Obama’s Deliberate Katrina

If you're fed up with the blatant incompetence of the federal government as demonstrated by its inability to contain the Gulf Coast oil spill, then you don't want to miss CARE's latest blog post. Our contributing writer is Paul Driessen, an established author that has long advocated energy policies that actually work. Paul builds the case that the Obama administration along with other elements of the federal bureaucracy is deliberately magnifying the severity of the Gulf Coast oil spill in order to ram through a malicious political agenda.

The federal thugs calling the shots have dismissed regulatory protections that could have helped prevent the oil spill, implemented regulations that hurt our economy and further damage our environment, "rejected 21 offers of help from 17 different nations" (in reference to the Jones Act), and have further politicized science to justify their draconian drilling moratorium. Paul's commentary is compelling and we're confident that you will never look at the role that the federal government plays in energy policy the same way ever again.

Bungling the BP Oil Spill Cleanup? Or Never Letting the Crisis go to Waste?

Back in May, a television news program asked me if I’d tell America the BP oil spill is President Obama’s Katrina. We discussed the spill’s causes, effects and cleanup effort, but I wouldn’t give them the “red meat” they were looking for. So I lost my 15 minutes of national fame.

Since then, it has become obvious that the Katrina analogy is inappropriate. The 2005 hurricane was marked by abject failures by the New Orleans mayor and Louisiana governor, and initially inept responses by FEMA and the Bush administration.

The 2010 oil spill is defined by yeoman’s efforts by Gulf Coast governors – and an Obama administration response that is leagues beyond inept. It is proactively incompetent and obstructionist, as though it is determined not to let this crisis go to waste – but to prolong and intensify the environmental and economic calamity, to advance its political objectives: shutting down offshore leasing and drilling, bringing the US oil industry into the automotive-banking-housing-healthcare sphere of federal control, forcing a massive shift to costly renewable energy, and ramming cap-tax-and-trade through Congress.

How else can anyone explain the litany of bureaucratic decisions that have squandered opportunities to shield beaches, fisheries and estuaries from the expanding slick, before hurricanes hammer cleanup efforts? Ponder this unconscionable malfeasance by the EPA, Corps of Engineers, Interior Department, Fish and Wildlife Service, OSHA, Justice Department, White House and Congress, which:

* Exempted BP from normal environmental reviews, from requirements that BP have viable plans in place and equipment on location to deal with any blowout and spill, and from oversight of its intended removal of drilling muds from the drillstem despite signs of dangerous pressure building in the well.

* Opposed surface and subsurface use of dispersants and rejected offers of dispersants from Britain.

* Compelled crews to employ 4-inch hoses to vacuum up oil by the quart, after President Obama objected that he “can’t suck it up with a straw.” Rejected state-of-the-art skimmers from the Netherlands, because the skimmers send a little oil back into the ocean, while collecting seawater mixed with oil, segregating the oil and discharging the water. (EPA demands that any water discharged from the skimmer be 99.99% oil-free. In other words, it demands that all the oil be left in the ocean, to be driven onto beaches and into sensitive estuaries – rather than permitting ships to collect 95% of the oil, and discharge the rest.)

* Rejected other state-of-the-art vessels, because the Jones Act prohibits the use of even specialized foreign crews in US waters. All together, says the State Department, the feds have rejected 21 offers of help from 17 different nations. (The president could waive the Jones Act, as President Bush did after Katrina, but apparently doesn’t want to offend his union allies.)

* Stands poised to reject help from the Taiwanese tanker-turned-skimmer, “A Whale,” which is now steaming toward the Gulf, to aid the cleanup – on the same bogus Jones Act and “pollution” grounds.

* Refused to allow the building of berms, because dredge and fill operations might cause environmental impacts – as though the massive intrusion of oil into marshlands would have no effect on wildlife.

* Forced Alabama to remove barriers it had installed to protect the state’s beaches, and move them to Louisiana waters.

* Appointed a scientific advisory board to assess the spill response – then falsely claimed the panel had approved the imposition of a drilling moratorium that was actually added to its recommended actions only after the scientists had signed off on the proposed plan. The drilling ban’s severe impacts on Gulf state employment and revenues were ignored by Interior and the White House, which likewise ignored a Federal District Court order to lift the moratorium until the matter could be fully adjudicated.

* Instead of coordinating an effective cleanup, appointed an oil spill investigation panel that includes the dean of the Harvard Engineering School, a former EPA administrator, the head of an anti-drilling environmental activist group, an anti-oil former US senator, and three others. Not one has actual expertise or experience in drilling or oil spill cleanup.

