There is no valid analogy between the Gulf spill and Apollo 13
I am honored to present this guest post by Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Dr. H. Harrison Schmitt – Anthony
President Obama’s Administration and its supportive media repeatedly say our 1970 Apollo 13 experience is analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not hardly!
The rescue of Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, after an oxygen tank explosion on their spacecraft, illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled, in contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Nothing in the government’s response to the blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and its Mission Control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation “from day one” in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland Security. With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.
Whatever may be the culpability of British Petroleum and its federal regulators in causing and dealing with the accident, it has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf State officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful and hesitant.
Absolutely no reason exists to assume that any part of the Federal Government has engineering expertise comparable to the petroleum industry that can be applied to this or any future energy-related crisis. Certainly, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have no more experience in these matters than does the President.
Salazar’s empty threat to “push BP out of the way” has no basis as a realistic option and best illustrates the floundering of the Obama Administration. Indeed, from “day one,” the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling and production industry should have been mobilized to combat this spill, with a single experienced engineering manager in charge. It still is not too late to start doing it right.
A more appropriate analogy from the Apollo era would be the recovery from the tragic fire during a pre-launch test on January 27, 1967, that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 204 fire occurred in the clearly recognized crisis atmosphere of the Cold War, in which America raced to demonstrate to the world the superiority of freedom over the Communist oppression of the Soviet Union. The Deepwater Horizon explosion took place in the equally apparent crisis of America’s dependence on sources of oil from foreign nations governed or intimidated by our enemies or economic competitors. There, however, the validity of the 204 fire analogy ceases.
The NASA’s response to the 204 fire was to rapidly implement its previously well-formulated, objective investigation of its causes, both technical and managerial. Managerial responsibilities were identified, and George Low and his engineering team made appropriate changes without a prolonged exercise in finger pointing or the delays of another Presidential, buck-passing “commission.” NASA of that day moved forward and even accelerated the Apollo effort to its successful conclusion. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon less than two years after the 204 fire. Seven months after that, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, with Mike Collins in orbit overhead, landed on the Moon.
The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, President Obama’s and his Administration’s otherwise rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop offshore oil exploration by the United States. How misguided and, indeed, how either ignorant or devious can our President be!?
President Obama has shown repeatedly that the best interests of the American people are a lower priority than his ideological goal of changing America from what it has been, to some mystical, socialist utopia with a renewable-energy-based standard of living equivalent to that of the late 1800s. As if the Administration could not make its ineffective, disjointed response to the Deepwater Horizon accident any worse, it did not even use previously established sea surface burn-off and dispersant procedures to minimize the effects of the spill.
In addition, it has inexcusably delayed approving and assisting in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s request to protect the state’s shores and wildlife habitats, by building offshore sand barriers – as unnecessary as having to make that request should have been. And this is the government that Congress and the President want to run healthcare, immigration, banking, carbon emissions, auto manufacturing, and everything else in American life?
The geologists, engineers, and on-site managers responsible for the Deepwater Horizon drilling effort understood that drilling to an oil reservoir through 13,000 of rock in 5000 feet of seawater would be very difficult. They knew that their geophysically defined target, typical of Gulf petroleum reservoirs, would be a complex mix of crude oil, natural gas and brine, contained in porous and permeable rock. Because of the rock and water depth, the reservoir also would be under very high pressure. In this situation, a reliable blowout preventer, a crimping device installed on the pipe near the floor of the sea, would be essential to reduce the risk of both a spill and potential explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.
Current information indicates that BP installed a defective blowout preventer and did not have a deep-water, robotically emplaced crimping technique as a backup to the blowout preventer. Essential to the prevention of future accidents will be an objective, complete technical and managerial investigation of why a geological and engineering situation of known risks spun out of control. The primary question is, will such an investigation be possible in the politically charged, adversarial “boot on the neck” atmosphere created by President Obama and his team? Imagine if such an atmosphere had surrounded the 204 fire investigation and recovery.
Responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon accident ultimately lies with the chaotic regulatory environment for petroleum exploration created over recent decades by the Congress, courts, Department of the Interior and environmental pressure groups. Will we learn anything about regulatory overkill from this tragic loss of eleven lives, extensive environmental damage, and disruption of business and employment in the Gulf?
Elimination of access to most on-shore and near-shore oil production prospects has driven American exploration away from more easily discoverable and producible resources – and into the much more dangerous and technically challenging deep waters of the seas and oceans. Even then, drilling and production accidents are exceedingly rare, in spite of the geological, engineering and weather-related difficulties that explorers and producers face as a consequence of these misguided restrictions.
Long-term, history reminds us that naturally and accidentally released oil in the oceans disappears due to bacterial action. Remember that the fuel oil which blackened the world’s beaches as a result of World War II ship destruction disappeared after only a few years, and ocean life survived. The Gulf oil spill will not be this Nation’s most serious environmental crisis: World War II tops it by orders of magnitude in more than just this respect.
