

The Spill, The Scandal and the President - davi
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/111965

======
johnohara
I finally took the time yesterday to read whatever I could about this problem.
Like most Americans, I've watched the daily developments and nervously
believed a solution was imminent. Maybe not optimal, but close at hand.

Multinational comglomerates the size of BP have such a large quiver of
resources at their disposal that it seemed all it would take was the desire to
act and it would get done.

So I believed.

Here's one fact that has convinced me the Gulf of Mexico is lost and that only
the riskiest and most extreme measures (a nuclear device or other such
detonation) will seal the leak:

 _The oil is rushing into the Gulf at between 20,000 and 70,000 psi._

Nobody's certain of the actual value, but that's the range usually cited. This
is a very different problem than capping the wellheads in Kuwait after Sadaam
retreated.

Anyone familiar with a waterjet cutter knows they run at 55,000+ psi and are
so powerful they can cut 6" steel like butter.

Imagine raw oil with sediment and impurities (similiar to the garnet abrasive)
streaming upward into the Gulf the same way the cutting nozzle projects
downward into the water basin. All at one (1) mile below the surface.

There is no conventional solution that is going to stop the flow at those
psi's.

None.

If you factor hurricanes and tropical storms into the mix it quickly becomes
apparent that this is an international crisis without parallel in our time.

The lack of leadership from both the private and public sectors and the
overall lack of accurate information on the potential long term ramifications
is stunning.

Screw the talk about alternative fuels or who's to blame. We need action now.
Right now.

~~~
richcollins
Can you post your sources so I can better inform myself?

~~~
johnohara
Here's TransOceanic's Spec Sheet For DeepWater Horizon:
[http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-
Horizon-56C17.htm...](http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-
Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17)

From the NY Times:
[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/science/0521spill....](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/science/0521spill.pdf)

Yahoo Answers:
[http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100529174827AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100529174827AAbe9hy)

There were more at boston.com including excellent photos of the spill and the
efforts to control it.

... to name a few.

------
mbateman
I can understand -- sort of -- holding up lax regulation as something
blameworthy here. More to fault is BP for not taking the possibility of
disaster seriously and (apparently) having a dramatically worse safety record
than other large oil companies.

But other than that, I don't get it. Why blame Obama for taking a week to act?
What could he have done? And what can he do now? Imagine the volcano in
Iceland had been caused by human agency somehow. Would people still demand
"action" or "leadership", especially from politicians, to magically stop the
volcanic eruption? Maybe it's just not possible to stop once it's started.

~~~
grandalf
Lax regulation? Not only was regulation lax, but there was a liability _cap_
on spill damages. That's a regulation that amounts to a handout!

To your second point, at the critical moment of public outrage Obama lowballed
the estimate of how much oil was flowing into the gulf. His actions have
mainly had the effect of buying time and preventing public outrage.

What if he handn't acted this way? Maybe the American people would have
demanded an end to all offshore drilling.

I think it's relevant to point out that if Obama were the kind of guy who
would even remotely consider cracking down on oil industry excesses he would
not be in the oval office today.

~~~
anigbrowl
For the _n_ th time, the $75m liability cap only applied to cases of genuine
accident, not those involving gross negligence; it only capped punitive
liability and not mitigation costs anyway; and it was a statutory provision
made into law back in 1990, a generation ago. Pointing to this as if it was
indicative of current political machinations is completely misleading.

~~~
grandalf
What is an accident? Why was the recent spill the result of negligence rather
than an accident? The difference is a matter of some bureaucratic definition,
not of reality.

Offshore drilling is always a gamble. Any diffusion of the risk to the public
/ taxpayers shows that the firms used their influence with regulators to stack
the deck in their favor, and that regulators complied.

~~~
anigbrowl
Absurd. The public necessarily shares _some_ risk to the extent that it
asserts a claim over, and collects royalties for mineral resources extracted
from US territorial waters.

~~~
grandalf
You are saying that the American Public should feel lucky that BP is
extracting oil and just tolerate spills and incompetence?

------
Wolf_Larsen
"Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea
production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms.
Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is
located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet
deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional
documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much
as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents
reveal could lead to 'catastrophic' errors."

~~~
grandalf
If Obama were the sort of guy who would even remotely consider messing with
the oil industry, he would not be in the oval office right now.

Similarly if he were the sort of guy who would even remotely consider pulling
out of Iraq he would not be in the oval office right now.

It's important to realize how much intrenched power the oil industry has and
to what extent it is able to influence policy. Obama will dish out a lot of
tough talk and fines to BP, but he won't mess with the industry as a whole by
enacting meaningful reforms.

