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Brilliant. From The Daily Show:
"Fox &Friends" deems it inappropriate for the Obama administration to mention Bush when talking about the wars, economy or oil spill.
...So everything bad that happened during the Bush administration, was Bill Clinton's fault and now, everything bad during the Obama administration, is Bill Clinton's fault.
Dick Cheney hasn't made much time for television appearances lately. But in the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon unleashed a torrent of oil on the Gulf of Mexico, his name has been creeping back into the press. "The truth is that right now we have precisely the regulatory system that the Bush-Cheney administration wanted: full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbyists filling the very agencies that are supposed to be overseeing the industry," liberal commentator Arianna Huffington said on ABC's This Week last Sunday. Cheney's daughter, Liz, was on hand to defend her father. "Arianna, I don't know what planet you live on," she shot back. "What you are saying has no relationship to the truth, no relationship to the facts."
The reality is a lot more complicated than that. Many of the policy and regulatory failures that laid the groundwork for the BP catastrophe can be traced back to the Bush-Cheney era. But so far, this question has received relatively little attention—mostly because the task force that developed the former administration's energy policy operated in extreme secrecy. Did the task force's decisions play a role in the BP spill? And could the Gulf disaster finally provoke new scrutiny of the task force's clandestine workings?
Cheney's secret energy task force.
The energy task force was created days after onetime oilman George W. Bush took office in 2001, and was headed by Cheney, a former CEO at Halliburton, one of the world's largest providers of oilfield products and services. For months, the task force solicited input on US energy policy. On May 16, 2001, the group issued its final report, which was submitted to Congress in June. But the participants and details of the discussions were kept tightly under wraps.
The open-government group Judicial Watch tried to pry details of the task force's deliberations from the administration in June, arguing that the sessions qualified as public information under the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the open-meetings law. The US General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, also sought information on which industry executives and lobbyists had attended the gatherings.
But in the first of many clashes over presidential secrecy, the White House rejected those requests, arguing that it was entitled to conduct the meetings behind closed doors thanks to executive privilege. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club sued, but the Supreme Court ultimately sided with the administration. Though some information has trickled out in the years since, the vast majority of the task force's deliberations remain hidden from the public eye.
The task force position of deregulation of offshore drilling.
Here's what we know about the task force and offshore drilling. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, was able to obtain 13,500 pages of heavily redacted documents that gave a glimpse into the role industry leaders played in shaping the administration's policies (NRDC also got a list of the documents (PDF) that the administration refused to turn over). In July 2007, the Washington Post got a list of the roughly 300 groups and individuals who met with task force staffers and, in some cases, Cheney himself.
BP officials were among those who "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the administration, though when that fact came to light, the company refused to comment on those meetings. We still don't know what specific policy areas BP execs weighed in on. Perhaps it's little surprise that BP recently hired Cheney's former press secretary, a public defender of the secret task force, to help the company with crisis communication after the spill.
But we do have a few more details about other oil industry players in the talks. Chevron's CEO contributed a detailed list(PDF) of ways in which the government could "eliminate federal barriers to increased energy supplies"—many of which were incorporated in the task force's final report. This included recommendations to ease federal permitting rules for energy development and a request that the administration support opening up new areas of the eastern Gulf of Mexico for offshore oil and gas development. Doing so, wrote Chevron CEO David O'Reilly, would "demonstrate a commitment to reject unjustified opposition to new energy leasing and development."
The American Petroleum Institute offered its own long list of suggestions for energy policy. A March 20, 2001, email from API to an official at the Energy Department included a draft executive order calling for all federal agencies to issue a detailed statement on any regulatory action that "adversely affects energy supply, distribution or use." It was nearly identical to the order Bush issued just two months later.
The connection between the task force and the Energy Policy and its effect.
Many of the recommendations from the task force report were adopted in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. That legislation provided $6 billion in subsidies for oil and gas development. Royalty payments for oil and gas development were waived in several regions of the US. Some companies were allowed to pay royalties with oil, rather than money—a less transparent system that was more vulnerable to abuse. The bill also provided $1.5 billion in direct payments to companies to incentivize drilling in deepwater wells, and curtailed the power of states to oversee oil and gas exploration off their coasts under the Coastal Zone Management Act.