If America and freedom are to survive indefinitely, the next Congress must begin to restore sanity and intelligence to national energy policy. Until economically competitive alternatives become fully feasible, fossil fuels will remain the mainstay of our economy. Our dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil has become one of our greatest national security vulnerabilities, and only domestic production can solve it in the next 50 years.
The 2010 elections thus become a critical starting point to bring rational, constitutional, America-first thinking back into the Federal Government.
______________
Harrison H. Schmitt is a former United States Senator from New Mexico, as well as a geologist and former Apollo Astronaut. He currently is an aerospace and private enterprise consultant and a member of the new Committee of Correspondence.
Sponsored IT training links:
We offer best quality 70-680 dumps for 646-205 and 642-813 exam with 100% success guarantee.
“The Deepwater Horizon explosion took place in the equally apparent crisis of America’s dependence on sources of oil from foreign nations governed or intimidated by our enemies or economic competitors. ”
This comment really bugged me because we are not at war with Canada nor ourselves. That’s where our oil primarily comes from, and has come from long before this incident. Saudi Arabia is number three, and last I checked they weren’t our enemies. And neither Canada nor Saudia Arabia are our economic competitors. They’re our trade partners.
“President Obama has shown repeatedly that the best interests of the American people are a lower priority than his ideological goal of changing America from what it has been, to some mystical, socialist utopia with a renewable-energy-based standard of living equivalent to that of the late 1800s.”
Yes, but Obama is not a green utopian. Obama is a good liar. What he wants is the nationalization of oil companies, not solar panels. Perhaps his aim is even that of an inter-governmental union ownership of all meaningful energy production (such as a North American Union or joint EU/NAU).
To be fair, however, that sort of agenda doesn’t belong solely to him, nor to that of government soley in the present or near past. Understanding the motivations of government today, and how they plan to acheive those goals, requires understanding how money works…
It’s really quite simple. Governments of the world sell debt on the open market. What doesn’t get bought is bought up by the various central banks. This causes price to continue rising above what the market is willing to pay, and thus yield to fall beyond what the market desires. But on the back of rising government debt, the corporations (the majority of bondholders) create credit to last them til payday. And as this process continues, the price of credit only goes higher.
In the last year (maybe the last two) central bank buying has increasingly stepped up to fill in for what the market can’t afford. What this means is that the cost of credit is becoming too much. The private sector is going bankrupt, ie, in order to stay in the market for government debt. Priavte wealth to a large degree has been sucked into the black-hole of ever-lowering interest. It’s already happened to the banks and the automakers, not to mention thousands of small and mid-size businesses indirectly affected by these ongoing bankruptcies.
At the same time as wealth is trapped in that game of zeroing interest, asset prices must by nessecity lower because once credit becomes too expensive, holders of all assets get nervous about growth (numerically speaking). So they devalue them in order to not be stuck with them. And worse, the assets devalue at the same time that central banks are increasingly _giving_ government more and more money, which would, at the end-stages, allow for government to pick up assets (like oil comapnies) on the cheap.
Where the green mantras come in is purely reverse psychology. They know we don’t want nor can “go green”. They know it’s a pipe-dream. But they threaten and yammer on about this and that, so oil companies go into places they should as soon not. While there is an initial silver lining to this, it’s inevitably their/our demise …
As price of creating new credit increases, expensive projects initially act as a counter of sorts. This is what “economical oil” is. It’s not what we think it to be. What economical oil is, are projects which are expensive enough to justify the borrowing of large amounts of credit (from all manner of private sources world-wide). The big expensive project will then, for a time, generate the returns by which the oil company can keep up with the rising prices of government debt (their ultimate source of credit).
This is done because quite simply, we need the energy, and this isn’t lost on lenders and investors. To have the energy at all, oil companies must be able to afford more and more debt that so they can create more credit for themselves as the rest of the available credit in the market dries up. In order to do that, they must engage in the most “economical” of projects to attract the drying-up credit. The “mediocore” projects are deemed unworthy because they do not generate the returns they need.
But with oil prices falling in this inevitable (asset) deflationary environment, it’s not looking good for BP. Their stock has already shaved off around 40% in the last five to six weeks. They’re going broke, fast. And with this disaster unresolved (imo, it never stood much chance of being controlled), there is every justification for government to nationalize them. This probably will not happen right away, though. The more likely case is that they will be sold off in parts to other companies (and BP execs, like the banking CEOs, given their golden parachuttes from the proceeds). But as the credit game continues, the buyers will in time fall to government take-over. It’s mathmatical certainty because the private sector is not made of infinite money. The central bank, on the other hand, is.
