Frances Beinecke, one of seven commissioners serving on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling and president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, published an op-ed in the New Orleans Times Picayune on Friday. Even if it is all merely lip service, it might be considered heartening that it's actually being said...Follow-through, however, is more difficult.
Gulf of Mexico is a treasure to protect: Frances Beinecke
...after an exhaustive inquiry into the April 20 blowout that killed 11 workers and gushed 170 million gallons of toxic crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling issued a full report in January.
In it, we laid out specific recommendations on essential steps needed to protect our workers and our waters from the risks of offshore oil production. We were unanimous in our recommendations, reflecting solid agreement among all seven members of our bipartisan commission.
Among our key recommendations:
•Reorganize the Interior Department to improve its oversight of offshore oil production and to insulate its safety functions from political pressures.
•Make sure the bulk of the fines BP pays for the spill are used to help restore the Gulf.
•Raise oil company liability to realistic levels.
•Elevate science and environmental analysis in decisions affecting drilling and production operations.
The oil and gas industry, the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration each has a vital role to play.
The industry must improve its ability to respond to an emergency, contain a blowout and clean up oil from a spill. The non-profit Marine Well Containment Company the industry created last summer is an important step forward, as is a partner effort being coordinated by the Helix Energy Solutions Group. More is needed, though, to extend containment capability to depths greater than 10,000 feet.
If there's one thing I and my fellow commissioners learned in the 10 months we studied this issue, it's that the Gulf of Mexico is a special place. It's not a national sacrifice zone; it's a national treasure. It's time we started treating it like one.
We will never be able to prevent, outright, another disaster in the Gulf, so long as we continue, as a nation, to rely so heavily on oil. Every single day in this country we use 800 million gallons of oil, enough to fill the Empire State Building three times.
Unless and until we start to reduce that demand, we will continue to put the lives of our workers and our habitat at needless and growing risk. Even as we work to reduce those risks, we must also begin moving toward cleaner, safer and more sustainable sources of power and fuel.
We owe that much to those who lost their lives in the BP blowout last April. We owe that much to the people of the Gulf of Mexico. We owe that much to the future we all will leave to our children.
If we only thought that Big Oil and their Congressional enablers would live up to the spirit and the fact that the Gulf, and indeed, our entire environment, is something to truly be "treasured", and not raped, pillaged, and sacrificed on the altar of greed.