I’m not a big critic of BP. It’s not that I like BP or hold them harmless. It sounds like the oil giant did some really bad things, cut corners, whatever. It’s my assumption that BP did what ALL oil companies do; no more, no less.
This kind of disaster could have been caused by any of them. It’s the system that’s broken. Like the financial crisis we are still living through, the industry was not regulated well. There was not enough regulation; the regulation there is was not enforced well enough.
So what do we do?
On Meet the Press this morning Tom Friedman said, ‘What’s really difficult about this moment and why it requires much smarter leadership is we need to cut some taxes right now. And raise some taxes.” Paul Gigot said the answer to the crisis in the gulf is a $3 or $4 tax on gasoline. I agree with both.
In a column this week on Obama and the oil spill, Tom Friedman proposed one tax that’s needed right now — a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax:”
[T]he gulf oil spill is not Obama’s Katrina. It’s his 9/11 — and it is disappointing to see him making the same mistake George W. Bush made with his 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare seismic events that create the possibility to energize the country to do something really important and lasting that is too hard to do in normal times.
President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America. I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change. It was the Texas oilman’s Nixon-to-China moment — and Bush blew it.
Had we done that on the morning of 9/12 — when gasoline averaged $1.66 a gallon — the majority of Americans would have signed on. They wanted to do something to strengthen the country they love. Instead, Bush told a few of us to go to war and the rest of us to go shopping. So today, gasoline costs twice as much at the pump, with most of that increase going to countries hostile to our values, while China is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in wind, solar, electric cars and high-speed rail. Heck of a job.
The idea got no traction in the blogs I read. Still, I’m for it. Making BP pay for all of it lets us of the hook. We want oil, we want that risk, we should pay for it.
The video above is an excerpt from an excellent 60 Minutes report on the Deepwater Horizon blowout (part 1 and part 2). It shows what still pictures can hardly capture, the results of the oil spill close up; “mats of thick floating oil.” There are “vast plumes of oil up to ten miles long under the surface” of the gulf heading for our shores. Hating BP for it solves nothing.
You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.