------
davi
People interested in this might also be interested in how Senator Obama
handled a tritium leak in Illinois before he ran for president:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/us/politics/03exelon.html>

(EDIT: deleted carping about moderator changing title of post.)

~~~
tptacek
I'm not sure what the one has to do with the other.

In one case, a power plant near Rockford is associated with elevated levels of
tritium, and Obama, a freshman senator with almost no regulatory affiliation
to nuclear power generation, attempts to pass a bill requiring more stringent
notification of possible radiation leaks. Meanwhile, state and federal
regulatory bodies that Obama has no oversight over take over the incident,
fine the plant, and create more stringent notification requirements.

In the other, Obama, now elected president, is forced to decide whether to
allow an allegedly expert company with severe conflicts of interest to
coordinate and direct the mitigation of the largest environmental disaster the
country has ever faced, a disaster they themselves caused, or instead create
from whole cloth the federal capability to coordinate and direct that
mitigation.

The only thing these two stories have in common is that there's no "good guy",
"bad guy" template to lay over them, unless you want to try for "cheap and
inevitably unsafe energy bad", "bicycles good".

~~~
davi
In one case, after a radioactive byproduct of an Illinois power plant leaked
into his constituents' well water, Senator Obama sponsored legislation to
require nuclear power plants to report all abnormal leaks, not just ones they
determined to rise to 'emergency' levels. The power company, Exelon, believed
that the leak arose from "millions of gallons of water that had leaked from
the plant years earlier but went unreported at the time" because the leak was
not considered an 'emergency'. Faced with stiff opposition to the bill from
industry and Republicans, Obama "removed language mandating prompt reporting
and simply offered guidance to regulators," and added "new wording sought by
Exelon making it clear that state and local authorities would have no
regulatory oversight of nuclear power plants." Exelon subsequently became a
big Obama supporter, with exectives in the company becoming important fund-
raisers, and direct corporate contributions of $227,000 to his Senate and
Presidential campaigns. The full Senate never voted on the bill.

In the other case, Obama, now elected President, fails to follow through on
reform of an agency he had decried while running for office, and instead
continues to allow the foxes to mind the hen house, as detailed in the Rolling
Stone article.

What do the two articles have to do with one another? As you say, there's no
"good guy" or "bad guy" template to lay over them. But there _is_ a tension,
or ambiguity, between whether Obama is a populist reformer, or a conservative
(in the original sense of the word) pragmatist. These two articles show how
Obama is good at rattling his saber and mobilizing the base while on the
campaign trail, while also being willing to make deals and accommodate
industry interests in order to get things done (and perhaps not incidentally
accrue contributions to his campaign coffers).

This is a far subtler picture than the socialist caricature painted by the
right, and the Messiah caricature painted by the left. It is probably
incorrect in places. But these two articles help me to put that picture
together. I think Obama would've been comfortable with the moderate
Republicans of twenty years ago, ideologically and temperamentally. Today's
moderates seem to need to play more strongly to their left- or right-wing
bases than they used to in order to get elected. I'm starting to see this
playbook, and starting to see Obama (and Clinton before him) as being a master
of that playbook.

I'm no student of politics or history, this is just the gestalt I see.

(EDIT: delete first sentence, edit last sentence of next-to-last paragraph)

~~~
tptacek
Your accounting of the Byron plant story _drastically_ oversimplifies the
actual events. It casts Obama as somehow central to the story when, again, he
had virtually no formal oversight over nuclear regulation. It attempts to read
tea leaves about Obama's mentality out of the progress of pushing a bill ---
itself a meaningless political reaction to an event in his backyard, a sop to
his constituents --- past stiff opposition, as if the alternative to "watering
down" this bill was strong new legislation on nuclear regs, which of course it
wasn't.

In short, it attempts to make Obama the go-along get-along energy-insider-pol
"bad guy" in a story that not only has no good guys or bad guys, but also
almost nothing at all to do with Obama.

~~~
davi
"My" accounting is derived entirely from what I read in that New York Times
article. I'm not clear if you're criticizing my read of the article, or the
article itself. If the latter, do you have any other accounts that provide
further detail? The vehemence of your responses suggests you might live in the
area?

 _when, again, he had virtually no formal oversight over nuclear regulation_

Elected members of a representative democracy are charged with producing the
legislation that _defines_ "formal oversight", and with using feedback from
their constituents to do so. Who else should his aggrieved constituents have
turned to in this case?

 _go-along get-along energy-insider-pol "bad guy"_

Not really. His behavior is typical of politicians across the board (except
the ones who don't get elected). I agree with you that his legislation might
be characterized as "a sop to his constituents". This doesn't make him one of
the bad guys, it just means he is not the leftist demagogue/messiah some make
him out to be.

 _attempts to read tea leaves about Obama's mentality_

Sure, I think this is fair game. He (like his predecessor) is a bit of a
cipher.

