The presidential commission on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill released its final report and recommendations on Wednesday, a key step in the Obama administration’s program to continue unregulated offshore drilling after the greatest man-made ecological disaster in US history.
The primary aim of the 382-page document is to shield the executives of BP for their criminal culpability in the disaster. The report explicitly fails to name official BP policy as the root cause of the spill, rather blaming the “culture” of the oil industry. The report concludes that, since‚ “complex systems almost always fail in complex ways,” searching for culprits “provides a dangerously incomplete picture of what happened.”
The other goal of the report is to justify the continuation of offshore drilling with no serious changes. While listing a number of recommendations that have no meaning unless they are implemented by Congress, the report insists the US “cannot realistically walk away from these offshore oil resources in the near future.”
The Obama Administration put a moratorium on new offshore drilling in May, several weeks after the April 20 blowout that killed 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig and began the worst oil spill in history. The ban, which affected only 33 out of hundreds of rigs operating in the Gulf, was lifted on October 12, seven weeks in advance of its scheduled end date of November 30.
The commission is co-chaired by former Democratic Senator and Florida Governor Bob Graham, a long-time advocate of deregulation, and William Reilly, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under the Reagan administration, during the time of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Reilly has spent the past 17 years on the board of energy giant ConocoPhillips.
Press coverage of the report has focused on its recommendations to create an “Offshore Safety Authority” to oversee drilling, and to raise the absurdly low $75 million liability cap on oil spills. The Offshore Safety Authority would be a subsidiary of the Minerals Management Service, the regulatory agency within the Department of the Interior that not only failed to regulate the Deepwater Horizon, but ran interference for BP to protect it from environmental and safety requirements.
The report insists that what is required is further industry self-regulation, concluding that “regulatory oversight alone will not be sufficient to ensure adequate safety,” and that “the oil and gas industry will need to take its own, unilateral steps to increase dramatically safety throughout the industry, including self-policing mechanisms.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/spil-j13.shtml
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