Too early to assess blame

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 17, 2010.

Too early to assess blame

The overriding question in the Gulf of Mexico right now is how can the daily spewing of 20,000 to 40,000 barrels of crude oil be stopped and, eventually, cleaned up. Inevitably, however, the question will be who is to blame for the disaster.

Parenthetically, given past history, it is likely that it will be decades before all the cases are heard and decided. The 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which spilled a total of 200,000 barrels of oil (which the Deepwater Horizon can leak in just 10 days), is still being litigated. In 2008, the Supreme Court sent a punitive damages award case back to the lower courts for further hearings.

On my website, in the month of June, I've been taking a poll asking my visitors exactly who they blame for the on-going disaster. The choices include BP, Halliburton, the majority and minority owners of the oil rig, and the government in any of three forms: the Minerals Management Service (in charge of off-shore oil rig regulation), the Obama Administration generally, or just The Government generally.

My site tends to attract a conservative audience (in 2009, 34 percent of my visitors self-reported as Republicans, only 13 percent as Democrats; 55 percent reported voting for John McCain, only 35 percent for Obama), so the results two weeks into the month are not shocking. Still, given the situation, I do find the numbers a little surprising.

Only 44 percent of respondents blame BP or one of the affiliated companies. 47 percent blame the government for the on-going disaster. 21 percent blame the Obama Administration specifically, even though the administration has, thus far, taken a very conservative approach and been relatively hands-off in terms of forcing the companies involved to do much of anything.

The approach makes some sense. An oil company should know best how to handle a spill at an oil rig — the oil company or at least the companies responsible for the component parts of the oil rig. Halliburton, for example, was contracted to do the final cementing of the oil well, and Cameron International is the supplier of the failed blow-out preventer. That these companies have failed to perform their basic duties is a condemnation of the industry in general.

When it comes to fixing a problem with one of these component parts, it should be the job of the company to fix them. This is not a liberal or conservative position — it is a common sense position. The fact the oil is important to the nation from a defense standpoint or from an economic standpoint is no excuse for not being able to control an oil spill, and not a reason to assume the spill is the government's fault.

I know my poll is hardly scientific. One visitor recently told me that because my poll does not allow for a write-in response, it is essentially "useless." I countered that Internet polls, mine included, are generally useless, because they are not controlled and they are self-selected.

But the sense I get from reading a few other polls is that the feeling is not isolated. In a USA Today/Yahoo poll released May 26, 75 percent thought BP was doing a poor job with the spill, but 53 percent thought the Obama administration was also doing a poor job.

As I've noted before, the President often gets blamed, or gets credit, for things that are not his doing. Regardless, the office of the presidency is a powerful and important one. What a president says matters. Obama is pushing BP and the industry from his bully pulpit, and that must continue.

The administration, in recent weeks, has gone on the offensive. This past weekend, the administration said they planned to order BP to establish a fund of an undetermined amount to help compensate victims of the spill. Earlier this week, the president visited affected states for the fourth time since the oil rig sank. The Energy Department has established a web site to consolidate all the data it can about the spill.

Is the administration doing all it can in the face of this disaster? Perhaps, perhaps not — that's a tough call at this point. It may only be in the calm of the post-disaster analysis that we can tell that for sure. For now, the priorities must be finally capping the leak, containing the already-lost oil, and protecting the fragile ecosystems of the Gulf coast.

There will be plenty of time, decades in fact, for blame.