* Threatened criminal prosecutions, thereby chilling witness discussions and testimony, rather than working to learn what precisely went wrong on April 27 and coordinate a successful cleanup effort.

* Held congressional inquisition hearings, to grandstand, browbeat industry officials, and gloss over MMS regulatory and oversight failures – long before a factual investigation could be completed into the accident and response to it, and amid threats of criminal prosecution for anything witnesses might say.

To top it off, in the face of an environmental catastrophe largely perpetrated and perpetuated by a deliberately incompetent and intransigent federal government, rabidly anti-drilling Congressmen Waxman, Markey and Stupak have now introduced HR 5626, the Blowout Prevention Act. The bill requires that any company seeking a drilling permit must first guarantee that it could prevent any future blowouts; promptly stop any blowout, even if the blowout preventers and other measures fail; and drill a relief well within 90 days of any blowout.

This “domestic oil production prohibition” bill sets safety standards that are as impossible to meet, as requiring that all oil tankers prove they will never have an accident, even if they are forced to negotiate the obstacle courses that these same legislators intend to create off our shores, by installing thousands of wind turbines along our coasts. In conjunction with other anti-drilling initiatives, the bill would greatly increase the number of tankers coming to the United States with crude oil and refined products – thus increasing the number of major tanker accidents.

Even a six-month moratorium could cost 20,000-30,000 jobs in the Gulf Region. If HR 5626 and other measures are implemented, the ban could easily become permanent – destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs. Once the big rigs leave, most won't be back for years, as they will be in high demand in counties that do want to drill. Meanwhile China, Cuba and other countries will be drilling in our backyard, off Florida for example, using their rules and technologies, tapping into US reservoirs, and threatening our coasts.

Anyone who’s read my book, Eco-Imperialism: Green Power / Black Death, knows I am no fan of BP. It screwed up big time in the Gulf, cutting corners and failing to respond properly to tests and other signs of trouble downhole, further compounding its awful environmental and workplace safety record.

However, there is simply no justification for these actions by the Obama administration and Democrat Congress, which seem determined to magnify the crisis – to further hobble the nation’s oil and gas industry and the countless companies, workers, families, hospitals, schools and charities that depend on it. Indeed, America runs on reliable, affordable petroleum fuels for almost two-thirds of all the energy we consume. It counts on offshore oil for millions of jobs and billions in royalty and tax revenues.

Enough is enough. The Gulf States must take control of their energy, economic and environmental future. In the long term, this means conducting complete investigations into corporate and government failures – and imposing civil and criminal penalties for misfeasance and malfeasance, as appropriate.

In the near term, the Gulf States should make it clear that these are their beaches, estuaries, coastal waters, jobs and revenues – and they will no longer tolerate the abject failures that have defined the authoritarian federal takeover of this oil spill response effort.

The states have a right, and a duty, to make decisions about booms, berms, skimmers and every other aspect of the cleanup – based on what their experts advise, and perhaps regardless of what the EPA, Coast Guard or other federal agencies might say.

Only then will this nightmare be brought to an end.

Paul Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ∙ Black death (http://www.eco-imperialism.com/) and senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, whose new book (Freezing in the Dark) reveals how environmental pressure groups raise money and promote policies that restrict energy development and hurt poor families.

Letter To Congress: Stop The Off-Shore Drilling Moratorium

There is something noble about dedicating one's life to building a family-owned business. It is a huge investment of time, money, energy, and human emotion. However, one family's dream of helping power America has been shattered by President Obama's six-month moratorium on off-shore drilling. In the letter below, citizens Cliffe Laborde and Peter Laborde ask Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Senator David Vitter (R-LA) to intervene on behalf of their state and their country. They ask that their Senators do whatever it takes to lift the moratorium for the sake of protecting the livelihoods of thousands of American citizens.

The simple fact is that an overwhelming majority of the people working in America's oil and gas industry are honest, hard working Americans that love their country. They're sick and tired of being demonized by this Administration because one company, British Petroleum, made irresponsible decisions that led to a massive oil spill off the Gulf Coast. This letter captures the zeitgeist of how oil and gas workers feel about what's going on in America. It's a compelling story and we invite you to read on.

