A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [56]
In 2001 the president’s National Energy Policy report (it was actually the vice president’s; the first page is Dick Cheney’s submittal letter to George W. Bush) ordered agencies to increase oil production and remove “excessive regulations.” The report has a lot of good ideas. For instance, it says, “A primary goal of the National Energy Policy is to add supply from diverse sources. This means domestic oil, gas, and coal. It also means hydropower and nuclear power. And it means making greater use of non-hydro renewable sources now available.” But in practice, federal agencies didn’t get past the first sentence on that list. Maybe they never really intended to; I don’t know.
In 2005, despite high oil prices and even President George W. Bush saying oil companies needed no further drilling incentives, the Republican-dominated Congress again lowered the royalties oil companies are required to pay our national Treasury. That’s nonsensical, especially in an era of massive federal deficits, but part of the ideology appears to be a desire to starve the government so there is scant money for wasteful social programs like education, health, and environmental protection. And while, yes, there are excessive regulations, there is also excessive greed. Regulations don’t threaten business; they threaten greed, the greed that threatens both us and our nation’s economy. In 2006, Louisiana’s congressional delegation supported giving a share of oil royalties to states that allowed drilling. This means using national oil revenue directly to achieve state policies that benefit Big Oil. Nice giveback. Clever.
And while calling for more incentives to drill, baby, Congress slashed those annoying safety regs. From 2002 to 2008, Congress approved budgets reducing regulatory staff by over 15 percent. So we got more complex, deeper drilling, higher-volume oil pools, no further safety. In 2000, the Interior Department had voiced concerns that industry’s extensive use of contractors and inexperienced offshore workers in deep water created new risks. And a 2004 Coast Guard study—repeatedly cited by Congress’s own Congressional Research Service—warned, “Oil spill response personnel did not appear to have even a basic knowledge of the equipment required to support salvage or spill clean-up operations.” Lawmakers slept peacefully. Environmental groups focused on maintaining the existing moratorium on new drilling, not operational safety or response. Consequently, regulatory proposals often drew fewer than ten “public” comments, but most came from the oil industry.
With democracy working on half of its cylinders, the Interior Department politely filled the public-interest vacuum with a new tendency to better serve, rather than better monitor, the oil companies. The person in charge of offshore drilling for Interior boasted that he “oversaw a 50 percent rise in oil production.” But he was supposed to be a regulator, not a fixer. Ergo: deep blowout preparedness = zero.
EARLY JUNE
A dead dolphin rots in the shore weeds; an oil-stained gull stands atop its corpse. “When we found this dolphin, it was the saddest darn thing to look at,” says the cleanup worker who is taking a news team on a surreptitious tour. “There is a lot of cover-up for BP. They specifically informed us that they don’t want these pictures of the dead animals.” The shore is littered with oiled marine creatures, some dead, others struggling. “They keep trying to clean themselves,” the guide says. “They try and they try, but they can’t do it. Some of the things I’ve seen would make you sick.” He mentions that he recently found five turtles in oil. Three were dead. Two were dying. He says, “Nature is cruel, but what’s happening here is crueler. No living creature should endure that kind of suffering.”
News crews are now being barred from and escorted away from public beaches