Congress should be working to avoid future Gulf catastrophes

Rough seas and the possibility of a tropical storm have brought a temporary halt to work on a relief well and permanent plugging the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Three months after the BP-leased Deepwater rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers, there is hope that the worst is over, at least as far as releasing more oil into the waters of the Gulf. A monumental clean-up operation covering hundreds of square miles of ocean and hundreds of miles of beaches and wet lands along the coasts of four states remains.

But while the weather necessitates a delay in work in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing should stand in the way of Washington continuing work on the long-term issues that the Deepwater catastrophe brought to the surface.

The spectacular lack of oversight of drilling operations in the Gulf has been alternately blamed on the Obama administration and the Bush Administration by various partisans, but the dysfunction of the Minerals Management Service can be traced to its very creation in 1982. Then-Interior Secretary James G. Watt used it to sidestep his department’s environmental responsibilities in favor of faster development of more oil fields.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has issued a new executive order that gives MMS a new name, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, and divides its responsibilities among three divisions. The same people who are responsible for producing revenue from mining or drilling operations are no longer also responsible for overseeing safety and environmental practices.

Permanent solutions needed

But Salazar’s reorganization is a stopgap measure. Congress must reassert its legislature responsibility for setting strict environmental and safety standards and assuring that drilling companies are capable of responding to emergencies. It is the administration’s duty to carry out the law.

Congress must also eliminate caps on oil spill liability so that no future president is accused of “shaking down” a multinational corporation when seeking billions of dollars to protect Americans from the damage done by an oil spill.

Several bills to address these and other issues have already been introduced in the House and Senate. More will be coming. The American people should not soon forget the damage that has been done to the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf states and the people who live there and work in the oil, fishing and tourism industries. Powerful political forces are already at work to stifle oversight of drilling operations.

The ultimate protection against drilling accidents, a move away from fossil fuels to clean energy alternatives, will at best be pursued in a piecemeal fashion in the foreseeable future. Any comprehensive energy and climate bill is dead in the water as far as this Congress is concerned, and resurrecting it in the next Congress will be a political challenge.

But inevitably, the United States is going to have to come to grips with the reality that fossil fuels are a finite resource. The more we use them, the more damage we do to the environment, the more expensive those dwindling resources become and the more dollars we ship to foreign providers of oil. We’re going to have to wean ourselves away from oil eventually; the sooner we start, the better.