Obama a green? Ha! There are no greens in government. To be a hippie tree-hugger is to be one of millions (billions, even) of used-up suckers, never mind our philosophical differences. A sucker is a sucker. Central bank-funded governments have always been red, and there isn’t a difference between “conservative” and “liberal”, “democrat” or “republican”. Neither side has a reputation for seeking the end of central banking, and that is how and why things are playing out the way they are today.
It was a blessing at first (which we called capitalism, though I doubt Ayn Rand would approve) as government debt rose from a low point (courtesy of Paul Volcker) to allow for cheap, easy credit. Alan Greenspan continued it, and so did his replacement, Ben Bernanke. This will not last, and it hasn’t, which is why we’re still in a “recession”. Private sector wealth is disappearing faster than ever, replaced by direct cash hand-outs to the government by central banks.
Anyone who thinks this all about utopias had better get real yesterday. Government is run by very nasty people that simply don’t want you to be free in any sense of the word. And they are well ahead of us because we were suckers that believed in so-called capitalism, and that it could last forever. We allowed ourselves to cast moral and intellectual (and maybe financial) support for what was really an outrageous idea (deep water drilling) that was only done because we allowed ourselves to be psyched-out by the threats of so-called greens.
No sense blamming Obama (or any politician, for that matter). We did it to ourselves. It’s up to us to get ourselves out of it. If we do not, our grand children, or their children, or theirs will have to do something the founders of this country never intended for any of us to do again… Fight to the death for our freedom.
Ah, America. Once she was a spacefaring nation. Alas, one more trip to space and that is history. Will we soon be so mired in our the socialist utopia that we never will venture into space again, except to beg an occasional ride from the former social utopias in Asia?
Thank you Mr. Obama.
Posted also at http://www.freerepublic.com
Attributed here, of course.
To all readers who are discussing solutions: Recognize that a 21 inch pipe at 6000 psi creates right at 2,070,000 pounds force. Up. Against whatever you are trying to plug the hole with.
Oil pressure is estimated at 6000 to 9000 psi at the leak, so your “solution” must be able to stop and hold 1000 to 1500 tons of force. If you are going to try to force something “down the hole” (to stop the flow) you must be able to “push down” harder than the oil is pushing up. Assuming you can thread a needle blindfolded from a mile away while facing the equal of ten Colorado Rivers going through the end of the needle.
Then you must be able to hold your solution in place (against that flow) while you try to grip the pipe (or the muddy bottom) to keep your plug from spewing back into your face.
A mile below the sea. In the dark.
At last someone puts the Deepwater Horizon spill into a sensible context. Unlike the shrill, anti-oil propaganda spouted by the BBC.
Actually a good strategy would be the following:
1. Some kind of cap to nearly stop the flow while we wait for the relief wells
2. Relief wells miss the intended target every time. Darn it, but we just can’t seem to hit the target.
3. Tell the bozos in the administration, “the only solution is to place the relief wells into production as soon as possible to remove the source of the oil.” They are complete idiots, so they might buy it. On the other hand, they are complete ideologues, so they might say no even it it were truly the only solution.
4. A few hundred million or more barrels flow into gulf coast refineries that don’t have to be imported from the sworn enemies of democracy and freedom.
Considering the tragic loss of life involved, the public relations disaster, and the impact on future operations, I think the Challenger Explosion, unfortunately, provides a better parallel to the Deep Horizon event, except in this case the problem was not unsafe cold o-rings but inadequate blow-out prevention devices and the lack of any established, quick-response blow-out suppression technique.
I am delighted to see BP absolved of any blame in this disaster. Does this mean my pension fund investment should be safe? BP shares are definitely a “buy”.
Clearly, government regulation and too much taxation was the root cause. The solution is to dissolve the EPA and let the competent-professionals of Big Oil take over. Geroge Bush showed the way.
This is the first explicit parallel between Apollo 13 and the oil spill I have read. I see no resemblance whatsover, and the response to any drawing a parallel should be a one-liner, not a windy disquisition like this one.
As someone who once considers Harrison Schmitt a hero, I am disappointed to find he is an heroic idiot, or an idiotic hero, whichever you prefer.
“Indeed, from “day one,” the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling and production industry should have been mobilized to combat this spill, with a single experienced engineering manager in charge. It still is not too late to start doing it right.”
Here’s a bit of sense. I repeat as I have before that I am amazed at some of the stuff BP has been doing to try and stop the spill such as throwing rocks and MUD at it. They dont seem to have a clue! I am also amazed that America has been unable to come up with the engineeering competence to stop it.
If they put me in charge I would do it. This requires a bit of management and engineering skill. Fancy words wont do it. Obama, I’m afraid you cant!
As a sometime peripheral offshore oil worker, I say that this post hits the nail right on the head.
