Six Months On: Hard Lessons From the BP Blow Out

We Americans expect our presidents to fix big problems. The BP oil disaster was too big to fix. 

Six months after the blow out, though, President Obama has grasped three important lessons and taken action on each. That's leadership too.

Lesson one: the Gulf of Mexico is a national treasure, and it needs to be treated like one.

That means, first and foremost, the 14 million Americans who call this region home need to be made whole.

That's very much a work in progress, but Obama has done several things right.

He spent time in the region, hearing firsthand from the people whose lives were turned upside down by the spill. He held BP accountable, securing a White House agreement for the oil giant to set aside a $20-billion escrow account to cover damages. He named Kenneth Feinberg, the arbitrator of the damages paid out to victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to oversee the resolution of claims. And he directed Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, to develop a comprehensive survey - produced in late September - of what it will take to restore the Gulf from the ravages of the oil spill and the longer-term consequences of decades of degradation from a variety of pressures.

Lesson two: the stakes are too high in the Gulf of Mexico to allow the deepwater drilling industry to police itself.

Obama lambasted the old Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency that failed badly in its oversight of BP's ill-fated Macondo well. In a May 27 press conference he assailed what he called "industry's cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship with government regulators," saying the result had been "little or no regulation at all."

He ordered the reorganization of the MMS, to separate out its often conflicting roles into the newly-formed Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

He named the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling to determine what caused the blow out and what must be done to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

And Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued a new drilling rule that goes a long way toward strengthening the safeguards we depend upon to reduce the risk of another Macondo-style disaster. The House passed legislation that would made similar safeguards law; now we need the Senate to pass a companion bill when it returns after November elections. 

Lesson three: we must reduce our reliance on oil and begin at last to move toward cleaner, safer more renewable sources of power and fuel.

Presidents going back to Richard Nixon have called on the country to reduce its reliance on oil. Doing so will make the country more secure, the economy stronger and our future healthier. Refusing to change, Obama understands, will take a growing toll on our country.

"We cannot consign our children to this future," he told the country in June in his first-ever address from the Oval Office.

Obama understands what change will require. He's led the call to promote the development of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. He successfully worked with House leaders to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation, which unfortunately stalled in the Senate. And he's pledged to continue to press for needed change after the new Congress convenes in January.

The administration's response to the spill has not been perfect. Information early on wasn't forthcoming; even now there are serious doubts as to whether its accurate and complete. The president was right to impose a moratorium on deepwater drilling; he should have kept it in place until new safeguards were fully drawn and implemented. And certainly, in hindsight, we wish the administration had straightened out the mess at MMS before this catastrophe occurred.

Not every big problem, though, can be solved, even by our presidents. Leadership sometimes means learning hard lessons, then acting on them for the good of us all. In the six months since the BP blow out, this president has both learned and led.

(For more on the oil spill, read the new NRDC book, In Deep Water, by NRDC Executive Director Peter Lehner and NRDC associate director of communications, Bob Deans.)