Our writers here at American Daughter have been critical of Obama’s response to the oil disaster. Reader MaryAnne reasonably asks:

Could you please detail exactly what you think Obama should personally do about BP’s complete disregard for the safety of its workers and the destruction of Gulf Coast beaches? I have gone to the trouble of reading some of your past posts and have yet to see you offer one workable solution to any of the problems you address.

I haven’t done this until now, because it doesn’t make any difference what I would have done. The mission of our news magazine is to inform our readers of the capabilities and shortcomings of public figures, so they can make informed decisions about their political activism, financial support, and voting. But such a discussion may offer a useful baseline for comparison, and it certainly is something that I have given a lot of thought. Here’s what I would do if I were president:

1. If I were president, I would immediately assume personal executive responsibility for the response to one of the greatest environmental disasters to face our planet, that happened under United States jurisdiction. I would NEVER abdicate that authority to any profit-motivated corporation. I would use every legal means to force that corporation to finance the clean-up, but I would manage the clean-up myself, by delegating tasks to my government officials.
    
2. The assessment of “guilt, fault, and blame” is only useful if it prevents future mistakes based on “lessons learned.” And technological mistakes usually result from policy driven by wishful thinking rather than scientific data. In this respect, the Deepwater Horizon disaster is almost an exact reprise of the Challenger disaster, in which decision makers ignored the warnings of scientific personnel about the O-ring’s potential failure at freezing temperatures.

   If I were president, I would immediately make it perfectly clear and well understood by the public that the deepwater drilling was promoted during the Clinton administration (the Outer Continental Shelf Deepwater Royalty Relief Act of 1995) without due consideration of disaster contingencies. Our government gave British Petroleum a “categorical exclusion” for the well during the Obama administration. I would do this, not to indulge in partisan finger-pointing at Democrats, but to prevent the root administrative causes and lax safety standards of our own government agencies from being obscured by Democrat partisans throwing up smoke-screens about Dick Cheney’s relationships with the oil industry.
    

3. Within hours of the first phone call notifying the White House of the rig explosion, I would have assembled a crisis team, booked a hotel on the Gulf Coast, and taken the whole team there on location to assume personal positive control of the situation. Within the first twenty-four hours I would have convened an emergency meeting with the governors of the Gulf States. For the entire duration of the crisis, I would not have played one hour of golf, nor done anything else but be the country’s executive.

   To be president of the United States is an honor, and it is an executive position, a management position, and a good executive “rests in action.” A qualified executive does not need the personal recreation of sports or parties to “recharge his batteries.” He draws his strength and energy from his passion for the job, from the personal satisfaction of giving his hands and heart to the cause and knowing he has done his best.
    

4. Upon first being notified of the rig explosion, I would have placed an emergency call to Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I would have decreed, under the executive powers, that she bypass the normal protocols for data calculation and delivery, assemble her best scientists immediately (waking them up if necessary) and get back to me within eighteen hours with her best estimate of the latitude/longitude coordinates of the point above the blown hole where the center of the oil “volcano” was most likely to first breach the ocean surface.

   I would have asked the Gulf State governors to mobilize their National Guards to protect the beaches and wetlands, and asked Congress for emergency funding for same. I would have tasked the Secretary of the Navy to identify some Naval assets in the Gulf for assisting oil containment operations. I would have instructed the Coast Guard to immediately mobilize a fleet of boats on standby, awaiting the NOAA calculations. As soon as the NOAA coordinates were received, I would have had the Coast Guard deploy five widely spaced concentric rings of oil booms around the NOAA-calculated surface point. The containment booms would have been in place within two days, tops. (Those measures would impede, but not prevent, the spread of oil. They would buy time for dredging and bioremediation.)
    

5. I would have ordered dredging to begin immediately to create sand reefs connecting the barrier islands offshore from sensitive wetlands and marshes, to protect the pelican rookeries and sea turtle hatching grounds from contamination. As executive, I would have taken the responsibility for my decision and not hidden behind the requirement for an Environmental Protection Agency impact study that could take months or years.
    
6. Under the authority of the Executive Powers, I would have forbidden British Petroleum or any other agency from using the toxic chemical dispersant Corexit 9500. I would have personally taken the responsibility for ordering the bioremediation of oil-eating microbes, stored in large enough quantities in Texas warehouses.
    
7. With respect to the potential for environmentally friendly solutions, I would have immediately tasked Cornell University’s Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering to recommend plant-based bioremediation. I would have used discretionary grant money for a crash program aimed at the specifics of the Gulf situation.

   I would also have used discretionary grant money to task Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences to do a systems analysis of the oil spill response, and to quantify risk factors associated with various strategies — chemical dispersant, burn-off, booms, reefs, skimmers, bioremediation via plants or microbes. (I have no doubt that the combination of chemical dispersant and burn-off currently being implemented is the worst possible choice with respect to long-term environmental considerations. It has short-term cosmetic appeal, in that it masks the full dimensions of the disaster, but we will pay a long term price worse than that for DDT.)
    

8. Under the authority of the Executive Powers, I would have suspended the Jones Act, or Merchant Marine Act of 1920, and accepted help from the foreign governments that offered it on DAY ONE — Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

   The fact that Obama deferred his leadership role to British Petroleum is most egregious here:

   Four weeks after the nation’s worst environmental disaster, the Obama administration saw no need to accept offers of state-of-the-art skimmers, miles of boom or technical assistance from nations around the globe with experience fighting oil spills.

   “We’ll let BP decide on what expertise they do need,” State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid told reporters on May 19….

