Oh, Come On....

David Brooks is pretending to be concerned that the government might stand up for the environment and against the big oil companies, and impose restrictions against fracking that are so arbitrary and onerous that we might ignore a potential 100 year supply of shale gas, sighing, "It would be a crime if we squandered this blessing." Seriously? The facts or precedent underlying this professed concern would be... what?

David Brooks laments that we need a regulatory regime that balances costs and benefits, lamenting, "This kind of balance is exactly what our political system doesn’t deliver". To support his argument he tells us, "So far, the Obama administration has done a good job of trying to promote fracking while investigating the downsides." In other words, the Democrats are doing exactly what Brooks suggests to be good policy. Is he concerned, then, that the Republicans will impede fracking because of a newly discovered concern for the environment or their distaste for the energy industry? If his argument is that our political system is failing because it is likely to compromise between Obama's position and "Drill, Baby, Drill", he's completely undermining (dare I say 'fracking') his thesis.

BP vs. The President

Here's a little rhetorical trick that is surprisingly effective:

The evidence is overwhelming. Any fair-minded person who examines the Gulf of Mexico oil spillage is compelled to two conclusions. First, that there is no evidence of wrongdoing by BP. Second, that the President of the United States has behaved disgracefully.

Wow... there's a lot of evidence, even if I haven't heard it all? And I'm fair minded, right? So how can I not agree with whatever comes next?

Truly, the trick is effective. If you're addressing an audience that hasn't spent much time thinking about the issue, the rhetorical flourish "any fair-minded person would agree," or "as any thinking person would concede," can embarrass a lot of people out of challenging your position. Even if the facts are much more ambiguous, or if you're advancing a position you know to be misleading or wrong.

The author, British right-winger Bruce Anderson, complains that the world needs oil or, more accurately, " meet increased demand and replace declining production in mature fields, [over the next twenty years] we will need the equivalent of two new Middle Easts or four new Saudi Arabias." So, yes, absent a miracle the world will either have to make due with a lot less energy than it wants, invest heavily in alternate sources, and engage in oil exploration in areas that are increasingly remote and difficult to access. Anderson insists, facts be damned, that the oil companies that are pursuing the elusive "four new Saudi Arabias" are "obsessed with safety". That's not to say that safety isn't important to them, or avoiding the cost of a disaster such as the one we're presently experiencing doesn't motivate a significant degree of care and safety, but "safety obsessed" is not a term I would use to describe BP or the management of the Deepwater Horizon.

Anderson suggests that nothing more could have been done, something that is patently false. He also suggests that oil disasters are an inevitable consequence of oil exploration, particularly the complicated and dangerous forms of exploration that are necessary to quench the world's unquenchable thirst for oil, something that is true but in no way excuses the inexcusable. He pulls out the red herring that it would be "absurd to force all oil rigs to cease drilling", something that nobody of consequence has suggested. While it's fun to trot out a straw man, such as his suggestion that the "international left has always hated the oil industry", even if that were true it has no relevance to the present discussion. It's similarly fun to accuse "the Greens" of wining "naive support by exaggerating the threat which oil-drilling poses to the environment", but Anderson's own sin of granting an undeserved industry-wide exculpation for any environmental consequence of the industry's practices.

So what of Anderson's attack on President Obama? He compliments the government's response to the disaster,

Government agencies were on the scene rapidly. There was a much greater sense of grip than over Hurricane Katrina.

So... what is it then? Being unable to criticize Obama's job performance, Anderson attacks (of all things) his speaking skills, suggesting that they're inferior even to GW's. Um... alrighty, then. Anderson also contends that he's incapable of "mak[ing] Americans feel good about themselves", something that if true seems again irrelevant to the present discussion. He then ignores Obama's record, pretending that prior to his becoming a presidential candidate "he took ultra-left wing positions on almost everything", then abandoned those positions "in pursuit of electability". No, actually, Obama has been more consistent than most politicians. He has been very good at maintaining a certain level of ambiguity about his positions, and letting others assume that he agrees with them, but his actual record demonstrates a consistent approach to the issues. But Anderson's on a rant, so facts be damned, right?

So what's Obama's biggest sin, at least according to Anderson? Trying to make up for his inability to make Americans feel good about an oil catastrophe by defaming BP. Anderson offers one, and only one, example of this phenomenon:

It has been 10 years since BP stopped calling itself British Petroleum (patriots could be tempted to conclude that its present misfortunes are divine punishment). Yet the President constantly reverts to the old name, as if "British" were a term of abuse. Not only is Britain the US's most important ally. BP has 24,000 American employees and 10,000 British ones. So when he denigrates this great company, Mr Obama is damaging US interests as well as British ones.

