Who watched President Barack Obama’s speech on British Petroleum’s oil spill? I did.
Obama got a couple things right, or almost right. He called the Deepwater Horizon blowout the “worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.”
It will certainly be the worst in terms of dollars spent. The president spoke of 30,000 cleanup personnel, along with authorizing the deployment of another 17,000 National Guard troops for the worst kind of “flood response.” He noted thousands of ships and boats, laying down 5.5 million feet of booms (about 1,041 miles) so far.
Like all Americans who aren’t interested in getting stuck with British Petroleum’s bill, I was happy to hear the president announce, “we will make BP pay” for its “recklessness,” and even happier when BP’s tangle-tongued head honcho Carl-Henric “Small People” Svanberg later affirmed that BP would set aside $20 billion for that purpose.
If Obama had left matters there, it would have been a good way to end his first Oval Office speech – short, sweet and to the point.
But no, this is a crisis, and there’s a larger agenda to be pushed: Obama moved on to announce a commitment not only to cleaning up the fiscal and physical wreckage, but to move “beyond responding to the crisis of the moment” toward a “Gulf Coast Restoration Plan.”
That prepared me for the next part, the formation of a “National Commission” on the Deepwater disaster … you know, kind of like the 9/11 commission? I bet you can rattle off their conclusions and recommendations by heart, right?
Then Obama spoke about cleaning up the Minerals and Management Service (MMS) bureaucracy. You might be interested to know that the Interior Department’s MMS Deputy Assistant Secretary is Sylvia Baca. She was assistant (not just deputy) MMS secretary for the Clinton administration. Even more interesting was her interim private-sector employment, as “vice president for Health, Safety and Environment, BP North America.” In short, as the lefties at Mother Jones magazine put it, “an excellent example of the revolving door.” Never mind the BP, “Beyond Petroleum” advertising campaigns of the last few years.
So I knew where the president was going: beyond petroleum, to more guff about “clean energy jobs,” how windmills, solar panels and caulking guns would miraculously end “our addiction to oil.” In fact, the president himself set the stage at the start when he bragged that the guy he’d put in charge of “our nation’s best scientists and engineers” after Deepwater sank was Steven Chu, our Energy Secretary.
Chu has a Nobel Prize in physics, which is pretty good. But what might not be so good is this trivia item: From 2004 until his appointment to Energy, Chu sat on the Board of Directors of the Hewlett Foundation. He was there when the Hewlett board of directors made their decision to grant $500 million to a new nonprofit, ClimateWorks.
And what does ClimateWorks (CW) work on? It “supports public policies that prevent dangerous climate change.” In other words, CW is a global-warmist lobbying group. They have a “Design to Win,” and lots of money to spread far and wide. Their 2008 tax return shows precisely how “aggressive and highly targeted campaigns, focusing resources on policies that can be enacted quickly and lead to the largest possible emissions reductions,” are funded and executed.
By the time President Obama blessed us, I was thinking there was no way I could feel any more cynical.
I was wrong.
While researching this column, I stumbled across an Agence France Presse story about a Climateworks report claiming a “forced emissions cut of 42 percent by 2030 would spell 549,000 more jobs” in America. The dateline: June 15, the very same day as Obama’s speech.
Finally, I learned the names of the co-chairmen of this National Commission on Deepwater. One is former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida. The other: Former EPA Administrator William K. Reilly, chairman of the board of Climateworks.
Crudely slick, that … but not slick enough.