Blame Bubba

The Blame Goes Back to Bubba

By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN

Published in the New York Post on June 15, 2010

Printer-Friendly Version

The Gulf oil spill that's so bedeviling President Obama has its roots back in the Clinton years.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed the Outer Continental Shelf Deepwater Royalty Relief Act, which exempted oil wells drilled deep in the Gulf from the normal royalty payments to the government.

Usually, these payments amount to between 12 percent and 16 percent of their revenues, so the exemption did a great deal to catalyze drilling in deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Deepwater Horizon well, where drilling began in 2001, was one of those catalyzed by the Clinton legislation. Overall, deepwater oil production in the Gulf shot up from 42 million barrels in 1996 to 348 million in 2004.

The latter figure represents about 6 percent of total US oil consumption and about 15 percent of domestic production. Natural-gas production from deepwater Gulf drilling increased tenfold during the same period.

The legislation was pushed avidly by Republicans in Congress, particularly those representing the very Gulf states now engulfed by the BP spill.

Unfortunately, the Clinton administration -- and the Bush and Obama administrations that followed -- failed to consider seriously what to do if things went wrong.

In contrast to the licensing of nuclear power plants, which we require to spend vast amounts of time and money to develop failsafe systems, very little thought was given (obviously) to how to stop an explosion that would trigger a vast spill, how to plug the hole or how to stop the oil from reaching Gulf and Atlantic coast beaches. Instead, the industry took its cue from Washington and went full speed ahead into drilling and production in deepwater wells.

This decision to embark on vast Gulf oil drilling was, of course, the correct one. But the failure to think through how to avert a disaster like what's now on our hands is the height of irresponsibility.

All three administrations -- Clinton, Bush, and Obama -- bear the blame for this abject failure. None took the danger of a massive spill seriously or sought to hold up the massive expansion of offshore drilling until failsafe measures could be developed.

Ironically, the crisis that arguably put Obama in the White House was also rooted in the Clinton era: The road to the mortgage meltdown begins with the '90s drive to greatly loosen mortgage-lending standards in the pursuit of increasing homeownership.

As we suffer now for past failures of foresight and planning, perhaps it's time to start taking closer looks at what Washington's doing now that may lead to future disasters.

Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!