Environmental Concerns and Disaster in the Gulf

During his first weeks in office, Obama had pledged a “new era of global cooperation on climate change.” Nearly everyone assumed that he intended to push for ratification of the 1997 agreement, signed by more than 130 nations at Kyoto, Japan, to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other atmospheric pollutants. The Senate had opposed the Kyoto accords because developing nations—including

In 2010 protesters in Washington DC demanded that the Obama administration support liberalized immigration policies.

China, the worst air polluter in the world—were exempted from its costly provisions. President Clinton never submitted the treaty for ratification. In 2001, President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from subsequent negotiations. But in 2006 the mayors of over 200 U. S. cities, struggling with smog and air pollution, signed a Climate Protection Agreement pledging to meet the Kyoto targets for greenhouse gas reductions by 2012. But if Obama intended to move in the direction of the Kyoto agreements, the economic crisis of 2008-2009 changed his mind. With the nation’s economy in recession, Obama thought it unwise to impose new environmental restrictions. In late 2009 he quietly withdrew support for an international arrangement on atmospheric pollutants.

By then, political economic realities had already caused Obama to backtrack on another environmental issue. Originally an opponent of oil drilling off the Atlantic coast, he changed his position during the 2008 presidential campaign: The nation needed cheap oil and gasoline (see introduction, Chapter 30, pp. 796-797). On April 21, 2010, disaster struck in the Gulf of Mexico. Workers aboard a British Petroleum (BP) oil platform forty-one miles off the coast of Louisiana were drilling for oil at a depth of

5,000 feet. This was not exceptional; for over a decade, global oil companies had been sinking hundreds of wells into the Gulf of Mexico, which generated one-fourth of all oil produced in the United States. But that day, a drill hit a pocket of methane gas under high pressure; it shot upward through the

A brown pelican surveys the ecological damage caused by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Drilling pipe and exploded, blasting eleven workers from the platform and engulfing it in flames. (The bodies of the workers were not found.) Oil gushed from the damaged pipe, an upsetting image captured by underwater cameras and transmitted by streaming video on the Web. The world watched in horror as BP’s repeated attempts to cap the well failed; weeks passed as hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf, fouling marshes and beaches, killing fish, birds, and aquatic life. Obama called it the “worst environmental disaster America has faced.”

Pressure built on him to “do something.” Exactly what was unclear. “He can’t put on scuba gear and go down and stop this well,” observed New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican. Obama forced BP to set aside $20 billion to cover damage claims and sacked the director of the Minerals Management Service for failing to adequately inspect the off-shore platforms. He also declared a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling, pending the inspection of existing platforms.

But this provoked howls of protest. Opponents of the moratorium included both of Louisiana’s senators and its governor, Bobby Jindal, who noted that the oil industry accounted for 17 percent of Louisiana’s jobs and much of the state’s revenue. “The last thing we need is to enact public policies that will certainly destroy thousands of existing jobs,” Jindal added. Such opposition underscored the dilemma confronting a nation whose thirst for cheap oil was unquenchable. The exhaustion of oil reserves beneath the earth’s landmass necessitated offshore drilling; but the environmental risks of deep-sea drilling were all too apparent.

Obama resurrected his campaign goal of promoting alternative sources of energy, such as solar and wind power. But such solutions seemed to lie far in the future. Whether the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would reinvigorate the environmental movement remained to be seen.