Energy & Environment

How sad it is that the energy-company enablers in our government don't determine that the Gulf Coast is "too big to fail.” Maybe then they would stop dithering and take whatever decisive action necessary to prevent further ecological and economic destruction.

We could call it Tar Prevention, "TARP.” But instead of throwing money at the corporate offenders, the taxpayers would immediately seize whatever assets of British Petroleum it will take to effectively and quickly jam a cork in this devastating diarrhea.

The Department of Justice and congressional committees should open a preliminary inquiry about whether BP committed perjury in testimony before Congress. All video of the spill should be released publicly. Subpoenas should be issued for any information from within BP about its private estimates of the size of the spill and the dangers of the dispersants. Key BP personnel should be formally interviewed by investigators.

There's no question the ongoing spill in the Gulf of Mexico and BP's inability to contain it will have long-term repercussions on the industry and how government responds to future incidents. There's also little doubt this spill sets environmentalists clearly in the driver's seat for future policies as they relate to offshore drilling. I don't fault them. After all, industry made the mistakes, and boy, were they monumental. Perhaps it's time for the green faction to exert some muscle and exact a price for all those years industry thumbed its nose at their agenda.

Now we learn that the Obama administration weakened environmental impact standards and circumvented permit rules for offshore drilling.

We already knew that the administration of former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney was fully in league with offshore drillers. And while congressional committees proceed with righteous indignation about the latest spill, both parties in past Congresses, and in the current Congress, are complicit with a dreadful failure of oversight.

In May of 1983, I was actually in attendance at the Department of the Interior when the Minerals Management Service was created. MMS leases federal and Indian lands and the Outer Continental Shelf. MMS is the second largest income source to the U.S. Treasury through its collection of leases, bonuses, rentals and royalty collection. The first director was former Ambassador Harold Doley Jr. from the Gulf Coast state of Louisiana.

I am enclosing an important dispatch from a friend in Nashville, Tennessee. Flooding there has been flooded out by news of Faisal Shahzad's attempting bombing at Times Square in New York City, a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf and the debt crisis in Greece that continues to frighten investors and politicians across the globe. But the residents and businesses in and around Nashville have been devastated by water, and they are exhibiting a unique, and inspiring, unity that should be an example to us all.

I don’t have much use for President Obama's bobbing and weaving on offshore oil, or his taking more than $70,000 of BP campaign money. But these Republican geysers are real pieces of work, aren't they? The Republicans are the party of oil, the party of pollution and, dare I say it, the party of global warming. The president sins out of weakness. The Republicans commit far greater sins as a matter of policy.