Scott Spiegel

Deepwater Horizon is not Obama’s Katrina, because Katrina was not Bush’s.

The Katrina hurricane should have been addressed by state and local governments and residents who didn’t evacuate despite warnings of the impending storm.

Similarly, the Gulf spill should be dealt with by the company that caused it and has the best understanding of how to end it, British Petroleum.  The federal government’s role should be to adjudicate claims against BP.

Of course Obama and every liberal on the planet have been hollering for years that Bush was personally responsible for the Katrina-induced death of every man, woman, and crawfish in New Orleans.

Conservatives’ longstanding wish that liberals please stop trying to put the government in charge of everything recently prompted Frank Rich to sneer, “The only good news from the oil spill is that when catastrophe strikes, even some hard-line conservatives, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, start begging for the federal government to act, and act big.”

Rich’s solution is nonetheless preferable to two other New York Times columnists’ strategy for Obama, which is: to cry.

Maureen Dowd counsels Obama to offer President Clinton a job: “Bill would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire.  Let him resume a cameo role as Feeler in Chief.”  Tom Friedman, in his column “Malia for President,” advises that “the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would.”

It should go without saying that the spill is not Bush’s Katrina II, notwithstanding claims by Nancy Pelosi and Chris Dodd.

Given the role the federal government has historically adopted, and the Obama administration has claimed, in preventing and dealing with large-scale industrial disasters such as the BP spill, the incompetence and radical environmentalist ideology of this administration have only exacerbated the crisis.

In a special investigation, AP reported that the federal Minerals Management Service, responsible for overseeing oil rig safety, failed to adequately respond to AP’s Freedom of Information Act request for copies of the agency’s inspection reports over the past several years.  MMS provided reports for only January, February, and April 2010; inspectors were revealed to have spent no more than two hours examining the rig during each visit; and the agency had inexplicably whited out sections of the reports.  AP also found that in 2009 MMS awarded Deep Horizon a safety award.

The Obama administration took a week after the explosion to announce an inquiry into the cause.  The same day, the Interior Department “point person” assigned to the incident left town on a work trip that included rafting in the Grand Canyon.  Meanwhile, Homeland Security was busy denying that the Defense Department was involved in addressing the crisis, then backtracking and claiming that Defense had been there since the day of the explosion.

Michael Barone argues that the public views the spill as reflecting poorly on the administration’s competence, rather than its ideology.  Peggy Noonan calls the oil spill a “political disaster” for Obama and labels it an “unforced error” that was “shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.”

A good part of Obama’s judgment and instincts relate to his environmentalist ideology, which places the needs of caribou, fussy Democratic Senators with pristine oceanfront views, and other lowly creatures over those of everyday Americans.

As Charles Krauthammer asks, “Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?”  His answer: “Environmental chic has driven us out there…  [W]e go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production…  [I]n the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

After the spill, while BP was spraying the dispersant Corexit to prevent oil from spreading, the Environmental Protection Agency butted in and told BP it had 24 hours to replace Corexit with another, less toxic dispersant from a list of EPA-approved dispersants, or else provide documentation on why the other dispersants on the list didn’t meet BP’s requirements.  BP responded by tactfully noting that none of the dispersants on the EPA’s list met the toxicity and effectiveness criteria the EPA expected BP to live up to, and concluded that it would continue to use Corexit, the dispersant most readily available to it.

Obama flew gaggles of lawyers, EPA officials, and environmentalists to Florida in the weeks following the Gulf tragedy, which shows where his priorities lay: not in rapidly and effectively solving the crisis, but in preventing federal liability claims, ensuring compliance with executive rulings upholding green dogma, and using the event as a PR opportunity to ban future drilling.  As Noonan writes, “When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble.”

Although the leakage of radioactive gases at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 yielded no casualties or even detrimental health effects, the accident helped pave the way for a moratorium on building new plants in the United States for the next 30 years.  This, despite the fact that “eco-friendly” countries like France, Sweden, and Switzerland all get more than twice as high a percentage of their power from nuclear sources as the U.S.—80% in France’s case.

The Gulf oil spill isn’t Obama’s Katrina—it’s more like his Three Mile Island: a rare but inevitable accident, an unavoidable byproduct of an essential method of power production, and an incident used by a far-left administration to phase out an entire category of energy production in the hopes of scaling back industrial civilization as we know it.



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I hate to have to point out the obvious to the rosy-cheeked, starry-eyed eco-warriors heading en masse to the international global warming summit this week (OK—I love to point it out), but the fact is that the Copenhagen Climate Conference is going to be, on every level, a monumental failure.

As has been reported for months, the nations of the world have not agreed, and will not agree, to legally binding reductions or limits on carbon dioxide emissions at the conference.  The biggest “polluters” are least likely to volunteer to give up their 21st-century living standards (the U.S., Australia, Canada) or their efforts to achieve such (China, India, Brazil).

