A disaster with many fathers

By Charles Krauthammer

Here's my question: Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we 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. And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

So we go deep, ultra deep - to such a frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

There always will be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people?

The other culprits are pretty obvious. It starts with BP, which seems not only to have had an amazing string of perfect-storm engineering lapses but no contingencies to deal with a catastrophic system failure.

However, the railing against BP for its performance since the accident is harder to understand. I attribute no virtue to BP, just self-interest. What possible interest can it have to do anything but cap the well as quickly as possible? Every day that oil is spilled means millions more in losses, cleanup and restitution.

Federal officials who rage against BP would like to deflect attention from their role in this disaster. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whose department's laxity in environmental permitting and safety oversight renders it among the many bearing responsibility, expresses outrage at BP and threatens to “push them out of the way.”

Obama didn't help much with his finger-pointing Rose Garden speech in which he said that these problems have been going on “for a decade or more” - translation: Bush did it - while, in contrast, his interior secretary had worked diligently to solve the problem “from the day he took office.”

Really? What about the September letter from Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration accusing Interior's Minerals Management Service of understating the “risk and impacts” of a major oil spill? When you get a blowout 15 months into your administration, and your Interior Department had given BP a “categorical” environmental exemption in April 2009, the buck stops.

If BP can cap the well in time to prevent an absolute calamity in the Gulf, the president will escape politically. If it doesn't, it will become Obama's Katrina.

That will be unfair, but that's the nature of American politics: We expect our presidents to play Superman.

Moreover, Obama has never been overly modest about his powers. When you anoint yourself King Canute, you mustn't be surprised when your subjects expect you to command the tides.

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