I was asked yesterday, “What’s the most constructive response to the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana? Is the Obama administration doing the right thing? Any advice or cautions?”
In response to the first question, first and foremost, the Obama administration must work with any and all parties that have capabilities in oil-disaster prevention and recovery in order to halt the leak and prevent further damage.
At the same time, Congress and the administration should constrain their natural political tendency to assign blame, set up hearings, and call people names. It may gain them political points with the extreme Left, but it will do nothing to establish what went wrong. Holding show-trial hearings now would be akin to holding a murder trial before the crime lab had even been called to the scene and the crime investigated. We don’t know what went wrong: whether the explosion and spill was due to human error, equipment failure, something unforeseeable, or a combination of all of the above. Until the cause has been established, it’s too early to attribute blame fairly. Once the immediate crisis has passed and the clean-up has begun, it will be time to establish a cause and then ensure that any correctable errors that contributed to this disaster do not happen again.
Most importantly, the administration should not allow this isolated incident, no matter how bad it appears at this time, to derail plans to begin new offshore oil exploration and production. Domestic offshore oil production improves our energy security, provides jobs, and is better for the environment than the alternative — increased oil imports via supertankers, which leak far more oil each year, in environmentally sensitive locations, than do offshore platforms and pipelines. I have written more on this here.