Gulf drilling moratorium overruled

What happened

A federal judge overturned the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf this week, challenging the government to produce a detailed rationale for idling 33 rigs and thousands of workers. The White House said it would issue a new, more narrowly focused moratorium, ensuring that the rigs remain stalled for now.

With the slick spreading beyond Pensacola, Fla., toward Panama City, government estimates of the total leakage to date range from 38 million to 108 million gallons, far eclipsing the 10.8-million-gallon spill of the Exxon Valdez. BP removed the well’s containment cap Wednesday after a robotic submarine collided with a vent, damaging it. As The Week went to press, BP was preparing to reinstall the cap, which had collected an estimated 700,000 gallons in the prior 24 hours. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said he hoped to more than double that “capture” rate by mid-July. After BP’s gaffe-prone CEO Tony Hayward prompted new outrage by taking time off to watch a British yacht race last weekend, the company assigned American managing director Bob Dudley to supervise cleanup operations and serve as its public face. “It is clear that Tony has made remarks that have upset people,” said BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.

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What the editorials said

The administration’s jobs-killing moratorium on other wells was purely political, said The Wall Street Journal, as Judge Martin Feldman made clear in a “remarkably pointed” rebuke. Saying that there was no sound scientific reason for the drilling ban, Feldman exposed this reckless policy for what it is—a political sop to environmentalists that is “compounding the spill’s damage to the people and economy of the Gulf.”

Maybe the moratorium can be shortened, said USA Today. But only if the oil companies can first prove that they can contain a deep-water spill “as effectively as they claimed when they got their drilling permits in the first place.” About the only thing BP has done right is push Hayward aside, said the Chicago Tribune. The guy who complained, “I’d like to have my life back,” while his company’s oil ruined the livelihoods of thousands of “small people,” reached a new low when he took refuge among the rich, boaty crowd in “the blue waters off the Isle of Wight.” What was he thinking?

What the columnists said

In addition to a $50 million public relations campaign, BP “has hired 27 more lobbyists, mostly former elected and appointed federal officials, to work its case on Capitol Hill,” said Noel L. Griese in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But it’s hard to see politics and PR defraying the damage to BP and the Gulf. The spill can’t be stopped until August, when relief wells intercept the blown-out well, allowing it to be cemented and capped. After that, the cleanup will “go on for decades.”

How ironic that BP is now the environmental movement’s chief villain, said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. Over the past decade, BP tried mightily to appeal to greens by adopting a new sunflower-like logo and the slogan, “Beyond Petroleum.” BP announced its support of cap and trade, and showered Obama’s campaign with twice as much in contributions as it gave to John McCain. Now as much as 60,000 barrels of petroleum a day are fouling the Gulf, “courtesy of the corporation that spent so much convincing people it was ‘beyond’ it.”

The damage will reach beyond the Gulf, said Allan Sloan in The Washington Post. After radiation leaked at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979, doing “minimal harm,” the country overreacted massively, shunning nuclear power for three decades and increasing our dependence on oil. But this time, the “alarmists” were right, said Joel Achenbach, also in the Post. In fact, the reality of this spill has often surpassed the worst-case scenarios. Some now think the well “has been so badly damaged that is has spawned multiple leaks from the seafloor, making containment impossible and a long-term solution much more complicated.” As awful as things have been, they could still get worse.