The politics of disaster

Barack Obama has had a good spill so far. But his energy policy is now a mess

WHEN the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989 and dumped its oily cargo into Alaskan waters, it killed hordes of beautiful creatures and cost billions to clean up. The current spill in the Gulf of Mexico could prove even worse. A tanker can leak its load, but no more. A broken pipe connected to an oilfield may continue leaking until it is fixed. And since fixing it involves sending remote-controlled submarines a mile below the surface to tinker with mangled machinery in the dark, that could take a while. Small wonder that Barack Obama sounds so grave.
On April 20th an explosion crippled the Deepwater Horizon, an offshore oil rig. Eleven people are presumed dead. As The Economist went to press, a vast oil slick was drifting towards American beaches and oyster beds. Flying down to Louisiana on May 2nd, Mr Obama described the spill as “a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster”. He warned that it “could seriously damage the economy and the environment of our Gulf states and…jeopardise the livelihoods of thousands of Americans.” And he told television viewers that the federal government had “launched and co-ordinated an all-hands-on-deck, relentless response to this crisis from day one”.
He was mindful, no doubt, that his predecessor’s political fortunes took a plunge after another environmental disaster in the same region in 2005. The federal response to Hurricane Katrina was slow and ineffectual, and George Bush dithered before visiting the wrecked city of New Orleans. He was widely decried as incompetent, insensitive, or both. Some people see parallels: Mr Obama also took his time to head for the Gulf coast, and was conspicuously larking around the previous night, telling jokes at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. (My approval ratings may be sinking, he said, but they “are still very high in the country of my birth”.) Hostile pundits mutter that the spill is “Obama’s Katrina”.
The label has yet to catch on, however. For one thing, Mr Obama is plainly juggling multiple crises, from floods in Tennessee to a bomb in Times Square. The oil spill has not produced wrenching televised images of human suffering, as Katrina did. And Mr Obama has not yet made any obvious foul-ups. Addressing Gulf coast residents, he sounded calm but firm. “Let me be clear,” he said, “BP [the oil firm] is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill.”
So far, the spill has probably not altered many people’s minds about Mr Obama. That could change: no one knows how long the crisis will linger, or how bad the damage will be. But for now, the spill’s main political effect has been to pollute the debate about energy. Before the rig exploded, America was inching fitfully towards a coherent energy policy. Not a perfect one, and certainly not a moment too soon, but a better one than before, and better late than never. Before the spill, Mr Obama’s approach was to offer something for everyone. To please greens, he proposed subsidies for renewable energy and curbs on greenhouse gases. To stop consumers from revolting, he was prepared to phase in those curbs slowly. To placate conservatives, he promoted nuclear power and recently came out for more offshore oil-drilling. That last idea is now on hold.
Any sensible policy needs to recognise two facts. First, fossil fuels are warming the planet. Second, America cannot suddenly stop using them. Since many Republicans deny the first point and some Democrats underplay the second, getting a bill through Congress is hard; and it has just got a lot harder. The Democrats will need at least a few Republican votes in the Senate, since they now control only 59 votes, one short of the number needed to break a filibuster. That is unlikely to happen before the mid-term elections—Lindsay Graham, the keenest Republican on the idea, was working on a bill with two Democrats but walked out last month when Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, said that he had decided to tackle immigration first. Conceivably Senator Graham can be wooed back, possibly along with a couple of his colleagues. But the wooing will be a lot trickier if Democrats block new domestic drilling, as several propose. Bill Nelson, a Democratic senator from Florida, says that any energy bill allowing offshore drilling would be “dead on arrival”. Governors of coastal states are terrified, too. Charlie Crist of Florida and Arnold Schwarzenegger of California both withdrew their support for drilling this week.
Lessons to be learned
Disasters can be instructive. Both regulators and oil firms will learn useful lessons from the Deepwater Horizon fiasco, and safety will surely improve as a result. But it is easy to learn the wrong lessons, too. After the accident on Three Mile Island in 1979, Americans grew scared of nuclear power and stopped building new reactors, even though no one died in that accident. Had the nation not panicked, it would now have many more nuclear reactors, making the shift to a low-carbon economy significantly easier. Similarly today, panic is likely but unhelpful.
So long as Americans do not reduce their consumption of oil, refusing to drill at home means importing more of the stuff, often from places with looser environmental standards. The net effect is likely to be more pollution, not less. Nigeria, for example, has had a major oil spill every year since 1969, observes Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation, a think-tank. Putting a price on carbon would eventually spur the development of cleaner fuels, and persuade Americans to switch to them. But in the meantime, oil is both useful and precious. Extracting it domestically, with tougher safety rules, would bring a windfall to a Treasury that sorely needs one. When the current crisis is past, Mr Obama may remember this.