Letter From Laborde Marine To Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) And Senator David Vitter (R-LA)
June 4, 2010


The Honorable Mary Landrieu
United States Senator
724 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

The Honorable David Vitter
United States Senator
516 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

RE: Moratorium on Deep Water Drilling


Dear Senators Landrieu and Vitter,

The B.P. blowout and its aftermath constitute a continuing tragedy of gigantic proportions, both for the nation as a whole, and for Louisiana in particular. However, the Administration’s moratorium on deep water drilling is ill-advised and compounding the tragedy.

Over 50,000 wells have been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico with no environmental incidents of any consequence. Of that number, 4,000 were deepwater wells (drilled at a depth greater than 1,000 feet), and over 700 were ultra-deepwater wells (over 5,000 feet in depth); none of these had any problems. These impressive statistics establish that the offshore drilling industry has an excellent safety record. This record was achieved by advances in drilling technology, coupled with an industry culture of exceptional and safe performance. No one in the industry wants to see our water polluted with oil, and no one wants anyone injured or killed in the production of energy for our nation. The fact that the MMS conducted a safety assessment of each of the deepwater rigs in the days following the blowout and found no significant problems is testament to the industry’s commitment to safe operations.

While the investigation into the BP blowout is still underway, it is apparent that the cause of this tragedy was a series of human errors in judgment, with catastrophic results. The technology and processes were in place to prevent this accident, but they were circumvented to expedite completion of the project. To shut down the entire industry is overkill and analogous to shutting down all commercial air traffic after one plane crash due to pilot error. It is a decision that makes no sense and should be reversed.

Laborde Marine is a family-owned business headquartered in New Orleans which employs over 200 people. Over the last three years, we have built in US shipyards or acquired new US built and flagged vessels primarily designed to service the deepwater drilling market. We own and/or operate 21 vessels, all built in US shipyards. We have invested over $150 million to build or acquire our fleet of vessels. Our annual payroll is over $14 million. Now the US government is telling us to simply “park” our vessels for at least six months. Never in the history of the United States has the government decided to shut down an entire industry for six months. That decision seems to be a knee-jerk reaction based on an emotional response to the spill, and made without a full appreciation of the consequences which will adversely impact tens of thousands of hard working people who are engaged in the industry. It is a decision that advances the Administration’s agenda for transferring to a clean/alternative energy- economy, but at an enormous cost to the thousands of us engaged in offshore exploration and development.

If the moratorium on deep water drilling is not lifted, the 33 semi-submersible rigs and/or drillships affected will simply go to other countries where they will be well received, such as Brazil, the countries off West Africa, and Southeast Asia. They will not return to the US Gulf of Mexico for years, if ever. The damage to our industry will be irreversible. And the companies most adversely affected by this plan are the US based service companies — particularly the marine/boat companies which built their vessels in US shipyards, as required by US law to work in US waters. For us to move internationally, we will have to compete with vessels built in foreign yards at a much lower cost and often subsidized by foreign governments. It will not be a level playing field. The moratorium may well be the death-knell for US businesses engaged in the energy service sector. The major and independent operators — the “oil companies” — are not nearly as adversely affected by the moratorium as service firms, inasmuch as the operators will still own the oil in the ground, and can come back later, after the moratorium is lifted and oil prices have increased, and then produce the oil. The local service companies may not be around to come back.

We are proud to be a part of the offshore industry, doing our small part to assist in the production of energy for our nation. We believe that we are enhancing the national security of the United States by lessening its reliance and dependency on foreign sources of oil. While alternative energy is a laudable goal, it will be decades before alternative fuels make a dent in our country’s needs. The transition to alternative fuels must be done over time — not by a six month moratorium that may well put us out of business. This is the United States of America, where reason and sound judgment have always been the foundation of our system of government — not poorly thought out and capricious reactions that destroy the livelihoods of thousands of its citizens in order to promote a partisan political agenda. Please do whatever it takes to lift the moratorium on deep water drilling immediately, before irreparable harm to our nation’s and state’s economy occurs.


Sincerely,

Cliffe F. Laborde
J. Peter Laborde, Jr.


Cc: Governor Bobby Jindal
Louisiana Congressional Delegation

The Gulf Disaster: Is Failure an Option?

Have you ever heard the phrase “rocket scientist” in reference to someone really smart, someone who can solve problems? Well, we are pleased to have a “rocket scientist”—or at least an astronaut and a scientist—on board to help shed light on some of the current issues facing America—especially energy. We welcome Harrison Schmitt, former New Mexico State Senator and Apollo Astronaut.

