Besides the funny papers, one of my favorite Sunday morning treats is skimming the Commentary section of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
It is filled with plenty of amusing material, such as the usual local boosterism nonsense from the publisher, why we should ignore anything coming from the Congressional Budget Office and why we should beware Democrat Barack Obama cozying up to Communist China. It was Republican Richard M. Nixon who made the breakthrough to Beijing years ago, but I gather that little fact is too deep for the RTD’s editorial staff.
Imagine my smile when I saw a piece by Michael Thompson, head of a right-wing, libertarian outfit made up of lobbyists and think tankers grandly called the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. Its annual reports feature TJ statues is various heroic and triumphant poses. It also owns the old Bacons Rebellion e-zine, which is too bad, because it used to be a pretty good publication.
Thompson bemoans the fact that Obama has restricted oil lease sales off the East Coast for about six years. He says that anytime we try to muscle up and create jobs, Bad Old Washington and untrustworthy Obama “make sure we fight these battles with one arm tied behind our back.” Thompson also assumes that the offshore area is particularly “Virginian” which presumably means that much of the revenue from any oil (still unfound) would go to Virginia and any oil spill disaster miles offshore would affect only Virginia.
The column is strange both in its content and its timing. We’re still not that far away from the worst environmental disaster in the U.S, namely, the BP/Deepwater Horizon, also known as the Macondo, blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.
Just as I was reading Thomson’s puff piece, in which he predictably buries Deepwater on the newspaper jump page, I was also reading “In Too Deep. BP and the Drilling Race That Took It Down.” This book by Bloomberg Press takes a hard look at the managerial culture at BP and the sloppy regulatory climate in the U.S. that led to Macondo.
The authors are Alison Fitzgerald and Stanley Reed, both Bloomberg reporters. I can vouch for Stanley. He and I worked at BusinessWeek in the late 1980s and 1990s. Reed knows oil and the Middle Eastern thoroughly. He worked in Cairo for years, speaks fluent Arabic and later, as BW’s London Bureau Chief, covered BP extensively along with the global oil industry.
In a nutshell, the authors note how BP under former chief executive John Browne went through a feverish effort to expand reserves and boost BP from its second tier status into a true behemoth. Simultaneously, Browne was chopping operational expenses left and right while all the while seeking new elephant oil fields that often were in dangerous and tricky deep water.
These conflicting goals, and Browne’s over attention on the upstream (exploration and acquisition) side of the business, were reasons why BP’s Bay City, Texas refinery, one of the largest in the U.S, blew up in 2005 with fatal results.
Macondo, of course, signalled any number of flaws, from bad technology at the ocean floor about a mile down to too much corporate cost cutting to too much attention paid to individual worker safety while forgetting factors that lead to a catastrophic system failure.
The federal Minerals Management Service which supposedly oversaw offshore drilling was in reality, a hot bed (literally) of cronyism. During the George W. Bush administration, the MMS saw its role as expediting oil production. Its workers accepted oil company bribes and regulators and oil officials were, literally, in bed with each other.
In his “Drill Baby Drill” screed, Thompson mentions none of these facts. He says that the oil industry has “come together to build a $1 billion spill response system that could be mobilized within 24 hours of an offshore spill.”
Really? Does he have details about this? Skimmers that were supposed to respond quickly to the BP spill failed miserably. A giant tanker fitted as a skimmer took weeks to get onsite and then didn’t work. Would Thompson have us believe that in the nine or so months since Deepwater Horizon was finally capped that the oil industry was come up with a wonderful new clean-up system? Even better, this gizmo could be moved miraculously from the Gulf, where it would likely be based, to the Mid-Atlantic coast within 24 hours?
This is the problem with views such as those of the “Thomas Jefferson” lobbying outfit and some newspapers. They put out a bunch of superficial views while ignoring key points — in effect, lying. It’s too bad that Thompson’s e-zine shares the same name as this blog.
Peter Galuszka
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