The oil spill: Does it mean the end of new drilling?

Pensacola Beach charter captain Jim McMahon, like many in the conservative Florida Panhandle, once cheered Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill” chant. But that was before an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on April 20 and began spewing 5,000 barrels of crude a day, generating a massive spill that’s threatening to ravage the Gulf Coast’s lucrative fishing industry and fragile wetlands. McMahon now counts himself among drilling foes, said Melissa Nelson in the Associated Press. “People aren’t going to come to a beach,” he said, “if they have to step through tar balls.” President Obama also must be having second thoughts, said Bryan Walsh in Time.com. Just a few weeks ago, Obama announced that he was lifting a decades-old drilling ban off parts of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. But as the administration braces itself for “images of oiled birds and blackened shorelines,” it now says that there will be no new drilling until authorities figure out what caused the BP oil blowout.

This horrendous spill has exposed “the oiliness” of Obama’s embrace of offshore drilling, said Jacob Heilbrunn in Huffingtonpost.com. Figuring “he could triangulate with the best of them,” Obama hoped to win over some Republicans to his energy policy, which includes limits on carbon emissions. Now facing a disaster that could rival the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe, he’ll have “no choice but to retreat.” The political landscape has just been radically transformed, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Environmentalists have been on the defensive in recent years, in part because the gravest threat we face, greenhouse gases, is invisible. “Suddenly, environmental destruction is photogenic again,” and it will be harder for the Right to dismiss drilling opponents as “eco-Nazis.”

Actually, nothing has really changed, said Steve Hayward in National Review Online. “This oil spill isn’t going to make Americans quit consuming oil,” and if we don’t produce it ourselves, we’ll just import more. That increases “the overall risk of environmental harm,” since oil tankers are far more vulnerable to mishaps than are oil rigs. And much of the additional oil we’ll import will come from nations that are expanding their own offshore drilling. “Think Angola is likely to inspect its offshore oil platforms as often as we will?” Ironically, “Washington’s aversion to drilling closer to shore has pushed the industry into deeper, more difficult waters,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. BP’s gushing well is 5,000 feet down, which has greatly complicated efforts to contain it.

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As those efforts continue, the question becomes: Why did this accident happen? said William Galston in The New Republic. During the Bush administration, the agency responsible for overseeing offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, was exposed as “a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest,” with regulators routinely accepting gifts from oil and gas companies. That could explain why the BP rig lacked a remote-control shut-off switch; in 2003, lax regulators caved to industry lobbying against a proposal to make the $500,000 device mandatory. So much for the idea that government is the enemy, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. Suddenly, conservative Republicans whose states are in the path of the widening oil slick, such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, are now clamoring for Washington to rescue the affected communities with cleanup help, emergency supplies, and every possible resource. “Through oil-fouled water, big government looks better and better.”