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Monday, June 21, 2010 The
Bush-Cheney Gulf Coast Oil Spill of 2010
“If ever a time should come, when vain and
aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will
be in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." Samuel Adams
(1722-1803), statesman, political philosopher, and one of the Founding
Fathers of the United States, 1776 “America
is addicted to oil.” President George
W. Bush, State of the Union address, 2006 “Let me
be clear: BP is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill.” President
Barack Obama, May 2, 2010 More often than not, the consequences of
public policies, good or bad, are felt many years after they have been taken.
The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a good example. This disaster
is, to a large extent, a consequence of the Bush-Cheney energy
policy of 2001 and later. After being
ushered into power by a one-vote-majority Supreme Court decision, one of the
first decisions made by the new Republican administration was to establish an
Energy Task Force
(the National Energy Policy Development Group) under the authority of oil-man
Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton (1995-2000). As some have asserted,
chief deregulator Dick Cheney was not only a vice president but a genuine co-president
in the split Bush-Cheney administration. After some 106
days of mainly secret consultations and deliberations with the executives and
interest groups representing the U.S. electricity, coal, natural gas and
nuclear industries, with a pledge to keep secret the names of participating
individuals, the Task
Force's 163-page final report was sent to President George W.
Bush on May 16, 2001. The report
focused on how to open up new domestic petroleum sources and on the need to
expand and control the all-important Middle East oil production. A parallel
report to the official Cheney report (Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for
the 21st Century) even stated that “Iraq has become a key 'swing'
producer, posing a difficult situation for the U.S. government”, ... a harbinger of things to come. This
is all well documented in my book “The
New American Empire”. Soon after the
secretive Cheney's Task Force report came out, things began rolling for the
U.S. petroleum industry. The regulatory rulebooks for energy development on
public property were rewritten with the idea of making the world environment
safe for oil business companies. It was going to be “Drill, baby,
drill”, including for deep-ocean drilling with minimal precautions, and
damn the consequences! Regulations and clean energy budgets began to fall. On April 9 2002, President George W. Bush announced deep cuts
in public clean energy research and development. In 2001-02, the
Bush-Cheney administration's energy policy goals were incorporated into an
energy bill (H.R. 4) titled the Securing
America's Future Energy Act (SAFE) that included $33.5 billion in tax breaks and other incentives for
oil companies and that lifted the oil drilling ban on the Coastal Plain of
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. In May 2002 the
Democrat-controlled Senate narrowly rejected the bill. On August 8,
2005, however, President George W. Bush signed into law the new approach and
enacted a new sweeping pro-oil bill, the “Energy
Policy Act of 2005”. The bill followed closely in
the footsteps of Vice President Cheney’s 2001 energy report and
provided $27 billion
to coal, oil and gas, and nuclear industries, and $6.4 billion for renewable
energy. Then, also in
2005, the Bush-Cheney administration allowed the
U.S. oil and gas industry to regulate itself. The federal
agency responsible for managing oil and gas resources and for collecting
royalties from companies, the Interior Department's Minerals
Management Service (MMS), decided, on August 30, 2005, that oil
companies, rather than the government, were in the best position for
determining their operations’ environmental impacts. In effect, MMS
decided on that date to de facto merge its services with those of the oil companies,
even to the point of letting the oil industry fill out MMS's inspection
reports. MMS officials also had other cozy
relations with the companies they were supposed to regulate. Then again, on July 14, 2008, just months before leaving
office, President George W. Bush signed an executive order to lift the
moratorium on offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic
and Pacific coasts. Such a moratorium had been put in place in 1990 by
President George H.W. Bush. There is also
some confusion concerning the scope of responsibility that oil companies have
in the event of an environment catastrophe. Since 1986, there already was on
federal books an Oil Spill Liability
Trust Fund (OSLTF) that set a cap on losses that a business could
suffer from an oil spill. That liability cap was set at $75 million by the George H. Bush administration, as part of the
Oil Pollution Act of 1990, after the Alaska Exxon Valdez spill of March 1989. Only proven negligence can render
that liability cap inoperative. Since the puny $75 m. cap has not been
increased in twenty years, that may explain why some analysts still recommend
to their clients to buy
the BP stock. BP is a worldwide oil company that makes in
excess of $25 b. a year. Covered from
losses by the liability cap, oil companies persuaded the Bush-Cheney
administration that expensive security measures were not required, even for
drilling in deep oceanic waters. For example, Minerals Management Service (MMS),
decided not to require oil companies to install a remote-control oil
blowout preventer on their deep-sea oil drilling rigs, i.e. an
acoustic blow off valve that immediately chokes off the flow of oil in an
emergency. Even though they are expensive, (they cost $500,000 each), most
offshore oil rigs in other countries—in Norway and in Brazil for
example, but not in the U.S. or the U.K— have such a switch installed
for cutting off the flow of oil in an emergency by closing a valve located on
the ocean floor. No such
emergency switch was available on April 20, 2010, when BP's
18,000-foot-drilling-deep floating oil rig blew up, a catastrophe that killed eleven workers, injured many others,
and which has spewed, so far, as much as 100 million gallons of oil into the
Gulf of Mexico (some 2,400,000 barrels, or nearly ten oil tankers the size of
the Exxon Valdez). The British-American BP company, seemingly, had cut
corners in order to take advantage of the lax regulatory
environment. However, contrary
to the damage done by Hurricane Katrina
in 2005, a natural event, the 2010 Gulf oil spill is a man-made disaster (just as, by the way,
the 2003 Iraq war and the 2007-08 financial crisis were also man-made
disasters). It could have been prevented if the Bush-Cheney administration
had not removed the regulations mandating basic safety procedures in oil
drilling, especially for offshore drilling. Of course, BP and its subcontractors (Transocean,
Halliburton, etc.) are the ones who are directly responsible for the
disaster. But the Bush-Cheney administration must share a large part of the
blame and responsibility in preparing the regulatory background for the
disaster. President Barack
Obama also doesn't escape all responsibility, because he was the
one who insisted on keeping so many Bush-Cheney appointees in their high
positions after he was elected. Moreover, on March 31, 2010, only weeks
before the BP Gulf Oil Spill, his administration also proposed to open vast
expanses of American coastlines to oil
and natural gas drilling. Americans have reasons to be confused and appalled. Rodrigue
Tremblay
is professor emeritus of economics at the University
of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com. He is the author of the book "The
Code for Global Ethics"
at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ The book “The Code
for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay,
prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, has just been released by Prometheus Books. Please visit the book site at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ See it on Amazon
USA: See it on Amazon
Canada: See it on Amazon
UK: or, in Australia
at: Please ask your favorite bookstore and
your local library to order the book: The Code for Global
Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles, by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr.
Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, 2010, 300 p. ISBN: 978-1616141721. *****The French version of the book is also now
available. See: www.lecodepouruneethiqueglobale.com/ or on Amazon
Canada _____________________________________ Posted, Monday, June 21, 2010, at 5:30 am Email to a friend: http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1126 or click on Blog at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com Send contact, comments or commercial reproduction
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