As is pointed out here, no matter how many rocket scientists one has working on a project, accidents can still happen. Here, Harrison Schmitt draws comparisons between how NASA handled a crisis and how the federal government is handling the BP/Gulf disaster. He offers and interesting perspective and shows that it is possible to do it right—even for government agencies.

No Analogy Between The Gulf Oil Spill Crisis And Apollo 13
President Obama’s Administration and its supportive media repeatedly use our 1970 Apollo 13 experience as analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not hardly! The rescue of Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert after an oxygen tank explosion on their spacecraft illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled in contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Nothing in the government’s response to the blowout explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by the NASA of Apollo and its Mission Control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.

“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation "from day one" in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Homeland Security, and Energy. With no single, competent, courageous, and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous, and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.

Whatever may be the culpability of British Petroleum and its federal regulators in the accident, it has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf State officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful, and hesitant.

Absolutely no reason exists to assume that any part of the Federal Government has engineering expertise comparable to the petroleum industry that can be applied to this or any future energy-related crisis. Certainly, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have no more experience in these matters than does the President.

Salazar’s empty threat to “push BP out of the way” has no basis as a realistic option and best illustrates the floundering of the Obama Administration. Indeed, from "day one," the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling and production industry, with a single experienced engineering manager in charge, should have been mobilized to combat this spill. It still is not too late to start doing it right.

A more appropriate analogy from the Apollo era would be the recovery from the tragic fire during a pre-launch test on January 27, 1967, that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 204 fire occurred in the clearly recognized crisis atmosphere of the Cold War in which America raced to demonstrate to the world the superiority of freedom over the communist oppression of the Soviet Union. The Deepwater Horizon explosion took place in the equally apparent crisis of America’s dependence on sources of oil from foreign nations governed or intimidated by our enemies or economic competitors. There, however, the validity of the 204 fire analogy ceases.

The NASA's response to the 204 fire was to rapidly implement its previously well-formulated, objective investigation of its causes, both technical and managerial. Managerial responsibilities were identified and George Low and his engineering team made appropriate changes without a prolong exercise in finger pointing or the delays of another Presidential, buck-passing "commission." NASA of that day moved forward and even accelerated the Apollo effort to its successful conclusion. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders orbited the Moon less than two years after the 204 fire. Seven months after that, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, with Mike Collins in orbit overhead, landed on the Moon.

The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, President Obama’s and his Administration’s otherwise rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop off shore oil exploration by the United States. How misguided and, indeed, how either ignorant or devious can our President be!

President Obama has shown repeatedly that the best interests of the American people are a lower priority than his ideological goals to change America from what it has been, to some mystical, socialist utopia with an energy-based standard of living equivalent to that of the late 1800s. As if the Administration could not make its ineffective, disjointed response to the Deepwater Horizon accident any worse, it did not even use preciously established sea surface burn-off and dispersant procedures to minimize the effects of the spill. Then, it has inexcusably delayed approving and assisting in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s request to protect the State’s shores and wildlife habitats with offshore sand barriers, as unnecessary as having to make that request should have been. And this is the government that Congress and the President want to run healthcare, immigration, banking, carbon emissions, auto manufacturing, and everything else in American life?

The geologists, engineers, and on-site managers responsible for the Deepwater Horizon drilling effort understood that drilling to an oil reservoir through 13,000 of rock in 5000 feet of seawater would be very difficult. They knew that their geophysically defined target, typical of Gulf petroleum reservoirs, would be a complex mix of crude oil, natural gas, and brine contained in porous and permeable rock. Because of the rock and water depth, the reservoir also would be under very high pressure. In this situation, a reliable blowout preventer, a crimping device installed on the pipe near the floor of the sea, would be essential to reduce the risk of both a spill and potential explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.

Current information indicates that BP installed a defective blowout preventer and does not have a deep water, robotically emplaced, crimping technique as a backup to the blowout preventer. Essential to the prevention of future accidents will be an objective, complete technical and managerial investigation of why a geological and engineering situation of known risks spun out of control. The primary question is, will such an investigation be possible in the politically charged, adversarial “boot on the neck” atmosphere created by President Obama and his team? Imagine if such an atmosphere had surrounded the 204 fire investigation and recovery.

Responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon accident ultimately lies with the chaotic regulatory environment for petroleum exploration created over recent decades by Congress and the Department of Interior. Will we learn anything about regulatory overkill from this tragic loss of eleven lives and disruption of business and employment in the Gulf? Elimination of access to most on-shore and near-shore oil production has driven American exploration away from more easily discoverable and produced resources and into the much more dangerous and technically challenging deep waters of the seas and oceans. Even then, drilling and production accidents are exceedingly rare in spite of the geological, engineering, and weather-related difficulties explorers and producers face as a consequence of misguided restrictions.

