Obama's Address on Gulf Oil Falls Flat

Obama just gave his flattest speech ever in an address to the nation that was supposed to show us how tough he’s getting on oil companies. Instead he just tossed out a few military references, calling the disaster an “assault” and a “siege”, and referring to the oil slick as a “menacing cloud”. Then he repeated something BP had told him about how much oil they plan to capture by such and such time, and in a clear nod to BP’s legal team, he even used their catch-phrase about paying “legitimate claims”. What a chuckler that was, and obviously it will be fodder for Stewart and Colbert tomorrow.

As for what to expect going forward, Obama apologized to all those hurt by the 6-month drilling moratorium, but said we needed time to learn all the facts. (The House Energy Committee is actually doing a terrific job of this.) He advised that we need new technologies and precautions and standards, alongside better enforcement, in order to resume drilling, but the clear message to me was that we are doing our best to resume drilling. Damn the gusher wells, full speed ahead!

Obama did a pretty fair job explaining oil-resource degradation, announcing to the whole world that our oilfields are terribly depleted and explaining that it will continue to get more difficult for us to extract oil, but he countered this by saying that not meeting this challenge would be unacceptable and that discoveries “will someday lead to entire new industries”. It hard to imagine conveying less urgency than that, and the talk about how tough we are as a nation is sounding pretty thin at this point.

The speech was devoid of specifics except for things like how many National Guard troops have been deployed. He said that in order to accelerate the transition he would be open to ideas from either party, from which I gathered that any ideas independent of a major political affiliation are dead in the water.

Obama closed by saying that we needed faith and courage to meet the challenges we face, and that we should pray and remember that God is with us even during storms. Lovely sentiments, to be sure, but it seemed an odd time to deliver them. It was time to say that he would get us off this runaway train of corporate excesses, crack down on the power of energy multinationals, and re-empower communities to meet their energy needs with local, independent production. He missed that opportunity by a mile of deepwater.