Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Depth & Destruction.

A Moment of Clarity.


Words.

"In the Gulf of Mexico, plumes of black oil are gushing into the ocean, coating the wings of seabirds, poisoning shellfish, sending tar balls rolling onto white Florida beaches. It is an ecological disaster. It is a economic nightmare. And there is absolutely nothing that the American president can do about it. Nothing at all.

Here is the hard truth: The U.S. government does not possess a secret method for capping oil leaks. Even the combined wisdom of the Obama inner circle -- all of those Harvard economists, silver-tongued spin doctors and hardened politicos -- cannot prevent tens of thousands of tons of oil from pouring out of hole a mile beneath the ocean surface. Other than proximity to the Louisiana coast, this catastrophe has nothing in common with Hurricane Katrina: That was an unstoppable natural disaster that turned into a human tragedy because of an inadequate government response. This is just an unstoppable disaster, period. It will be a human tragedy precisely because no government response is possible.

...In truth, the organization most likely to have the phone numbers of the "experts" is BP. The organization that will get them to Louisiana fastest is BP. I am writing this not because I like, admire or even have an opinion about the company formerly known as British Petroleum but because BP's shareholders have already lost billions of dollars and BP's executives are motivated to find solutions faster than anyone in the White House ever could. Bashing BP or seeking to punish BP is pointless. This is not only because we will soon learn that many companies -- American, Japanese, even Halliburton -- were responsible for that rig but also because whatever the solution, BP has to be part of it.

...It's right for Obama to be concerned about the consequences of this disaster, but wrong -- and dangerous -- for him to pretend he is capable of controlling it. We should stop calling on him to do so."

  • THE WASHINGTON POST: The oil spill isn't Obama's Katrina
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