Long-term, history reminds us that naturally and accidentally released oil in the oceans disappears due to bacterial action. Remember that the fuel oil blackening of beaches of the world from World War II ship destruction disappeared after only a few years and ocean life survived. The Gulf oil spill will not be this Nation's most serious environmental crisis: World War II tops it by orders of magnitude in more than just this respect.

If America and freedom are to survive indefinitely, the next Congress must begin to restore sanity and intelligence to national energy policy. Until economically competitive alternatives become fully feasible, fossil fuels will remain the mainstay of our economy. Our dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil has become one of our greatest national security vulnerabilities that only domestic production can solve in the next 50 years. The 2010 elections become a critical starting point to bring rational, constitutional, America-first thinking back into the Federal Government.



Harrison H. Schmitt is a former United States Senator from New Mexico as well as a geologist and former Apollo Astronaut. He currently is an aerospace and private enterprise consultant and a member of the new Committee of Correspondence.

Green-Think: It Is Less About The Environment And More About Using Environmental Accidents To Advance Social And Political Agendas

With the daily news continuing to focus on the oil spill in the Gulf, there is ongoing discussion as to what it all means. One suggestion is that the environmentalists are grieved. Surely there is truth to that as everyone—oil producers included—is. But there is much more going on in the background.

We were pleased to receive the following insights from Steven Milloy, author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them , widely known for his popular website: junkscience.com. This piece is bound to stir up some controversy while offering substantial food-for-thought.

If you are not familiar with Steven Milloy, we invite you to listen to CARE’s Conference Call recording when he was our featured guest, March 2009.

Greens Love Oil Spills
If you think that environmentalists are lamenting the Gulf oil spill, think again.
President Obama discomfited the greens in March when he announced that he would expand opportunities for offshore drilling. Although not a sincere policy proposal, the President’s announcement nonetheless worried the greens as they thought that they might have to make a concession on offshore drilling to get oil industry support for a climate bill.

Although the President reiterated his support for more drilling after the spill, Congressional Democrats, environmental groups and the Center for American Progress have all publicly breathed a sigh of relief. Their view is that the spill not only strengthens their hand against more drilling, but increases the likelihood of getting a climate bill through the Senate.

“Environmentalists hope the BP spill turns into a game changer that will help propel the climate legislation’s passage much like the Exxon Valdez oil spill led to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments,” reported Climatewire (May 4).

This is not likely to be the case since the public of 2010 is much more hip to the green agenda than it was in 1990, but the Climatewire report provides clear insight into green-think. They don’t care about the planet’s environment so much as they do about how they can use environmental accidents to advance their social and political agenda.

Not convinced?

Consider the puzzlingly slow response of the Obama administration to the spill.
Although Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano claims the government has been involved since “day one,” in fact, that “day one” response was limited to search and rescue efforts. Days after the spill, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed the severity of the accident, stating, “I don’t honestly think it opens up a whole new series of questions, because, you know, in all honesty I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last.”
As the spill got worse, threatening coastal areas and the administration, the administration remained content to allow the inept BP—responsible for the largest oil spill on Alaska’s North Slope in 2006—to putter around with unsuccessful efforts to repair the leak and contain to the spill.

For an administration that claims to be so sensitive to the environment, its reaction was curious. Why didn’t the administration rush to action? If your house is catches fire, does the 911 operator respond to your call for help with, “Let’s wait and see if you can put it out before we send a fire truck.”

Interestingly, a Clinton administration-era plan calls for the immediate use of fire booms in case of a major Gulf oil spill, according to a Mobile Press-Register report. A single boom (costing only a few hundred thousand dollars) towed by two boats can burn 1,800 barrels of oil an hour, “raising the possibility that the spill could have been contained at the accident scene 100 miles from shore.”

But there were no booms onsite or anywhere close. It took federal officials more than a week to even conduct a test burn. Booms won’t be onsite until Wednesday or Thursday of this week.

It’s hard to know for sure whether this all simple lameness on the part of government, or whether the Obama administration is in no rush to prevent a disaster because it perceives an oil-drenched Gulf Coast as a way to advance cap-and-trade and anti-oil agendas. But why would it let a good crisis go to waste?


Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them (Regnery 2009).