This is the title of Frank Rich’s column from yesterday’s NYT, which, as always, is a Must Read. Like Rich, I find the emphasis on getting some anger from the President a lazy and childish response from the media. A media who is perpetually looking for the ratings-boosting human drama rather than trying to figure out how,exactly, something like this could possibly happen. So instead of trying to figure out how the legendarily dysfunctional Bush-era Minerals Management Service was still largely dysfunctional this far into the Obama Administration, we get plenty of ink on how “angry” the President is. It is of a piece with the braindead “President you could have a beer with” narrative that helped BushCo get into office twice.
But I am going to use this space to take Rich to task for something that I would not have expected from him:
His most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it. At his gulf-centric press conference 10 days ago, the president said he had “probably had more meetings on this issue than just about any issue since we did our Afghan review.” This was meant to be reassuring but it was not. The plugging of an uncontrollable oil leak, like the pacification of an intractable Afghanistan, may be beyond the reach of marathon brainstorming by brainiacs, even if the energy secretary is a Nobel laureate. Obama has yet to find a sensible middle course between blind faith in his own Ivy League kind and his predecessor’s go-with-the-gut bravado. […]
It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.
Rich’s difficulty here is clearer in the longer article — but this conflation of “elites” and “experts” undermines the argument that I suspect Rich is trying to make. And that is that Americans are quite suspicious of elites that have rained a world of hurt upon them, and that letting the elite BP run the capping and cleanup show doesn’t play to those optics. But what Rich does gloss right over is that expertise does not make you one of the elite. There is real and specialized knowledge in this world and you wonder why this government shouldn’t tap into that — much like BushCo did not. Rich’s conflation leaves me wondering who he thinks should be working on this cleanup who he wouldn’t consider one of the “elites”.
There are plenty of experts working on this cleanup (and I know a couple of these people and they’d punch you if you called them this to their faces). The “Elites” did, however, get this disaster all queued up, though. The people who pushed the bullshit “energy Independence” argument, the people who sold an entire nation on the so-called “safety” of these deepwater rigs, the people who convinced Congress that they didn’t need specific regulation or even safety targets, the people who convinced Congress to fund oil exploration (via tax breaks), the people who convinced Congress that a Gulf monitoring program is not needed, and especially the people who suckered the American people into “getting the government out of the way of business”.
Because what you are looking at day in and day out is the failure resulting from the absence of regulation. BP and the other exploration companies have lots of incentives (lots of them funded by you, the taxpayer) to go get the oil. They have few incentives for safety — of either people or the environment. They have no incentives to be able to cleanup this kind of catastrophe. Why is that? Because the government for years has been in the business of transferring your money to these oil companies to do what you would expect an oil company to do — go get the product they expect to sell you. What the government has not been in the business of is protecting the parts of this equation that badly needed it — the Gulf of Mexico, the people who rely on it to make their living and American taxpayers who have always been the secret sauce in all of this. Because if all else fails, we’ll pay. And even the judges may be paid for in this thing.
Both Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour are already calling for an *end* to the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. You don’t hear a single GOP leader criticizing BP for anything except the pace of their payments for damages. The GOP is at ground zero for opposing any lifting of the liability caps. They aren’t demanding that BP live up to their cleanup certifications, they aren’t calling for any change in how drilling gets done to, you know, protect the Gulf and the people who live and work there — they are circling the wagons to protect a long-standing GOP special interest. (And you can expect Mary Landrieu to join them.) And, of course, the people whose interests are in dire need of protecting are completely out of the equation.
People clamoring for a government solution to this won’t get one. Because there is none. How do I know this? I do large scale environmental cleanups in my day job. And the government hires people like me to do this work. There’s no special expertise that the government has in this thing, other than in its regulatory capacity and we’ve already seen that they’ve abandoned that. While BP is not a good actor in this thing, they are one of the few actors who can make this work. (And given the fact that much of what BP is doing was also done for the much shallower Ixtoc blowout and for the similarly deepwater Timor blowout, you would correctly surmise that the lack of progress in a better way to cap off one of these wells or to cleanup the mess demonstrates where the incentives effectively are not.)
President Obama *is* counting on the so-called “elites” to get climate change legislation passed. But for his desire to play his legendary long game, I think that it is time for Obama to change the game. This is where I am back in tune with Frank Rich. This is the Get Even part. Most of the GOP won’t be on board here anyway and unless he can hang the horrific images around their necks, they won’t be. Hydrocarbon extraction (especially oil) is a fools game here in the US. Which is why it needs taxpayer incentives to make it happen. So get rid of the tax breaks and let BP, EXXON and the like do their exploration with their shareholders’ money. Get rid of the limitations on liability. Let the exploration companies factor in the potential disaster into their capital plans. Make them *demonstrate* that they can quickly cap a faulty well. Make them *demonstrate* they have functional capacity to cleanup a spill of this magnitude. Both of these things cost money — alot of money — in the development of some off-the-shelf technology that does not exist yet. In short — dismantle the extensive subsidy regime that exploration companies use to boost their share values and shield them from living within the confines of the free market. Because if you dismantle the subsidies, you’ve just made them live the real cost of deepwater exploration. Which would effectively kill that off the US coast.
If energy independence is crucial (and I think it is), then a complete orientation that incentivizes true alternative energy research and deployment is the only answer. Hydrocarbons and nuclear energy are mature technologies, which should not get taxpayer subsidies or preferences. Let them live in the free market if they can. (Or — in the case of nuclear — impose the French model.) Let the GOP clamor for oil and let them live with justifying to Americans why they should be paying for the destruction of our environment and the destruction of the kind of jobs and industry you can’t outsource.