I’m afraid it’s time for me to criticize my President. The President whom I have campaigned for, supported and loved since he became a candidate.
The Deep Horizon Oil Spill fiasco is completely out of control. This morning the situation was not compared to Bush’s Katrina but to Carter’s Embassy Hostage Crisis. The difference is not subtle.
While Bush demonstrated that he didn’t have an interest helping New Orleans during Katrina. He appeared to be lazy and didn’t care, like it wasn’t his job to do anything. When he did finally figure out that it was his job, he was totally ineffectual and incompetent.
Jimmy Carter on the other hand didn’t have any control over what happened to the hostages in Iran. He made the struggle with Iran his only concern after the revolution. He didn’t have the resources to negotiate with a regime of this kind that the world had never had to deal with before. He was destined to fail we see in hind sight, and he owned it. The problem is when a President of these United States says he’s going to do something; the people expect and demand action.
President Obama’s issue is that, besides the federal government not having the expertise or equipment to stop the oil leak, it’s beginning to appear that we also don’t have the resources, capacity, or command structure to keep the oil off the beaches.
The fact that BP, a major contributor of the president’s presidential campaign, can tell the EPA that they plan to continue using a dispersant that the EPA has ordered them to cease using gives me pause. Is BP an example of a corporation with its hooks into the federal government so-far that they have rendered the government ineffective? Like a bystander? A proverbial man leaning on a shovel watching other people work? I’m afraid that is the impression we’re beginning to get. It certainly isn’t what I had in mind.
The Government is giving the orders and BP must follow them.
My advice for the government is two fold. One, get a court order to stop BP from using any more dispersants, or at least unapproved ones. Two, the federal government should start hiring those out-of-work fishermen (and anybody else) to start stringing boom, skimming oil, let them get involved in the clean-up.
Another thought is that I don’t like about the whole idea of dispersants. Isn’t the idea to clean this thing up? Not to hide the problem, but to actually retrieve the oil from the water. Instead of trying to disperse the oil, we should be trying to collect it into one place. Dispersants are old thinking that the “solution to pollution is dilution”. Not so. We have to REALLY clean this up. We should be mixing the oil with straw, or any kind of biomass to soak-up the oil. That would make it easier to pick-up and dispose of it. I also think it could be more effective and easier to do.
In the end, President Obama has been a good president. He has done a lot of good for this country. He’s smart, engaged and has some great ideas. I just wish he’s think out of the box on this issue and start kicking BP in the ass some more.
