OBAMA’S SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY
The Antidrilling Commission
The White House choices seem to have made up their minds.
“Under my Administration, the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over. . . To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. . . I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions, and not the other way around.”
—President Obama, April 27, 2009
The President has appointed a seven-person commission to take what he says will be an objective look at what caused the Gulf spill and the steps to make offshore drilling safe. But judging from the pedigree of his commissioners, we’re beginning to wonder if his real goal is to turn drilling into a partisan election issue.
Mr. Obama filled out his commission last week, and the news is that there’s neither an oil nor drilling expert in the bunch. Instead, he’s loaded up on politicians and environmental activists.
One co-chair is former Democratic Senator Bob Graham, who fought drilling off Florida throughout his career. The other is William Reilly, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush but is best known as a former president and former chairman of the World Wildlife Fund, one of the big environmental lobbies. The others:
• Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland “biological oceanographer,” who has opposed drilling off the Virginia coast and who argued that “the impacts of the oil and gas extraction industry . . . on Gulf Coast wetlands represent an environmental catastrophe of massive and underappreciated proportions.”
• Terry Garcia, an executive vice president at the National Geographic Society, who directed coastal programs in the Clinton Administration, in particular “recovery of endangered species, habitat conservation planning,” and “Clean Water Act implementation,” according to the White House press release.
• Fran Ulmer, Chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage, who is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Arctic Climate Change. She’s also on the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which opposes nuclear power and more offshore drilling and wants government policies “that reduce vehicle miles traveled” (i.e., driving in cars).
• Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who prior to her appointment blogged about the spill this way: “We can blame BP for the disaster and we should. We can blame lack of adequate government oversight for the disaster and we should. But in the end, we also must place blame where it originated: America’s addiction to oil.”
On at least five occasions since the accident, Ms. Beinecke has called for bans on offshore and Arctic drilling.
• Rounding out the panel is its lone member with an engineering background, Harvard’s Cherry A. Murray, though her specialties are physics and optics.
Whatever their other expertise, none of these worthies knows much if anything about petroleum engineering. Where is the expert on modern drilling techniques, or rig safety, or even blowout preventers?
The choice of men and women who are long opposed to more drilling suggests not a fair technical inquiry but an antidrilling political agenda. With the elections approaching and Democrats down in the polls, the White House is looking to change the subject from health care, the lack of jobs and runaway deficits. Could the plan be to try to wrap drilling around the necks of Republicans, arguing that it was years of GOP coziness with Big Oil that led to the spill?
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel took this theme for a test drive on Sunday when he said that Republicans think “the aggrieved party here is BP, not the fisherman.” He added that this ought to remind Americans “what Republican governance is like.” The antidrilling commission could feed into this campaign narrative with a mid-September, pre-election report that blames the disaster on the industry and Bush-era regulators and recommends a ban on most offshore exploration. The media would duly salute, while Democrats could then take the handoff and force antidrilling votes on Capitol Hill.
Even as this commission moves forward, engineering experts across the country have agreed that there is no scientific reason for a blanket drilling ban. The Interior Department invited experts to consult on drilling practices, but as we wrote last week eight of them have since said their advice was distorted to justify the Administration’s six-month drilling moratorium.
Judging from that decision and now from Mr. Obama’s drilling commission, the days of “science taking a back seat to ideology” are very much with us.
