A growing chorus of politicians and pundits now agree that if President Obama had just done X, Y, or Z, then the devastation in the Gulf of Mexico could have been more effectively managed.
In a narrow sense, some of their points certainly have validity. After all, it's easier to figure out what you should have done than to figure out what you should do, and with the benefit of hindsight, it won't be hard to point out mistakes.
But in a larger sense, as Crashing Vor argues in a recommended diary, this type of prattle misses the point. Anyone who suggests that they know how to effectively manage a leak like the one gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is either dishonest or delusional or both. When you have a leak flooding nearly 100,000 barrels of oil each day and you don't have technology that can quickly stop that leak, you're going to have a disaster. And there's nothing you can do to prevent it. You can try to minimize the damage and you can hold the responsible parties accountable. These are things you have to do. But you're still basically at the mercy of the oil. It's nasty stuff. It will never be a secure source of energy. And claiming that you have a plan to spare us from the devastation of this leak is to deny that essential fact.
Take Bobby Jindal. He says that he's got a plan to protect Louisiana from the oil. He says all they need to do is build a 60 mile stretch of barrier islands to keep the oil out. Oh, and they also need another 13 million feet of boom. And he blames the Federal government for bureaucratic red tape on the islands and for not giving him the boom he needs.
C'mon, Bobby. You know it would take six months to build the islands, and that assumes no storms damage them as they're being built. Six months is too late, and even if they get built, doing it that fast means the next major storm to come along will destroy them. And 13 million feet of boom sounds nice, but that would be more than 4 times the amount of boom that's already been laid out and 10 times more boom than we have available in the entire U.S.
Jindal probably likes the sound of his voice when he says he has a solution to dealing with this leak, but the fact that his solution is such utter nonsense underscores this one central, immutable fact: oil is dangerous, and there's no way to make it safe. Yes, we're addicted to it. No, we're not going to stop using it overnight. But we must break that addiction. And if don't learn that lesson from this tragedy, we're going to be taught it again, and again. And each time the consequences will keep on getting worse.
