Finally

It looks like they’ve staunched the flow in the Gulf.

There was never much the administration could have done about this, but they haven’t acquitted themselves well, with the finger pointing at the finger pointers, and fascist talk of boots on necks. It was stupid to think that there was anything that the White House could do to make BP move any faster — they were in an existential crisis, and there was no reason for them not to be working as fast as they could. If the White House is getting too much blame, it has only its own rhetoric to blame for that. When you campaign and take office with the promise that you’re going to make the seas recede, it’s not surprising that people expect you to stop a pesky little oil leak with a wave of your hand. The president should have taken his cue from King Canute.

Now, where they’re really falling down is not in capping the well, but in not dealing with what’s happening on the coast as an emergency, with the EPA dragging its feet as the oil infiltrates the wetlands, and Jindal calling for relief. As Glenn says, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when people start acting like it’s a crisis. The governor is acting like it’s a crisis. The White House isn’t.

[Update a few minutes later]

It strikes me as deeply ironic that, with all of the things that the president has done to actively damage the nation over the past year and a half, the thing he seems to be taking the most heat for is one over which he had no control. But you know, justice is justice, even if it isn’t fair.

[Update a while later]

Here’s a nicely detailed description of how they finally plugged the leak. Note that this was all done via telerobotics. I think there are some interesting implications for things like asteroid mining, but in that case, the time delay would make things a lot more difficult.

[Via WOC]

[Update a while later]

I agree with Jonah’s reader:

This is so frustrating that no one is really making this point. During Katrina there was also an oil crisis with pipelines and refineries and President Bush was in daily communication with these companies and responded by suspending all kinds of regulations to facilitate pipeline and refinery repair. (I have family members in the industry). Work that was estimated to take months was done in days and weeks. Oil is the fuel of our economy as well as so important to national defense. George Bush understood this and he knew what needed to be done by the executive of the United States. And when the job was done he made personal phone calls and wrote letters of commendation to all the folks who worked so hard and around the clock to get it done. The media and democrats are so wrong to perpetuate this myth about President Bush, and to keep saying “there was nothing Obama could really do”: SUSPEND ALL REGULATIONS, THAT’S WHAT CAN BE DONE TODAY! Get the government out of the way. I wish Republicans everywhere would be shouting this from the roof tops!

I do too, but they’re called the Stupid Party for a reason.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jim Garaghty has a link roundup, and some thoughts:

A lot of righties feel like George W. Bush got an unearned share of the blame for the Katrina mess; Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco largely ignored pre-written evacuation plans and procedures during the critical hours. School buses were left unused. Several hundred cops walked off the job in the middle of the crisis. Yet somehow the lesson became, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” as we were informed during the charity telethon.

The dominant narrative of Katrina made no room for the normal human errors and snafus that mark any response to a giant problem; righties are naturally objecting to the sudden reinstatement of the “Hey, sometimes stuff happens, what can you do?” standard under a Democratic president.

Obama ran as the anti-Bush; he was supposed to be the embodiment of smarts and savvy and a pledge to get government working again. After almost a year and a half on the job, big government is behaving exactly the way it always has — accepting gifts from those they regulate and watching pornography at work, going whitewater rafting with their wives as part of “official business,” attending Democratic fundraisers, etc. Obama is far too focused on expanding the scope of government to spend much time or effort making sure existing government agencies are performing the duties they already have.

I thought that the media went overboard with the Bush criticism during Katrina, and as I’ve said, as far as stopping the the flow itself, there was little or nothing that the administration could do. But I do think that they could have been more prepared for such a disaster on the shore. And when you’ve lost Kirsten Powers, you’ve lost…well, I’m not sure what, other than one of the hottest Democrat pundits, but it doesn’t bode well for the White House. Bush never really recovered from his Katrina moment, and I don’t know if Obama will recover from this.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Yuval Levin:

I think it’s actually right to say that the BP oil spill is something like Obama’s Katrina, but not in the sense in which most critics seem to mean it.

It’s like Katrina in that many people’s attitudes regarding the response to it reveal completely unreasonable expectations of government. The fact is, accidents (not to mention storms) happen. We can work to prepare for them, we can have various preventive rules and measures in place. We can build the capacity for response and recovery in advance. But these things happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed. It is totally unreasonable to expect the government to be able to easily address them—and the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want.

…We seem to think that given our modern powers, there ought to be no accidents and no natural disasters anymore, and when those happen we blame the people in charge. Well, call me crazy but I don’t want a government so powerful that it could move half a million people in mere hours in response to a hurricane, or would have such total control over every facet of every industry that the potential for industrialaccidents would be entirely eliminated. Such power would come at enormous cost to a lot of things we care about.

We who live in the 21st century West have the least messy, least dangerous, least uncertain lives of any human beings in history. We should be very grateful for that, but we should not let our good fortune utterly distort our expectations of life, and we should not react with unrestrained indignant shock anytime the limitations of our power make themselves seen or the cold and harsh capriciousness of nature overcomes our defenses. We should expect a firm response from the institutions we have built to protect ourselves—science, technology, and modern government—but we cannot expect a perfect response. Not from Bush, and not from Obama.

