One Year Later
Next week marks the first anniversary of an environmental disaster — the explosion at BP’s Macondo oil well that killed 11 workers, sank the drilling rig, sent 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and threw thousands of people out of work. Yet Congress is behaving as if nothing at all happened, as if there were no lessons to draw from the richly documented chain of errors and regulatory shortcomings that contributed to the blowout.
Even worse, Congress is pushing in exactly the wrong direction. The House Natural Resources Committee passed three bills this week that would force the administration to accelerate the granting of drilling permits in the gulf and open huge new offshore areas to oil and gas exploration. The compromise 2011 budget makes major cuts in clean energy programs designed to lessen this country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
What makes this particularly discouraging is that, Congress aside, there has been a surprising amount of progress, thanks largely to the hard work of thousands of people and the extraordinary resilience of nature. More than 99 percent of the gulf has been reopened to fishing, jobs are returning, and the Interior Department has tightened oversight. Yet without Congress’s help progress will slow and many crucial tasks will remain undone.
Here is a one-year report card and a look ahead:
THE GULF After prematurely claiming victory last year, the Obama administration has since done exhaustive sampling across the gulf and concluded — along with many independent scientists — that the oil has now mostly evaporated, been captured or consumed by microbes. One thousand miles of soiled beaches have been reduced to less than 100. Gulf seafood is safe to eat.
Louisiana’s wetlands — vital fish nurseries — are soiled, and the full extent of the damage to the gulf’s ecosystem and its species, especially to fish larvae and the tiny organisms vital to the food chain, may not be known for years. More will be learned when the government issues its preliminary, legally mandated assessment next fall. Until then, and for years after, the watchword is vigilance: the herring population in Prince William Sound did not crash until three years after the Exxon Valdez spill.
RESTORATION The gulf had serious problems before the spill. One-third of Louisiana’s marshes, wetlands and barrier islands disappeared over the last century, victims of industrial development and levee-building along the Mississippi River. The administration correctly saw the spill as a chance to help underwrite a huge restoration effort, drawing on the $5 billion to $20 billion in civil and criminal penalties BP is likely to owe. To jump-start the effort, the White House may ask BP to make an advance payment on these penalties. But none of that can happen without Congress. Under current law, the fines would flow mostly to a fund to clean up future spills.
REGULATION The spill exposed grievous flaws in federal oversight, including a destructively cozy relationship between the oil industry and its regulators in the Interior Department. The department has since been reorganized and tough new standards applied to all aspects of the drilling process.
Industry and local politicians started pushing for new deep-water drilling permits the moment the drilling moratorium was lifted last fall. The Interior Department has been right to move cautiously. It has also insisted that new operators fully prepare for worst-case scenarios and have access to new equipment capable of stopping a runaway well. Such equipment — known as a capping stack — is now available, but has yet to be tested at great depth.
Here again Congress can be helpful. At a minimum, it should codify the Interior Department’s regulatory changes so that future administrations do not rescind them. It could go further by making the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the agency responsible for the health of America’s coastal waters — an equal partner in decisions about where oil companies can and cannot drill. Environmental concerns must play a primary role.
INDUSTRY A presidential commission concluded that the Macondo blowout reflected not just BP’s carelessness but an industrywide “culture of complacency.” Right after the spill, a half-dozen of the biggest companies banded together to develop new systems to contain a blowout. But so far the industry has turned a deaf ear to the commission’s modest but sensible suggestion that it establish an independent safety institute to audit industry operations, much as the nuclear industry did after the disaster at Three Mile Island.
BP will pay a high price for its negligence. But this is a rich and powerful industry long accustomed to getting its way.
If Congress chooses to keep enabling the oil barons, rather than demanding that they change their ways, the lessons of the gulf disaster will be wasted. And America’s waters will remain at risk.
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