It's almost enough to make you choke on your Kentucky Fried Ch... KFC. Seriously - Anderson's knickers are in a twist because President Obama is calling BP "British Petroleum", making "British" a "term of abuse", and thus transforming any criticism of BP into an attack on Great Britain itself? Let's call Anderson's attack for what it is - a swing and a miss.

Meanwhile, on another (virtual) page of the same paper, David Usborne shares his experience trying to squeeze some candor out of BP.

That BP is now accused of underplaying the awfulness of what is happening in the Gulf is the fault mostly of its CEO, Tony Hayward, who recently said the environmental impact would end up being "very modest". The American public were less than impressed.

No, wait, it's all because Obama doesn't make us feel good!

Ten days ago I was at BP's Houston HQ to interview Mr Hayward at a crucial juncture – the effort to plug the well with the "top-kill". Mr Hayward changed his mind and we didn't see him. But we did see BP's PR machine.

Just before noon on 27 May, I met managing director Bob Dudley and Hayward spokesman, Andrew Gowers. They told me that the top-kill was moving forward. "The top kill operation continues," Dudley told me. "The fluid right now is going in two directions; some out the top and some down into the well and we want to reduce the amount that is going out the top and then we will continue to inject the heavy fluids down into the well..." Please note the "right now" bit.

Usborn later found out that the claim was not true, that "Only later – when the markets had closed – did we learn that all pumping of mud into the well had ceased the night before."

I challenged Gowers by text message about the impression given that pumping was going on. "We cannot offer blow by blow commentary on something as difficult and delicate and market sensitive as this," was his response. There it is – market sensitive.

I think Usborne is too hard on BP. After all, high stock prices make Americans feel good.

(In case you can't get yourself enough of that Bruce Anderson, here are a couple of memories.)

The Oil Spill Shell Game

Look who's coming to the defense of BP: The former President of Shell Oil. We're assured that BP will survive the oil spill, this is really our fault for wanting oil, and that we're "greedy consumers" for wanting it to be produced in a manner that allows us to avoid the "taste, touch, see or smell it or its production". Perhaps Shell could fix that by lightly spraying consumers with a mist of crude oil at its gas stations - teach us some appreciation.

In the fullness of time the Gulf incident will be an anomaly: deadly, expensive and unfortunate, unprecedented in 40 years of offshore operations. The industry knows what it is doing.

We can hope that this spill is an anomaly. But the spill belies the argument that "the industry knows what it is doing", at least once you move past the question of how to remove deep sea oil from the ground. From the moment of the accident, the cleverest minds in the industry have been scrambling to find a way to slow or stop the gusher. (Was it those same minds, or the captains of the industry, who preferred to save money by blocking a requirement for potentially effective, but extremely expensive, untested technology that might have already stopped the spill?) The author complains, in the form of a non sequitur,

Shell and the other US oil majors have known all this for a century. They're unlikely to share their knowledge. They'd face an anti-trust charge.

Exactly what is it that the major oil companies can't share without facing an anti-trust charge? The auto industry has shared patented safety technologies (such as Audi's patented automatic shift lock) without problem. If Shell is sitting on technology that would enable BP to stop the leak, or would allow for deep sea drilling with a much lower chance of accident, color me skeptical that they would get anything but praise for sharing their discoveries.

But you know, the author has a point. The citizens of Bhopal, India didn't complain when they were earning wages producing chemicals at the local Union Carbide plant, but release a few tons of poison gas into the air and they never forgive you. Even though it's been twenty-five years and we haven't had a recurrence on that scale. Or, in the similar context of this oil spill:

In addition they have recruited 13,000 people to clean up, opened their website and telephone lines to every offer of help and damning complaint from the public, kept the media well informed, met with sceptical federal officials from an array of agencies, organised for legal recriminations – and kept their head while running the rest of their company. This takes capacity and competence.

You know what would have demonstrated BP's capacity and competence even better than a prompt effort to control the public debate, lobby politicians, point fingers at the other companies involved in the disaster, attempt to develop repair technology after-the-fact, and hiring even large numbers people to clean up a continuing, major oil spill? I'll give you one guess.

Maybe it's boring or unexciting to live the life of a competent executive who prevents disasters, as opposed to one who handles the post-disaster P.R. game with aplomb. But we greedy consumers want so much - like seeing the latest incarnation of "Brownie" do a "heckuva job" before we lavish him with praise.