Reply #34: The Buck Stops on Obama’s Desk [View All]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/22-6

Published on Saturday, May 22, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

The Buck Stops on Obama’s Desk

by Lewis Seiler & Dan Hamburg

One of the hopeful promises Barack Obama made to the country in 2008 was that if elected, his administration would reinstitute science-based decision making. We had all heard the stories of how, under George W. Bush, science was regularly compromised in the interests of big business. The BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, and events in the aftermath of this epic catastrophe, demonstrates how little has changed.


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In his State of the Union address this past January, President Obama made clear that drilling in the OCS would be a central part of his "energy program". And then, ironically just a few weeks before a BP rig turned into a fountain of flame and sank, Obama announced that new offshore oil leasing on the eastern seaboard would commence.

Obama has disappointed in many ways, but none more than in the way he has handled this issue. Because once the oil began to spill, so did the beans on how his administration's MMS is really no better than the one presided over by his predecessor. Maybe there's less cocaine and booze, fewer golf and ski junkets, but the overall functioning of this critical agency has not improved. According to Kierán Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), "MMS has given up any pretense of regulating the offshore oil industry. The agency seems to think its mission is to help the oil industry evade environmental laws."

In a recent article published on May 7 by the New York Times, Ian Urbina discusses the continued abandonment of science-based decision making at MMS. "Managers at the agency have routinely overruled staff scientists whose findings highlight the environmental risks of drilling, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists." One scientist, who has worked for the minerals agency for more than a decade, put it this way: "You simply are not allowed to conclude that the drilling will have an impact."

Certainly no change we can believe in here. And it gets worse.

On the same day the Times story broke, we learned in a press release from CBD, that the MMS had approved 27 gulf drilling operations after the BP disaster, exempting these operations from environmental review! The MMS has done so using a loophole in the National Environmental Act meant only to apply to projects with no, or minimal, negative effects, "such as outhouses and hiking trails."

Another highly disturbing aspect of this monumental clusterf**k is the way it illustrates (do we really need more evidence?) that corporations rule the United States of America. Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof illustrate the point in a piece published on Common Dreams this week in which they outline government complicity in the obfuscations around the exploded rig and subsequent gushing of oil into the sea. According to Taylor and Schoof, BP "hasn't publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers' exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf."

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Meanwhile, inexplicably, BP remains in charge of the situation. They decide who are the "legitimate interested parties" to information. (Obviously, this does not include the general public!) For example, air monitoring along the shore and over the sea is being done by an organization called The Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, hired and paid by BP. BP has also determined what kinds of chemical dispersants to use. They chose the eerily labeled Corexit, and sprayed at least 600,000 gallons of it on the sea. If by "corrects it" we mean hides it, as in "out of sight, out of mind", they chose wisely. However, it turns out that Corexit is also, according to the EPA, "carcinogenic, mutagenic, and highly toxic." EPA has ordered BP to change to a less toxic dispersant but significant damage has already been done.

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