Obama’s New War on Oil

“The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face,” Barack Obama recalled yesterday, during his first speech in five months from inside the solemn frame of the Oval Office. The event, an 18-minute speech, said a lot about the impact the catastrophe will have on not only his party’s chances during the November elections but also on his own strategy, which consists of transforming a major risk for his presidency into a motor for an offensive reform. The speech also did a great deal to justify a project for the environment that has been stubbornly combated by the Republican opposition.

Obama has already used this electoral judo during his 2008 campaign. After being rightly attacked for his ties to Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose anti-white beliefs shocked the country, Obama decided to profit from them to hammer home his principles on the fragile relationship between racial groups in the United States.

This time, the presidential initiative is concentrated more on the electorate than on establishing the responsibilities of the White House. The message is really quite simple: as well as stopping this spill — for the moment, a mission in which neither BP nor a master magician can succeed — he’s attempting to reduce the overwhelming consumption of petroleum by Americans.

The authorization that once again started off-shore drilling — announced by this same president in March, one month before the explosion of BP’s platform — was presented as both a compromise with the right, which is tied to the Big Oil lobbyists, and proof of both his pragmatic realism and good will in the search for solutions to the American energy deficit and the nation’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The American confusion over this drama in the Gulf of Mexico — a geyser that puts in check the illusions of “ya ka” and of a short-term “fix-it” solution, which is so deeply anchored in many mentalities — offers Obama the occasion to propose a long-term effort for the environment and energy.

Obama spoke of an ecological Sept. 11 — a reference that calls for a national effort and a national unity. Will solar panels and windmills be enough? No. But Obama can also remind us all of the number of coastal states, like Florida or California, who aren’t the last consumers of petroleum and who refuse the ecological risks tied to off-shore drilling. When the risk is well-known — and even when local politicians want to simply hand it off to someone else — why not finally find a way to fight it?

Going beyond the laws that Obama could possibly pass after taking leadership of a chaotic Congress, something in the ambiance — a national panic in the face of a natural catastrophe created by man — could unleash a new American challenge. I remember, in the ‘80s, the crazed anger of European automobile makers, and in particular the French, over the “ecological dictatorship” of Americans. It was an era in which we rejected as an aberration the catalytic converter imposed several years ago in the distant land of California. It’s possible that Obama’s initiative brings the United States back to its former rank as a global innovator in environmental matters, which has been lost in 20 years of oil lobbying and demagogic outcries against the destruction of jobs by “the greens.”

Ever since April 20, America really has nothing more to lose.