Editorial: Selling versus leading

June 21, 2010
Maybe US President Barack Obama really believes that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, horrible as it is, correlates with the terrorist murder of 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001.

Maybe US President Barack Obama really believes that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, horrible as it is, correlates with the terrorist murder of 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. Or has zeal for inside-out reform so misshapen his judgment that he'll recruit any crisis into service to an activist agenda?

Obama's distasteful terrorist-spill analogy served as a prelude to his much-anticipated speech on the gulf tragedy. "In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9-11," he told the Politico web site on June 13, "I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come." Then, on June 15, in his first speech from the Oval Office, he recited old news about spill response and touted his foundering program "to change how we produce and use energy."

Getting tough

He could have led. He could have gotten tough with the get-tough crowd. He could have acknowledged limits on what a president can or should do in response to a deepwater catastrophe. He could have moved away from useless confrontation with the company on whose resources well control, clean-up, and compensation depend. He thus might have halted the dangerous progression of fiats into which he's been coaxed by feverish journalists and political opponents for whom no penance for oil sins can be severe enough. Instead, Obama retreated into his familiar and deeply flawed faith in state-sponsored energy.

"For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered," he said. "For decades, we've talked and talked about the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked—not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor."

Obama overlooks a lot of history here. In the decades of which he spoke the US has had special taxes on the production of fossil fuels, subsidies for nonfossil energy, heavy spending on clean coal and research of renewable sources, expensive flirtations with hydrogen and other "fuels of the future," limits on the consumption of hydrocarbons, mandates for the use of alternatives, and indirect fossil-energy supply constraints of various forms, including but not limited to land-use restrictions. In just the past 5 years, Congress has passed laws requiring the production and consumption of nonfossil energy and discouraging the consumption of oil.

The problem with US energy thus is not a lack of political courage. The problem is confusion about the physical realities of energy. Politicians can't create energy or wish it into useful form; they too often just waste public money pretending otherwise.

To say this is not to advocate the "inaction" against which Obama inveighed and which does not characterize recent history. It is to seek realistic framing of the energy challenge. In his appeal for "a new future," Obama is just repeating shopworn promises that never come true. They don't come true because in the sweeping contexts in which they're always made—"End America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels," Obama said—they can't.

Regrettable pattern

Obama's lunge of political opportunism fits a regrettable pattern of overreaction to pressure. Some of his steps, in fact, stretch the law.

On what authority does a president commandeer one fifth of a private company's net worth? And after his attorney general has ballyhooed a criminal investigation of the blowout, is it not prejudicial for the president, before even meeting with company officials or hearing what they later would tell a congressional hearing, to accuse BP of "recklessness?"

Instead of leading, Obama used the bully pulpit to sell his spill record and energy program. He has shown too little appreciation for the difference between an act of war and an environmental mess.

An industrial accident, no matter how bad, is no reason to declare martial law.