In addition, the bill weakened environmental protections for offshore drilling, making it easier to exclude a broad range of exploration and drilling activities from analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act. This has been cited as the reason that the Deepwater Horizon site was not subjected to a thorough environmental analysis.
The task force's final report also presented a rosy picture of the offshore drilling industry. Newer oil and gas drilling methods, it said, "practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms" and "enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources." The report advocated lifting the moratorium on portions of the outer continental shelf, noting that "concerns over the potential impacts of oil spills have been a major factor behind imposition of the OCS moratoria." Bush lifted the executive moratorium in 2008, and the Democratic-controlled Congress allowed its own moratorium to expire.
Unanswered questions.
But there's a lot we still don't know. The task force recommendations included scaling back regulations and oversight of offshore drilling while expanding incentive programs and access to resources, many of which would come to pass in future legislation. But how much the task force may have guided decisions at federal agencies—in particular the notoriously lax Minerals Management Service (MMS)—is unclear. The administration's directives across the agencies actively discouraged any regulations or oversight that might hinder development of resources.
Among the many questions is what role the task force may have played in a 2003 decision by the MMS not to require offshore rigs to install an acoustic shut-off switch, a remote-controlled backup system that seals off an underwater well even if the rig above is destroyed. Countries like Norway and Brazil require this precaution, and MMS considered doing the same. But oil companies complained that the $500,000 devices were too expensive and, they argued, ineffective. Ultimately, MMS made the switches optional. The Deepwater Horizon was not outfitted with such a device, which could have prevented the spill. Other concerns include a failure to implement new cementing policies or act on known concerns about key components on drilling rigs.
Investigations without subpoena power.
The Department of Justice has launched criminal and civil investigations into the disaster, while a presidential commission is looking into both the spill and offshore drilling policy in general. That commission currently lacks subpoena power, though there's an effort underway in Congress to grant the commission that power. Numerous congressional committees have also launched probes of the spill. A congressional aide working for one of those committees indicated that there has been some discussion of revisiting the task force in those investigations, though no concrete steps to do so have been taken.
Open government advocates say this might be the appropriate time to push for more information about his task force. Mandy Smithberger, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, says that it's "definitely a ripe time" to find out more about what went on in the meetings. "I don't think you can understand how we got to where we are without looking back," she says.
"When you have a disaster of this magnitude, it raises the question, if in this whole secretive process, what was discussed, how much did the Bush administration ignore, how much did they allow the oil and gas industry to basically do what they wanted," says AnneWeismann, chief counsel at Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington. "Secrecy is so pernicious that it can continue to damage even when the administration is not in power."
Secrecy, deregulation, oil subsidies and a lack of accountability are just a few of the problems that have stemmed from the Bush-Cheney era energy policy. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now spreading and effecting the ecosystems across vast areas. So to has the energy policies of the previous administration infiltrated and caused loopholes and unbridled greed in the power play of oil and money.
BP is using federal agencies to shield itself from public accountability and is actually disappearing oiled wildlife. READ MOREBP Oil Disaster Stalls Climate Bill
You’d think that after a seemingly unstoppable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (official estimates are up to 50,000 barrels a day, as of yesterday) and the hottest spring on record (hello, climate change!), U.S. citizens and elected representatives would recognize that our country’s thirst for resources has consequences. READ MOREBP's 8 Dumbest Mistakes
It is now clear that the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill was eminently preventable. And even since the April 20 rig fire, poor choices by BP have worsened an already dire situation.
READ MORE
The reason disasters like this happen is due to a lack of understanding that, though we may be at the top of the food chain, we are not separate from it. READ MORE
What exactly is a "junk shot?" How about "top kill" or an "undersea plume?" The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is introducing the world to all sorts of fascinating words and phrases from the world of Big Oil. Some of them can be a bit confusing, so as a public service to NaturalNews readers, I've published a short dictionary that provides the real meaning behind many of these new terms.
"Top Kill" - A technique used to kill everything on the TOP of the ocean using chemical dispersants that cause the dead animal bodies to sink to the BOTTOM of the ocean so they can't be caught on camera.
