The Obama Oval Office speech – BP oil spill

I have been watching our TV news from the US reporting on the BP oil spill – and have been surprised that so often the US seems to be whining about what BP has done without seeming to understand that oil exploration is a partnership.
When the US assigns lands for oil exploration to this or that company it puts conditions on drilling and exploration and generally there is an obligation to explore and drill. An oil company can not just sit on land indefintely. With hindsight – when BP purchased the rights to explore/drill the very deep (a mile of water) Macondo prospect – the US had the opportunity to put the case to BP that perhaps they were too near the edge of the safe capacity of their drilling technology. Once BP proceeds with work – it is surely in a partnership with the US Govt.
To hear President Obama linking outrage surrounding this industrial accident with the case to change US energy policy away from the current usage of fossil fuels – IMHO the whole thing gets into the paranormal there. As I think somebody said – “Houston .. we have an oil spill disaster” – “Oh, lets build more windmills.”
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Sorry – but I was looking for signs the US leader was taking a realistic attitude to the entire oil spill issue – after having two months to work something out.

7 thoughts on “The Obama Oval Office speech – BP oil spill”

  1. Thank you for this post. Obie, in his previous speech trying to appear executive and in charge, actually stated that they have been telling BP what to do from day one. That includes forcing them to drill in deepwater rather than in the close in shallow water where they wanted to drill. It appears to me that this has been a setup to get a useable disaster. Out bureaucrats have not allowed any of the foreign governments to send assistance that in many cases is better technology than what we have. They have delayed many local plans to mitigate the spill. It is simply criminal that Obie and regime have helped cause and continue this disaster while blaming it on the big multinational corporations with which they collaborate. They ARE in charge and we need to hold BIG GUBMINT RESPONSIBLE!!!!!

  2. K
    I hope that was tongue in cheek. Just what exactly should Obama do? Blaming him for this is utterly ludicrous, especially from folk who complain about any government overinvolvement in the first place. Any attempt at blaming enviros is even worse, and casts huge doubt on your judgement of anything else.

    Expecting that BP could make a better job is shallower water is not based on reality. The problem arose exactly as BP said:- a combination of errors. In offshore drilling there have often been many errors but there are backups. Clearly nobody had a plan for all the backups failing. That is exactly my experience of the oil industry – we called it “firefighting”, ie they only ever do what they should have done in the first place when it’s far too bloody late. Closer to shore, this could have been a far worse ecological disaster, most especially as they’d have been even more lax and overconfident.

    Warwick
    Hindsight is 20:20. But the reaction from conservatives to any probing of the oil companies abilities to drill in deep water would almost certainly have been that the government should keep it’s nose out because these companies know what they are doing. It’s a bit rich to now complain that the government didn’t have a crystal ball.

    Yet it’s all so predictable – for a long time I’ve been noticing that anything that goes wrong is somehow always construed to be the fault of liberals, while conservatives take credit for a whole host of things they had absolutely nothing to do with. It’s amazing the contradictory mental gymnastics an ideological mind can undergo when the facts don’t support the ideology. But at least liberals sometimes admit they are wrong and change course, whilst conservatives always parrot what their favourite authority figure tells them – even if it’s people as obviously dense as Bush or Palin.

  3. JamesG, not tongue in cheek at all. His administration has held up Bobby Jindals plans to stop the oil from hitting the Louisiana coast substantially increasing the damage. They have held up 33 offers of men and material to help contain the spill from foreign countries over an old law which Obie could have requested Congress to overide. They have slowed every step that BP has taken at their direction to contain and stop the spill. After all this, he gets on tv and tells us he is calling for a moratorium on drilling in the gulf because the deepest well to date, Forced to be the deepest by his administation as BP wanted to drill shallow and cheap and safe, has had problems which are connected to the poor regulatory oversight by his own bureaucrats. Why did he not clean up these organisations when he got into office?? He ran on changing our energy usage and doing just that. Could it be that BP was one of his largest contributors and is a supporter of Kyoto and other idiot schemes that they will make even more money from than drilling oil?? I am dead serious about this Crony Politician from the immensely corrupt City of Chicago and State of Illinois. You haven’t noticed the trial of their ex Gevernor Blagojevich accused of trying to sell Obama’s seat? I guess you probably missed that He tried to get money from Obama’s people also and was turned down but not reported!! Obie is a typical ignorant, corrupt, socialist (or worse) who no longer is the darling of this country. He will probably have poll numbers close to Congress by the time we boot him in 2012. (no one person can get as low as Pelosi’s Congress, it takes a village of idiots to paraphrase Hillary)

    By the way, representatives of the two companies in joint operations with BP strenuously objected to the operational plan the day it blew and have testified to this fact. You really need to investigate the situation before throwing yourself under the bus. To ignorantly suggest that these corporations aren’t much more experienced with drilling in shallow water is to show you are not being truthful or are completely misinformed.

  4. Almost forgot, the Mississippi Governor finally arranged for oil containment equipment and personnel on his own when the Fed was unresponsive. The Coast Guard, put in charge by Obie, without even notifying them, took control of the resources and sent them elsewhere.

    Not sure who to blame that one on but it is an excellent example of why I am extremely against BIG Government.

    By the way, the EPA was tasked several years ago with creating and implementing the emergency plan to deal with catastrophic oil spills. Yet, Obie put the Coast Guard in charge. Did he have the EPA too busy making up Science for their CO2 Endangerment Ruling?? Yes, that is sarcasm. Why would you assign an enormous emergency task to a group that is not responsible for dealing with it?? Obie, in my OPINION, is studiously INTERFERING in the cleanup to promote his energy killing bill.

  5. President Obama, Admiral Thad Allen (US Coast Guard) and LaFourche Parish President Charlotte Randolf spoke to the media yesterday after touring Fourchon Beach, Louisiana:
    Parts of this video, minus sound was often seen on downunder TV news. The audio is worth hearing.

  6. No worries, mate. The denouement of Magic into Travesty is well-launched.

    Unfortunately we meet significant unpleasantness on the way. The spill response is killing Liberal support and really that is the least of his worries. Unemployment, foreclosures, corporate earnings, bond yields, inaction on immigration, fuel prices, state budgets, revealing court action,…, trouble from every corner cresting in late summer, early fall.

    I’d put chances of resignation in 12 months better than those of nomination for re-election.

  7. As the President of the United States, Obama most definitely is in charge of the situation. I think it is a fact that he has been coordinating, not to mention ordering BP to do what needs to be done the soonest possible time.

    Some would say it is predictable. To a certain degree, I must admit, it is. What do you expect the leader of the most powerful country in the world to say amidst such an adversity? That he doesn’t know how to handle the situation? The he is utterly clueless as to who to coordinate with? Of course not!

    Predictability aside, the most important to keep in mind is if there’s progress in handling this calamity. This happened several months ago so there should definitely be a measurable and tangible development.

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