Not from any human.

19 thoughts on “Finally”

  1. I’m thinking of Carol Browner stating “we’re in charge” and, of course, not having a clue about fixing the problem. If they hadn’t been so busy posturing before the media, they might have protected the coast better. That wasn’t as important as not letting a crisis go to waste. Kind of backfired though.

    It’s unfortunate the real lessons of enforcing current regulations and having the equipment the government was supposed to have will be ignored.

  2. I’ve always thought that mining in general would migrate to ROVs. The operators would still be in close proximity (on top of the mine on Earth, on a safe station / ship near the asteroid) but not directly in harm’s way.

  3. If the White House is getting too much blame, it has only its own rhetoric to blame for that. When you campaign and take office with the promise that you’re going to make the seas recede, it’s not surprising that people expect you to stop a pesky little oil leak with a wave of your hand. The president should have taken his cue from King Canute.

    He who claims credit for the sunshine must also accept the blame when it rains.

  4. Four reasons why this is not Obama’s Katrina:

    1) This disaster did not come with a week’s advance warning.
    2) The response to this disaster has been efficient. There are no reports of responders being sent to diversity training instead of to the disaster site.
    3) There has been limited loss of life. Not only that, we are not being treated to scenes of desperate Americans trying to flag down news helicopters from their rooftops.
    4) There has been no “heck of a job, Brownie” video clip, showing an out-of-touch President praising a clueless emergency manager.

    Other than all that, yeah, I guess this is Obama’s Katrina. (Do I really need a /sarcasm/ tag on that last sentence?)

  5. 6) an incompetent governor. So was the mayor of NO, but that’s a non-issue this time. Oh, and which party did these two fine examples of leadership belong to?

  6. Quick question of scale, am I right in calculating that this spill was the equivalent of losing 5% of the oil from an oil tanker?

  7. Four reasons why this is not Obama’s Katrina:

    You left out all the other hysterical myths that were being promoted by our top-notch media watchdogs:

    o Bodies stacked up at the Convention Center!
    o Mass euthanasia at hospitals!
    o Dynamited levees!
    o Hidden Race War!
    o Vigilantes patrol streets, shooting blacks!
    o Blacks locked up in the Superdome and forced to watch executions!
    o FEMA Concentration Camps!
    o Martial law testing for next 9/11!
    o FEMA Buys Millions of Plastic Coffins!
    o Dogs and cats executed!….

    and I’m not making any of this up! Go search “Katrina” on YouTube and watch your fellow leftists stroke out over the evil BusHitler and his nefarious racist plans.

    BBB

  8. Dunno necessarily agree with Obama only option is to stand back and let BP fix it.

    Well could go from Obama own saying “But I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. ”
    BP by some reports is a mess not following safety/engineering procedure and relying on them to stop it may not be the best plan. Can put a more doer in charge and leverage more extensive knowledge base of say Exxon Mobile or Haliburton to stop the leak.
    Along with faster response to containing the spill.

  9. One reason why this particular blowout was so difficult to contain is that it is a mile down. Working right at the edge of technological possibility is, and always will be, dangerous. Perhaps, just perhaps, they shouldn’t have been working in water that deep in the first place?

  10. Oil tanker at up to 550,000 ton capacity for a big one.

    5000 barrels a day infers around 23,000 ton total (say 175,000 barrels), hence the 5% of an oil tanker comment.

    A later estimate I see is 12,000-19,000 barrels a day, up to say 15% of an oil tanker.

    From what I can see natural oil seepage dominates human cause oil spills.

    Looking at Wikipedia, it would seem there was a larger spill in the Gulf way back in 1979 (35,000,000 barrels). This latest “spill” would not even make the top fifteen on Wikipedia.

    As bad as an oil spill is – I am a little suspicious of a hysterical component to the response in this case.

  11. Q: Dunno necessarily agree with Obama only option is to stand back and let BP fix it.

    A: Who is going to do it better?

    And why should BP get out of the way? Their existence is at stake. Keep in mind that BP doesn’t become less liable for what happens just because they get shoved aside to make way for a less effective government response. I don’t know about other people, but my view is that we shouldn’t effectively kill off businesses every time a large mistake is made and then run face-saving disaster theater.

  12. 1) This disaster did not come with a week’s advance warning.

    Neither did Katrina. Some things like the incoherence of the disaster response could be predicted (the Bush administration attempted to phase out FEMA’s role in disaster coordination without a proper followup organization). But Katrina wasn’t certain to hit New Orleans until a few days before. And the ineffectiveness of the evacuation was unprecedented. Most importantly, the levee break that did most of the flooding didn’t happen till near the end of the storm’s passage over New Orleans.

  13. BP is now saying the “top kill” procedure has failed, and they’re moving on to the next idea.

  14. I apologize for not reading every link and comment on this topic, but has anybody looked at the fact that BP was drilling in deep water because the politicians pushed them away from drilling closer in and this is the major contributing factor in the problem?

    In other words, they did it to us again and it’s not the eeviiil oil companies.

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