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14 Disaster in the Gulf On the evening of June 15, 2010, Barack Obama delivered his first Oval Office address to the nation. Surrounded by flags and pictures of his family, President Obama began, “On April 20th, an explosion ripped through [the] BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Eleven workers lost their lives. Seventeen others were injured. And soon, nearly a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, oil began spewing into the water. Because there has never been a leak this size at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology.” The president promised to “fight this spill”—which he called “the worst environmental disaster American has ever faced”—with “everything we’ve got for as long as it takes.” In his 17-minute address, Obama touched all the usual energy policy bases. Speaking nearly two months after the BP explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the president made it clear that he viewed BP and other oil companies as villains—BP for the catastrophic spill, oil companies generally for showering regulators with “gifts and favors” and “writing their own regulations ,” and, of course, “oil industry lobbyists.” He insisted that BP “will pay for the impact this spill has had on the region.” The president said that he had replaced the head of the agency in charge of issuing permits and regulating deepwater drilling, the Minerals Management Service. He announced a restoration plan for the gulf and its neighboring states and a national commission to study the causes of the disaster and to make recommendations. And Obama confirmed an earlier announcement that he had instituted a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. No doubt the most difficult of these tasks will be restoring the gulf region. Some experts have estimated that the costs of restoration there may run as high as $100 billion. And no one knows how long it will take. 250 Chapter 14 Indeed, as President Obama spoke, no one even knew for certain when BP’s oil would stop pouring into the gulf’s waters or just how far onto the nation’s land it might reach. Two things we can be sure of are that not all of the costs will be paid by BP and that restoration will not happen quickly. This was the first major offshore drilling spill since Santa Barbara in 1969, and that was literally a drop in the bucket compared to this one, which spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the gulf. As the old proverb goes, sickness comes in on horseback but goes out on foot. No wonder Obama closed his address with a prayer. President Obama’s speech was roundly criticized—and not just by Republicans. Some observers complained about all his hand gesturing and the aesthetics of the speech setting’s background. Many were disappointed by his failure to call for dramatic new action. The greatest disappointment, however, was that President Obama used this catastrophe as just one more occasion to restate his oft-repeated remarks about our nation’s “addiction to fossil fuels” and about how the “transition to clean energy” can “create millions of jobs.” In a speech prompted by an unprecedented tragedy— a unique occurrence after decades of deepwater drilling—President Obama seized this moment to endorse the cap-and-trade bill that had passed the House of Representatives a year earlier. The president proffered his customary promise “to look at other ideas and approaches from either party.” And he told us all—but especially the Senate—that the one thing he would not accept was “inaction.” After lamenting our “lack of political courage and candor,” however, the president failed to mention that getting rid of our “addiction to fossil fuels” would require us to pay higher prices for those fuels. And, like many presidents before him, he reminded the nation of its successes in World War II and in landing men on the moon, obliquely suggesting —to a nation frustrated from witnessing one failure after another to stop the flow of oil from the floor of the gulf and to keep it from reaching shore—that all we were missing was American grit and ingenuity. (Ironically, the oil industry had proudly proclaimed that its sophisticated technology for deepwater drilling in the gulf rivals that used for space exploration.) Everything had changed, yet nothing had changed. Despite this oil blowout’s unique size, depth, and scope as well as...

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