A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [79]
Boosting new energy technology and building new energy infrastructure would seem to line up with the mood among those who elected Obama to bring sweeping reforms. Yet Obama is chary, and a well-oiled moment is slipping through his fingers.
Obama, having already asked congressional Democrats to make a hard vote on health care, seems to feel he can’t ask them for another. He isn’t publicly deploying his assembled brain trust, including Nobel Prize–winning Energy secretary Steven Chu, to rally Americans who are waiting to be enlisted, ready to be rallied.
When people ask me, “What can I do to help the Gulf?” I don’t know what to tell them. There are no real opportunities for the public to just go down and help out, and for the Big Picture, we haven’t been given a concrete presidential vision that we can get behind.
“Mr. President,” Friedman offers, “Americans are craving your leadership on this issue. Are you going to channel their good will into something that strengthens our country?—‘The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act’—or are you going to squander your 9/11, too?”
In a similar but much more enjoyable vein, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow assumes the role of fake president just long enough to deliver the speech she wishes the president had given. Among other things, she wishes he’d said:
Never again will any company be allowed to drill in a location where they are incapable of dealing with the potential consequences.… I’m announcing a new federal command specifically for containment and cleanup of oil that has already entered the Gulf of Mexico.… I no longer say that we must get off oil like every president before me has said. We will get off oil and here’s how: The United States Senate will pass an energy bill. This year.
When the benefits of drilling accrue to a private company, but the risks of that drilling accrue to we the American people, whose waters and shoreline are savaged when things go wrong, I as Fake President stand on the side of the American people, and say to the industry: From this day forward, if you cannot handle the risk, you no longer will take chances with our fate to reap your rewards.
Maybe Maddow will someday throw her sombrero into the presidential ring. And if she wins, she will join every president since the 1970s in saying that America must get off oil. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. And Rachel Maddow.
But until the country realizes that our Congress and our courts must serve people with belly buttons, not multinational corporations …
More congressional hearings and briefings. The Interior Department’s acting inspector general, Mary L. Kendall, tells a congressional panel that in the Gulf region the Minerals Management Service has only sixty inspectors to oversee about four thousand drilling facilities. Inspectors in the Gulf operate “with little direction as to what must be inspected, or how.” Yet on the Pacific Coast, ten inspectors cover only twenty-three facilities. She says the minerals service has a difficult time recruiting inspectors because the oil industry tends to pay a lot more.
The sargassum weed, whose yellow floating mats provide cover and nursery habitat for many kinds of sea life in the open Gulf, is dying. Most people have never seen or even heard of sargassum, but it shelters and feeds uncountable numbers of fish and young sea turtles. Tunas, mahimahi, billfish, mackerels, and others often haunt its edges. Blair Witherington, a research scientist and sea turtle expert with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, says, “Ordinarily, the sargassum is a nice, golden color. You shake it, and all kinds of life comes out: shrimp, crabs, worms, sea slugs. It is really just bursting with life. It’s the base of the food chain. And these areas we’re seeing here by comparison are quite dead.” He speaks of seeing flyingfish land on rafts of oil and get stuck right there. He says