Anyway, this thread started because you asked me what I saw in common between
the two articles. That's what I saw in common. YMMV.

~~~
tptacek
I live in Chicago, which is an hour or so from Rockford. I didn't actually
manage to extract a "here's what Obama is about" narrative from the NYT
article. Here's what I think:

• Take _anything_ Obama touched during his time in the Senate.

• Note that we still have that problem. For instance: immigration, border
security, mines, spending transparency, no-bid contracting, nonproliferation,
and (of course) peace in West Asia. (Note how I cheated by reading 1 Wikipedia
graf to generate that list. You could broaden the list by finding things he
did in the Senate that weren't notable because they went nowhere.)

• For bonus points, find some large organization that contributes uniformly to
major political candidates of one or both parties that is relevant to the
problem Obama attempted to solve.

• Write a message board post with the same narrative as your original post.

~~~
davi
It's an interesting summation of your perspective, thanks. You depict Obama as
one molecule in a sort of political Brownian motion, with me & the Times
acting as a cherry-picking Maxwell's Demon.

A hard thesis to disprove, and I'll let it go from here. But I'll note that in
contrast to the examples in your list (with the possible issue of no-bid
contracting, I don't know about this), this tritium issue was local, raised by
Obama's constituents. Also, "Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceed[ed] its
support for any other presidential candidate."

~~~
tptacek
It seems to me a 99.99999% near absolute certainty that he'd have been nowhere
near nuclear regulation if this hadn't happened in his back yard. Which makes
it, to my mind, a pretty silly thing to try to mine for insight. _Any_ senator
from _any_ state would have had to react _somehow_ to an incident like that.

------
bodytitle
In 1967 the the house estimated that Medicare would cost $9 Billion a year by
1990. The real number would turn out to be $67 Billion.

Every week or so the rate of the oil leak is revised upwards. What was once a
spill has turned into a bad spill and now is being called a disaster. This
seems consistent with the way most government estimates work.

Ironically it is almost as if we need an independent body with no power to
spend money but with complete auditing power to get the public actual numbers.

~~~
grandalf
Let us hope that someone involved sends the truth to WikiLeaks! We can't
expect to get it from Obama or from BP.

Now that the buck stops with Obama, we can expect him to actively work to
prevent the public from getting outraged.

~~~
anigbrowl
I guess that's why he got BP to put $20 billion into an escrow fund. What is
it you want him to do, exactly?

Back when he was talking about the need for more alternative fuels etc. I kept
hearing about how he was interfering too much with markets and was a closet
statist/socialist/Communist. Of course a few months ago otherwise sane people
were still chanting 'drill baby drill' at political rallies.

~~~
grandalf
Think about it this way:

What should be done: A systematic review of all offshore drilling practices
and regulations and a significant reassessment, which would likely lead to the
closing of hundreds of productive wells.

What will be done: A massive fine to BP and minor regulatory changes.

Obama is acting like a company man on this one, of course BP will be
scapegoated, with the primary goal being to prevent widespread reforms from
occurring and focusing on the idea that the problem is BP's negligence rather
than on using the new information (spills can be very very bad) to question
the practice of offshore drilling being worthwhile in the first place.

~~~
anigbrowl
Your way of thinking seems to involve substituting portentous phrases for
actual argument.

We know spills can be bad; while the degree of damage resulting from this one
should certainly be factored into cost-benefit calculations, and prospective
drillers required to plan and put up security for such eventualities, we still
need to consider probability too. The fact is that incidents of this kind are
quite rare in developed countries nowadays.

"Obama = coroporate shill" is just as stupid and mindless as "drill baby
drill". 'Systematic review...significant reassessment' - mere buzzwords. If
you think his policy should be to just halt deepwater drilling then OK, I can
respect that point of view even if I don't fully agree. But please stop hiding
behind a mask of pseudo-objectivity.

~~~
grandalf
We knew spills are bad before the Deepwater Horizon spill, however the
estimates of environmental damage (for the worst case scenario foreseen) were
far smaller than what has already occurred with the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Why? Because spills of the magnitude of this one are quite rare. But, like any
low probability event, as the time horizon increases the probability
approaches 1.

Obama knows that another spill is very unlikely to happen soon, so he is under
no pressure to create a new regulatory environment that actually reduces that
probability.

The gulf is a public resource, and so the question for the American people
should be something along the lines of: If we are likely to get a Deepwater
Horizon level spill every 20 years, should we still allow drilling? My guess
is that (barring misinformation) most Americans would agree that we should
absolutely not allow any offshore drilling at all.

Offshore drilling in the US does not have a meaningful impact on oil/gas
prices as experienced by consumers. It simply enriches the firms that extract
that oil, but not enough is extracted to significantly impact the market price
of a global commodity.

Supporters of offshore drilling claim that gas would be $10 at the pump
without it... which is total nonsense. If anything we'd see about a $0.05
increase per gallon at the pump.

What is your explanation for why Obama is not doing more to create systematic
reforms that decrease the chances of another spill? It sounds like you think
he wisely views the risk as acceptably low.

