One Year Later
Next week marks the first anniversary of an environmental disaster — the explosion at BP’s Macondo oil well that killed 11 workers, sank the drilling rig, sent 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and threw thousands of people out of work. Yet Congress is behaving as if nothing at all happened, as if there were no lessons to draw from the richly documented chain of errors and regulatory shortcomings that contributed to the blowout.
Even worse, Congress is pushing in exactly the wrong direction. The House Natural Resources Committee passed three bills this week that would force the administration to accelerate the granting of drilling permits in the gulf and open huge new offshore areas to oil and gas exploration. The compromise 2011 budget makes major cuts in clean energy programs designed to lessen this country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
What makes this particularly discouraging is that, Congress aside, there has been a surprising amount of progress, thanks largely to the hard work of thousands of people and the extraordinary resilience of nature. More than 99 percent of the gulf has been reopened to fishing, jobs are returning, and the Interior Department has tightened oversight. Yet without Congress’s help progress will slow and many crucial tasks will remain undone.
Here is a one-year report card and a look ahead:
THE GULF After prematurely claiming victory last year, the Obama administration has since done exhaustive sampling across the gulf and concluded — along with many independent scientists — that the oil has now mostly evaporated, been captured or consumed by microbes. One thousand miles of soiled beaches have been reduced to less than 100. Gulf seafood is safe to eat.
Louisiana’s wetlands — vital fish nurseries — are soiled, and the full extent of the damage to the gulf’s ecosystem and its species, especially to fish larvae and the tiny organisms vital to the food chain, may not be known for years. More will be learned when the government issues its preliminary, legally mandated assessment next fall. Until then, and for years after, the watchword is vigilance: the herring population in Prince William Sound did not crash until three years after the Exxon Valdez spill.
RESTORATION The gulf had serious problems before the spill. One-third of Louisiana’s marshes, wetlands and barrier islands disappeared over the last century, victims of industrial development and levee-building along the Mississippi River. The administration correctly saw the spill as a chance to help underwrite a huge restoration effort, drawing on the $5 billion to $20 billion in civil and criminal penalties BP is likely to owe. To jump-start the effort, the White House may ask BP to make an advance payment on these penalties. But none of that can happen without Congress. Under current law, the fines would flow mostly to a fund to clean up future spills.
REGULATION The spill exposed grievous flaws in federal oversight, including a destructively cozy relationship between the oil industry and its regulators in the Interior Department. The department has since been reorganized and tough new standards applied to all aspects of the drilling process.
Industry and local politicians started pushing for new deep-water drilling permits the moment the drilling moratorium was lifted last fall. The Interior Department has been right to move cautiously. It has also insisted that new operators fully prepare for worst-case scenarios and have access to new equipment capable of stopping a runaway well. Such equipment — known as a capping stack — is now available, but has yet to be tested at great depth.
Here again Congress can be helpful. At a minimum, it should codify the Interior Department’s regulatory changes so that future administrations do not rescind them. It could go further by making the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the agency responsible for the health of America’s coastal waters — an equal partner in decisions about where oil companies can and cannot drill. Environmental concerns must play a primary role.
INDUSTRY A presidential commission concluded that the Macondo blowout reflected not just BP’s carelessness but an industrywide “culture of complacency.” Right after the spill, a half-dozen of the biggest companies banded together to develop new systems to contain a blowout. But so far the industry has turned a deaf ear to the commission’s modest but sensible suggestion that it establish an independent safety institute to audit industry operations, much as the nuclear industry did after the disaster at Three Mile Island.
BP will pay a high price for its negligence. But this is a rich and powerful industry long accustomed to getting its way.
If Congress chooses to keep enabling the oil barons, rather than demanding that they change their ways, the lessons of the gulf disaster will be wasted. And America’s waters will remain at risk.
From Pay-to-Play to Jail
New Yorkers, unfortunately, are all too accustomed to seeing state legislators sent off to jail for their misdeeds. When a court officer slipped handcuffs on Alan Hevesi, the former state comptroller, on Friday morning, however, Mr. Hevesi became the highest-ranking elected official in New York’s modern history to go to prison for corruption.
The former sole trustee of the state’s nearly $141 billion pension fund pleaded guilty to accepting more than $1 million in travel expenses, sham consulting fees and campaign contributions from people wanting to invest some of those billions. He was sentenced to one to four years in prison.
His conviction should be an urgent reminder to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature of how much they need to do to clean up Albany. Pay-to-play isn’t just a problem in the comptroller’s office, it is a problem throughout the entire political system. The state needs ethics reform, campaign finance reform and redistricting reform. It must restructure the state comptroller’s office.
No reform can protect against all forms of fraud, but New York is the only large state in the country that still lets one public official control such a huge pool of investments. What the comptroller’s office needs is an independent, financially savvy board of directors to approve the awarding of investment contracts — with the single goal of protecting and increasing state pension assets, invested for more than a million workers and retirees. New York’s lawmakers should also adopt a public financing system for campaigns, starting with the comptroller’s office.
Thomas DiNapoli, who took over as comptroller in 2006, has made important reforms, but the sole trustee still has too much power. As Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says: “Being a sole trustee gives more power than a good comptroller should want and more power than a corrupt comptroller should have.” Exactly.
Breaking Through on Trade
After two years of dithering, it is good to see the Obama administration championing freer trade. Last week, the United States and Colombia announced a deal that will improve, and we hope finally win passage of, a 2006 trade agreement signed during the Bush administration. The amended version will strengthen worker protections in Colombia while boosting American exports.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress must now overcome their parochial interests and approve the entire set of trade initiatives snagged on Capitol Hill. That includes an amended agreement with South Korea, first signed in 2007, and programs to grant preferential access to imports from Andean countries and to help American workers who lose their jobs because of competition with imported goods. Those lapsed in February.
The agreements with Colombia and South Korea would cement relations with key allies and slash tariffs on a range of American agricultural and industrial goods. The Andean preferences would help to combat the cocaine trade by creating jobs in other export industries. These deals (and another with Panama) have languished for years mainly because of Democrats’ — more to the point, their union backers’ — lack of enthusiasm for free trade.
President Obama seemed to have broken through on South Korea in December, after his aides renegotiated the agreement with Seoul to improve the terms for American carmakers. Then Republicans, who claim to champion trade, refused to pass the agreement or extend assistance for workers until the administration moved to gain approval of the Colombia deal.
Democrats have long opposed that agreement, arguing that Colombia’s labor laws are too weak and the government has not done enough to stop attacks against members of labor unions. And they refused to renew the Andean preferences unless the trade adjustment assistance was extended, too.
The new deal with Colombia should cut this Gordian knot. Bogota has committed to restore land to people displaced by conflict, increase state protection of union members and increase prison sentences for those convicted of killing them. It will change its criminal code to penalize with up to five years in prison anybody who interferes with workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively.
The administration also expects that Panama will soon satisfy President Obama’s conditions for moving forward on its 2007 trade agreement. Those include passing new laws to protect labor rights and agreeing to international standards to combat cross-border tax evasion.
Some Democrats may never be persuadable. Representative Sander Levin of Michigan and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio have made clear their opposition to the amended Colombia deal. But these agreements are good for the American economy and good for national security. Congress should waste no more time and approve them.
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