Earth Equity News

Spilled Oil. Commentary by Hendrik Hertzberg, NewYorker, June 28, 2010 issue. “For the young Presidency of Barack Obama, and for the nation, this hellish summer of discontent started in balmy spring, on the evening of April 20th, forty miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. At first, after the explosion aboard the giant oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the rig’s operator, BP, estimated the resulting flow at 1,000 barrels a day... By May 17th -- the day that the chief executive officer of BP predicted that ‘the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest’ -- it was obvious that what was unfolding was the single biggest environmental catastrophe in the history of the United States. By June 15th, when President Obama commandeered the networks for his first address to the nation from the Oval Office, the per-day estimate had been ratcheted up to 60,000 barrels -- a thousand every 24 minutes. The surface muck was fouling Florida beaches and Louisiana wetlands, leaving doomed seabirds shrouded in black; just as ominous, huge subsurface blobs were leaching oxygen from the depths, threatening to suffocate an entire ocean ecosystem...

“Against this background, Obama’s speech was bound to feel unequal to the occasion. What ‘people’ wanted to hear was an answer to Malia Obama’s now famous question -- ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ -- and the answer they wanted to hear was yes, or, failing that, real soon. This the President could not provide. Plugging the hole is beyond his power, or, apparently, anyone else’s... The President was right, of course, that the ultimate cause of the Gulf disaster is out-of-control consumption of a dwindling resource that must be extracted in increasingly dangerous ways. The most effective, most efficient way to rein in that consumption and make clean energy price-competitive would be to slap a heavy tax on carbon. Ideally, much of the revenue would be rebated to the public as a cut in the payroll tax, since it makes more sense to tax things we want to discourage, such as oil use, than things we want to encourage, such as work.”