9. Under the authority of the Executive Powers, I would have relaxed the oil-to-water ratios required for returning processed ocean water to the Gulf, thereby permitting the immediate deployment of the South Korean-built, Taiwanese-owned, Liberian-flagged ship “A Whale” for oil-skimming in the Gulf. The Obama administration allowed it to languish tied up to the docks in Norfolk, Virginia for weeks.
    
10. If I were president, I would never have limited access to the oil spill damage by the press or by photographers, except to the extent required for their safety. I would have valued our mutual stewardship of our natural resources above any concerns for my political reputation. I do not believe that the American public is a mindless herd of sheep whose perceptions need to be manipulated. I do believe that they are a resourceful and creative force that should be kept FULLY INFORMED and engaged in the solution to this truly earth-changing disaster.
     
11. If I were president, I would never have used phrases like “boot on the neck” or “kick ass.” The empty rhetoric and political grandstanding characteristic of this administration does nothing to solve the problem, and it does nothing to reassure the public that a responsible leader with a thoughtfully reasoned plan is in charge. It is the language of a guttersnipe, not a statesman.
     
12. As for the other part of MaryAnne’s question, what “Obama should personally do about BP’s complete disregard for the safety of its workers,” the remedy, if any, is the province of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration. The president can make clear to Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor, and to David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, his deep personal concern about this matter, and ask them for a study and special report with recommendations. But that is “locking the barn door after the horse is stolen.” It would, however, have serious value with respect to the remaining nearly 4,000 active oil and gas platforms in the Gulf.

And that’s just the first couple of days….

References:

American Daughter — The Executive Orders

LENTA — How to remove oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico? (translated from the Russian)

We are just beginning to see the effects of the massive oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. But after a few weeks of press coverage, muted by restrictions on journalists from the Obama administration in collusion with British Petroleum, the focus of the press will turn elsewhere. The story will be “old news” just as the real ecological devastation is revealed. A resident of Panama City sent pictures with this note:

:By the end of viewing these photos I felt like I was at a funeral, and the millions of barrels of oil have only just begun to kill. If you have access to any environmental people, government and elected officials, please send them these pictures; I don’t think they know or understand. Louisiana’s St Bernard Parish President went out into the marsh in an air boat and killed the engine. He said there was dead silence — not even a mosquito!

Most importantly, please, please pray for a miracle; we need a miracle!

This is so important for the world to see. This will affect not only us, but the entire United States, and as far as I see it, the World. Please, take the time to share these pictures with everyone you know. It’s our responsibility as Americans to let EVERYONE know of the severity of this disaster and to realize the long term affects.

These are some of the saddest pictures I have ever seen. Please share them so that more people are aware of the devastation. Out of sight … out of mind. Also, the more people who witness this … the more possible change will happen.

The pictures are posted here — Ripple effects of the BP oil spill.

Dead shorebird

Dead barnacles

Dead jellyfish

Dead hermit crab

Dying hermit crabs

Dying pelican

Dying shorebird

Dead shorebird

Dead vegetation

Dead fish

This could be the worst ecological disaster in earth’s history, according to one report. Many experts believe the Obama administration has deliberately misrepresented the nature of the oil reserves that are leaking.

According to Swedish researcher Vladimir Kutcherov, who is an expert on oil geology, the Deepwater Horizon well tapped into one of the earth’s major oil migration channels:

According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield, has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.

The implications of this are horrendous — oil may continue a volcano-like eruption from the broken well at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day for years to come. The spill feeds into the Gulf Stream, and the flow will curl up around Florida and wash across western Europe, causing irreversible damage to the Atlantic ecosystems. And there are 30,000 other off-shore oil rigs that use the same shut-off valves as the faulty Deepwater Horizon one.

The Obama administration says that oil is “leaking” at a rate of up to 210,000 gallons a day, and will soon be “contained.” But it may be “erupting” from unimaginable reserves at a rate of 100,000 barrels a day, and continue for years. There’s a world of difference between those two stories, a heartbreakingly damaged world.

References:

Democracy Now! — Scientist: BP Well Could Be Leaking 100,000 Barrels of Oil a Day

…scientist Ira Leifer says the oil may be gushing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day, a number that BP once called its worst-case scenario. Leifer is a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara…

Rense — How The BP Catastrophe May Devastate Europe

The Market Oracle — BP Oil Disaster Could Hit Europe Via the Powerful Gulf Stream Current

A stock analyst says Obama IS NOT trying to stop the oil flow and IS trying to mislead the public. Writing in The Market Oracle, United Kingdom market forecaster F. William Engdahl makes the following observations:

The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe….

Only after the magnitude of the disaster became evident did Obama order Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to declare the oil disaster a “national security issue.” Although the Coast Guard and FEMA are part of her department, Napolitano’s actual reasoning for invoking national security … was merely to block media coverage of the immensity of the disaster that is unfolding for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and their coastlines….

When the Army Corps of Engineers first attempted to obtain NASA imagery of the Gulf oil slick, which is larger than is being reported by the media, it was reportedly denied the access. By chance, National Geographic managed to obtain satellite imagery shots of the extent of the disaster and posted them on their web site. Other satellite imagery reportedly being withheld by the Obama administration, shows that what lies under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public….

…actions … from the Obama White House to date or from BP can only lead to the conclusion that some very powerful people want this debacle to continue….

Such an accusation is hard to prove definitively, but it is not inconsistent with the Cloward Piven Strategy of Manufactured Crisis for extablishing socialism. This two-step method comprises (1) creating a disaster and (2) inflicting draconian loss of individual freedoms as an ostensible emergency measure to cope with the crisis. The resilient Tea Party inspired public resisted the H1N1 pandemic scare and the potential economic collapse of our economy. Perhaps a more terrifying threat was needed — ecological destruction of life on earth as we know it.