As George Will noted, the U.S. population in 2050 will have risen to 420 million, which means that if we honor Obama’s pledge to reduce our nation’s “carbon footprint” by then to 80% below 2005 levels, emissions per capita “will be about what they were in 1875.  That.  Will.  Not.  Happen.”

Even climate change alarmists admit that pledges hinted at by Obama for Copenhagen and outlined in the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House this summer will have barely any effect on the earth’s climate.

And even if Obama decided to place some of his rapidly swelling political capital on the line and make a pledge for emissions reductions at Copenhagen, it wouldn’t be legally binding, because any treaty must be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which has already demonstrated its hostility to the less ambitious Waxman-Markey bill.

If all of this isn’t promising enough, Copenhagen delegates’ support from their constituencies for making firm commitments to reduce emissions will be diluted by several other factors.  One is the laughable hypocrisy on display in conference attendees’ lavish, luxury-filled, CO2 emission-intensive accommodations and entertainments.  The UK Telegraph documents that the summit, including jet and limousine travel, “will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of ‘carbon dioxide equivalent,’” about the same as the daily emissions of 30 smaller countries.  This is even after Al Gore canceled his talk in Copenhagen and the extra fuel required to fly him there was subtracted from the total.

Another lacuna in the alarmists’ scheme is that little matter known as “Climategate,” or, the fallout at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia from a whistleblower having leaked thousands of e-mails and other files documenting climate change “scientists” manipulating data, losing data, being unable to reconstruct data, and doing everything but counting “dimpled chads” to make the numbers come out the way they wanted.

Even before Climategate, polls showed that a majority of Americans believed climate change was primarily due to natural and not human causes and that such beliefs have been growing more common in recent years.  Yet Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate official, is worried only about people’s “perception” of the e-mails, not whether they reveal compromised data analysis.  Of the general public, he patronizingly states, “[W]hen they have the feeling… that scientists are manipulating information in a certain direction, then of course it causes concern in a number of people to say, ‘You see, I told you so, this is not a real issue.’”  Yes, Yvo—when people realize that the UN’s top climate official cares more about whether the little people discover the truth than he cares about discovering the truth, it does cast climate change alarmists in a suspicious light.

Then of course there’s the science, which is too complex for most non-climate scientists to follow (and now, we know, most climate scientists), but which infiltrates the public’s awareness from time to time, due to the efforts of honest climate scientists and tireless, usually unpaid fact-checkers, statisticians, and bloggers.  For example, these skeptics have helped publicize the well-documented Medieval Warming Period, during which temperatures were hotter than they are today, yet SUVs were still only in the test market phase.

Those over 40 remember the international scientific “consensus” in the early 1970s that the planet was cooling at an alarming rate and that humans were careening toward the next Ice Age.  More recently, those over 15 remember the catastrophic, government-fueled, technology-related Y2K predictions, none of which came true.  (Those over 9 months remember Obama’s promise that if we didn’t pass the $787 billion stimulus bill, unemployment might someday soar all the way to 8.0%.)

Acting in concert with Obama, the EPA on Monday released a declaration of intent to regulate and require permits from the largest U.S. emitters.  The timing of the announcement on the first day of the Copenhagen conference, which was a total coincidence, was meant to goad Congressmen into passing cap-and-trade legislation, lest the EPA effectively do it for them.

This usurpation of the legislature’s function is not sitting well with many in Congress, including even such Democrats and moderate Republicans as Russ Feingold, Blanche Lincoln, Byron Dorgan, and Olympia Snowe.  The working and middle classes will be none too happy, either: as Forbes’ Joel Kotkin notes, “Huge increases in energy costs, taxes and a spate of regulatory mandates will restrict their access to everything from single-family housing and personal mobility to employment in carbon-intensive industries like construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agriculture.”  Who ever said Democrats don’t look out for the little guy!

So Monday’s EPA ruling does not help, but actually undermines, any Copenhagen pledge in two ways: (1) the ruling undercuts the necessity of Obama’s making any public commitment in Copenhagen, because it allows the administration to enact its schemes more stealthily, yet (2) the ruling will not withstand the inevitable, prolonged legal challenges from every corner of society, or the public’s anger at an administration that would allow such an authoritarian agency to make this ruling, which will undermine the administration’s ability to carry out any pledge it makes at Copenhagen.  Paradoxically, Obama’s best prospect for restricting carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. is rescinding the EPA ruling and making no promises in Copenhagen, and taking his chances with Congress next year.

So in case it’s still not obvious to some, I’ll repeat it: Copenhagen will be a monumental failure on every level.

Bonus revelation: It deserves to be.