Obama, Salazar and Big Oil

Dear Friends,

How much real hope and change is there in the Obama Administration?  It turns out there is alot more talk than action and sometimes actions that disprove the talk.

The drilling of the well the blew out in the Gulf of Mexico that is causing the current environmental and economic disaster was approved under the Obama Administration without any environmental review.  Department of the Interior Secretary Salazar gave that well and many others a "categorical exclusion" from having to perform the environmental impact statement normally required by the National Environmental Policy Act.  Here is an article from the Washington Post about this issue.  I want to reiterate this approval without environmental review was granted not by President George W. Bush as you might have expected but by the Obama Administration.

The rationale for the exclusion is that big oil said that there was no real possibility of an environmental problem.  President Obama bought this argument hook, line and sinker.  Here is what he said on April 2, 2010,

I want to put out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.

You should read the scathing analysis at Firedoglake (here).  That article contains excerpts from an interview on Democracy Now that is a great summary of what President Obama should be doing, but isn't.  Here is part of that interview with Kieran Suckling, Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity:

Well, first off, I think that the President should announce a complete moratorium on all new offshore oil drilling. This three-week time-out is really too little, too late. And it’s very important to do that now because the president, under the urging of Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, has planned to open up new offshore oil drilling in Alaska, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and on the Atlantic coast. And that just needs to end. It’s not safe anywhere, anytime.Secondly, the president should immediately revoke existing oil permits and especially in Alaska. Shell Oil, this July, has- is going to start doing offshore oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea of Alaska. And if you think it’s difficult to clean up oil in the relatively warm, calm Gulf of Mexico, imagine trying to do this with icebergs and sea ice, twenty hours of darkness in the Arctic oceans. It just cannot be done. If this spill had happened in Alaska, its magnitude would have been ten times worse than has happened in the Gulf.
Then, thirdly, the President should start an initiation of an investigation of Ken Salazar and his role in allowing this to happen. Salazar has been a major proponent of the offshore oil drilling industry. He passed legislation as a senator in 2006 to open up the Gulf of Mexico in the first place to offshore oil drilling. He gets campaign contributions by British Petroleum. And then he walks into this agency he is supposed to reform, and instead of reforming it, pushes it to do even more offshore oil drilling. So Ken Salazar is part of the problem here, not the solution. He should not be doing the investigation of MMS. He should be under investigation for helping to cause this crisis.

Of course, no post about President Obama letting me down would be complete without a quick look at the role that money plays.  One of the things that candidate Obama was going to change in Washington was the role of campaign contributions, but ...  here is a story on Politico entitled "Obama biggest recipient of BP cash" which is mirrored by a story on CNN entitled "Obama was top recipient of BP-related dollars in 2008".  Both articles are worth reading.

So what happened to the change we can believe in?  It seems in many cases it is all words and no action.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal