Economist questions weighting of Obama commission investigating BP spill

Dear Editor:

The White House recently announced that our environment is recovering quickly from the effects of the oil spill.

Unfortunately, it will take a lot longer for the Gulf region to recover from the economic impact of the administration’s disastrous policies in response to the accident, especially with talk of increasing energy taxes on the horizon. An unsure or, in this case, hostile tax environment and the uncertainty it causes leads to decreased investment, decreased production, decreased supplies, decreased jobs … and increased costs.

After imposing a moratorium on deepwater drilling that will cost the Gulf states nearly 32,000 jobs, the administration has made matters worse by appointing a commission, charged with looking into the spill, that 1) is populated by smart people but not a single one with the background in drilling or expertise in the complex engineering that is required to extract oil from deepwater wells, 2) is populated with people who have a decidedly anti-fossil fuel bent, and 3) apparently feels no sense of urgency to get their job done quickly.

Their first meeting was not until mid-July. Importantly, this moratorium was imposed on an industry that has drilled 55,000 wells in the Gulf without a single major spill until the Horizon incident.

Imagine a situation where a brain surgeon makes a mistake during surgery. There were 55,000 of these surgeries successfully performed before this mistake. If you were a hospital administrator, wouldn’t you make it a priority to include people with experience in brain surgery on the panel investigating the incident? Wouldn’t you ask them to hurry with their decision because people are going to die while waiting for their decision?

The failure to include a single person on the panel who is an expert in deepwater drilling suggests that the commission’s main goal will be to provide political cover for the administration’s anti-drilling agenda.

If we want to understand what caused the spill and make sure it doesn’t happen again, we need a panel of experts, with a sense of urgency about their task. Every extra day taken is costing our country jobs and increasing our dependence on often-hostile foreigners for our energy.

Loren Scott,

LSU professor emeritus and president of Loren C. Scott & Associates