"Top Hat" - What BP executives will all be wearing at the huge banquet they will soon be holding to celebrate how they pulled off the environmental crime of the century without even a slap on the wrist (thanks to Big Government complicity).
"Blowout Preventer" - BP's public relations person who lies to the press to prevent a P.R. blowout from occurring. A blowout preventer preventer is any member of the press who asks tough questions.
"Junk Shot" - An effort to thrust shredded tires, golf balls and other trash into the hole to stop the oil flow. This is the oil industry's attempt to try to make the Gulf of Mexico look like the streets of Mexico City by filling it with trash.
"Chemical Dispersant" - A highly toxic chemical substance being pumped into the Gulf of Mexico by the hundreds of thousands of gallons in an effort to kill so much marine life that the toxicity of the oil itself seems small by comparison.
"Undersea Plume" - Rhymes with "doom." A term used to confuse mainstream news viewers who would be disturbed by the more accurate term, "Undersea VOLCANO of oil."
"Live Feed" - What BP calls a video loop which repeats a few choice frames over and over again and morphs them to create the illusion that it's actually a live video. The effect is further enhanced by adding a clock that counts off the seconds in real time in the lower right-hand corner. The public is now utterly hypnotized by these video loops, much like house cats watching ceiling fans.
"Mud" - A code word for crude oil. This is being repeated on the TV news when newscasters explain that the live video feed showing crude oil bursting out of the ocean floor is mostly just "mud." They actually mean oil. Mud, after all, does not explode from the ocean floor in a volcanic burst.
"According to plan" - A British Petroleum euphemism for "all f**ked up." As in, "The top kill procedure is going according to plan." The cleanup is going according to plan, too, it seems. As long as BP is in charge, everything is going according to plan. How dare you suggest they have no clue what they're doing...
"Barrel of oil" - An imaginary unit of oil volume that can be morphed into whatever size BP wishes it to be. At investors' meetings, the number of barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico magically becomes very large, but during oil spills, the number magically shrinks to appear much smaller.
"Cleanup workers" - Temporary workers hired by BP to comb the beaches in front of news cameras to make it appear like something useful is happening. BP has now promised to triple the number of active cleanup workers to nine.
"You will not be left behind" - A phrase uttered by President Obama, who, immediately after saying it, left everybody behind and took all of BPs beach cleaning crews with him, too. Obama has now returned to his golf game, where he claims to be working on the oil spill problem by aiming his golf balls in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico and hoping they will land in the gaping hole at the bottom of the ocean, thereby making them "junk shot."
Relief Wells: These will relieve the pocket books of BP.
Okay, everything above is just satire, but in reality this Gulf spill is serious business. Although we try to poke fun at the mistakes that were made in causing this to happen, the truth is that this situation is no laughing matter.
According to Pozzi, that mishap, kept under wraps for close to two decades and first reported by Esquire, dumped nearly 800 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf, which would make it more than 70 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.What's the problem? BP oil executives are ignoring this remedy.
But remarkably, by employing a fleet of empty supertankers to suck crude off the water's surface, Pozzi's team was not only able to clean up the spill, but also salvage 85 percent of the oil, he says.
"We took [the oil] out of the water so it would save the environment off the Arabian Gulf, and then we put it into tanks until we could figure out how to clean it," he told AOL News.
While BP, the oil giant at the center of the recent accident, works to stanch the leak from the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig, Pozzi insists the company should be following his lead.
Watch a compilation prepared by ThinkProgress:
On Thursday, May 27, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) responded to the myth that this catastrophe was unprecedented and thus unforeseeable:
Every time we have a catastrophic event like this involving British Petroleum or other parts of the oil and gas industry, we’re told that this is an unpredictable cascade of unforeseeable errors, that this is unprecedented, that nobody could have foreseen this. This is sort of like the bankers on Wall Street. Nobody could have foreseen the risks that they engineered themselves, so nobody’s responsible. I don’t believe this was some “black swan” or “perfect storm” event. There wasn’t something that could not have been foreseen. And I don’t think this is something you can promise will never happen again.
