Apollo 13, the Gulf Oil Spill, and BP

The Obama administrations actions following the Golf oil rig explosion has been one of finger pointing and blame shifting. Almost all of the efforts to remedy the situation have been taken by private industry and local government officials. In the mode of “the beatings will continue until morale improves” the Obama team has harassed, not aided the efforts of those who have been on the front lines.

Harrison Schmidt makes the point dramatically:

Nothing in the government’s response to the blowout explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by NASA and its mission control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.

Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers worked on the assumption that “failure was not an option.” In contrast, President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of the Gulf oil spill situation “from day one” assumed that failure is an option and, indeed, may want BP to fail for their own ideological reasons. Whatever their motives, the president and his cabinet officers, without any experience in real-world management of anything major, much less a crisis, have no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.

It has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf state officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful, and hesitant. Rather than allowing BP to stay focused only on solving the problems of the spill, Attorney General Holder now has launched a civil and criminal investigation! And let’s then follow with sending an unsupported bill to BP for $69 billion! For good measure, lets also stop offshore oil exploration by the United States. How misguided (or ignorant and devious) can our president be!

Following the path that the MFM have created for him, Obama is focusing his energies on showing emotion since he’s been criticized by the same media, not for being a clueless idiot, but for not “feeling the pain” of the people on the Gulf coast. As if emotion will somehow make their situation any better or “plug the damn hole.”

Here's the brutal truth:

If America and freedom are to survive indefinitely, the next Congress must begin to restore sanity and intelligence to national energy policy. Until economically competitive alternatives become fully feasible, fossil fuels will remain the mainstay of our economy. Our dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil has become one of our greatest national security vulnerabilities that only domestic production can solve in the next 50 years.