It seems like everybody's looking for the easy fix to the crisis in the Gulf, but not enough people are talking about the real problem: our addiction to oil.
Case in point: this morning on ABC's Good Morning America, James Carville blasted the Obama administration's response to BP's oil spill, accusing the White House of "political stupidity" by not taking advantage of the opportunity it has offered:
The political stupidity of this is just unbelievable. Here you have a situation where eleven hard-working people are blown up as a result of corporate malfeasance and maybe criminal negligence, as a result of inept bureaucrats who were part of, actually you can blame, the previous administration for this, and the President doesn't get down here in the middle of this. This thing should be, his approval rating should be up seven points right now, if he'd have come down here. I have no idea why they didn't seize this thing. I have no idea why their attitude was so hands-offy here. It's just unbelievable. I hope he sees it now because this is very seldom that you get something that is really good politics and really the right thing to do, and this is to get involved down here.
And what does Carville believe Obama should have done?
The President of the United States could have come down here. He could have been involved with the families of these eleven people. He could have commandeered the (unintelligible). We could have sent the Woods Hole people. We could have sent the Scripps people. They don't have research vessels in the Gulf of Mexico. He could have demanded a plan in anticipation of this. You know, right, he can't exactly fill the hole up. Last night I was on Larry King with the former CEO of shell. They said they got 85% of this stuff cleaned up in the Gulf of Saudi Arabia. We could be commandeering tankers and making BP bring tankers in and cleaning this up. They could be deploying people to the coast right now. He could be with the Corps of Engineers right now, with the Coast Guard, with the people in Plaquemines Parrish doing something about these regulations. These people are crying. They are begging for something down here and he just looks like he's not involved in this. Man, you've got to get down here and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this, and get this thing moving. We're about to die down here.
Other than the failure to adequately monitor the water column with research vessels, that's some pretty thin gruel right there. On Friday, President Obama will make his second visit, and while perhaps it would have been a good political stunt to have a photo op with the families of the rig workers, it wouldn't have made a substantive difference in terms of what we're dealing with now.
On the most important point, Carville himself concedes that President Obama can't plug the hole. But he offers two concrete proposals for what the administration could have done to aid cleanup, neither of which would actually do that much.
First, he embraces the idea advanced by the former CEO of Shell that we simply use oil tankers to skim oil off the surface. That sounds great, except when you remember that most of the freaking oil isn't on the surface.
Second, he says Obama should get the Army Corps of Engineers to cut the red tape and approve the plan by Plaquemines Parrish to build a 60-mile stretch of barrier islands to keep the oil out. Two problems: (1) even on an accelerated schedule, the islands will take at least six months to build and (2) doing it that quickly means that the first storm the comes along will wash them away, including the sand used to build them which is in short supply. So the sand barrier would take too long to build, and even if we do build it, it will was away.
On an emotional level, I have tremendous sympathy for what Carville is saying. Like him, I live in southeastern Louisiana, so this is happening in my backyard (though I've only just recently moved here). But he seems to believe that the President could just wave a magic wand and fix this problem and make the oil go away. Well, he can't. When you spill over one hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (with millions more being added each day), there just aren't any easy solutions.
The only real solution is to break our addiction to oil. And if President Obama does nothing else other than to force us to confront that reality, he'll have done his job.