All adverse consequences aside, I cannot but be impressed by the sheer volume of oil that this damaged well is putting out. Estimates as high as 25,000bopd have been published: that’s over 9 million barrels a year. Under any other circumstances this well would have been a very good producer, a fact that must be particularly galling for the unfortunate engineers at BP. Oh for a 25,000bopd discovery in my protfolio!
And yes, of course put the government back in its box and leave the technical stuff to the experts! I don’t mind Barack Obama myself, but I would no more want him seizing the controls of my 747 just because the pilot had had a heart attack, or grabbing the scalpel just because the surgeon had inadvertantly cut an artery.
Spot on!
We have a Federal Government with no competence in the field claiming to be in charge, and mostly just preventing those with competence from taking needed actions quickly. Just nuts.
BTW, from what I’ve seen of the details, BP has been less than stellar in their trade off of risk vs ‘cheapness’… So now the Feds have put a 6 month (or so was proposed) moratorium on offshore drilling. That breaks all the contracts, not just BP.
So, if I’ve got a rig under lease and expect to get $1/4 Million a DAY for it, and the contract is broken… how long do you think it will take me to start shopping it around to Brazil or Saudi? And once that rig is under a new contract in another country, it will be there for a few years.
That “6 month pause” is guaranteeing a much higher dependency on OPEC oil for about 1/2 decade. (The lost capacity is about 1/2 of the growth of all non-OPEC capacity. Yeah, it’s big…)
They ought to have left the guys who’ve been doing things right in peace, and told BP to clean up then get out, and come back after they did a thorough post mortem and lessons learned.
IMHO, you want this thing fixed? Hand it over to Exxon, Standard Oil, Petrobras, Transocean, maybe even Diamond Offshore and tell them they have a free hand.
The world needs oil, has done ever since the discovery was made that by burning it, you could power things. And there’s still plenty to be had. That being the case, you would think that should any mishap occur in it’s recovery, every assistance would be offered by the state to those involved to recover the situation. Why is Obama hell bent on apportioning blame, and destroying a company which is only trying to do its job?
Accidents happen, they always have, they always will, particularly where human beings are involved. Sympathy and unfettered assistance should be the order of the day, not punishment and prosecution. Foolish, foolish people. Obama is like a fish out of water, I hope for all our sakes that the US are rid of him at the earliest possible opportunity. Maybe the next president will be a REAL American…
RACookPE1978 says: “Posted also at http://www.freerepublic.com ”
Um, which story did you want to share with us? Or do you recommend all of them? 🙂
@RACookPE1978: June 1, 2010 at 10:50 pm
i.e. You don’t think they stand a chance either. I have to admit, when I first heard this story about a month ago, I didn’t know they were that deep. I thought it was 500, not 5,000 feet! As the weeks passed, though, and the story continued I figured something had to be up. Or down, I suppose…
Deepwater oil is a significant source of domestic petroleum…I don’t see any ban lasting very long http://www.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twiparch/100526/twipprint.html
That said, this tragic accident was caused by compounding human error allowed by complacency. Hopefully the lessons learned here will prevent future possibly larger accidents and those 11 will not have died in vain.
The dweebs in DC had no idea the seriousness of this event and didn’t care until the political fallout appeared. Their actions so far show that they are more concerned about fixing the blame elsewhere than coming up with solutions.
Well, what can one possibly say after that piece of sane, calm, considered, thoughful & thought-proviking prose! Harrison Schmidt for President of the United States of America I say, but if he doesn’t want the job, get someone like him to do it!
As to a country being run by a government who have never run anything up to & including a school tuck shop, get used to it, we’ve had 13 years of it & we’re getting another 5 years of being run by inherited millionaires/ex-bankers/blood-sucking lawyers, all about to make themselves even wealthier at the taxpayers’ expense! Offence intended! They’ll certainly put the “Grate” back into Britain (& no that wasn’t a typo).
Interesting how the cries from the US Government for BP to pay for all & compensation too, compared to its response following Union Carbide’s Bhopal disaster.
It’s unfortunate how politicians use incidents such as these to grandstand and promote themselves, rather than devoting as much energy to trying to solve the problems.
Sorry about the obvious typos! AtB
What surprises me is that, with the seemingly valid credentials as the top oil experts in the world, no-one has come up with a better plan than those involved in this terrible problem. I suspect there may be a “there but for the grace of God go I” involved & I suspect that when the truth comes out and all the jingoism of keeping “foreign” companies” out has been conveniently forgotten the industry will be even safer and more secure. America’s thirst for oil drives companies ever more close the extremes and journalistic thirst for news – preferably with death, destruction & someone else’s mayhem – enflames those who sit and watch the news from the comfort of their couch in Maida Vale or Bloomsburg.
From the sidelines, and a Brit whose Dad lived and worked for Shell Oil in Wyoming in the ’50s I remember him telling me that accidents happen – even in the most ordered of industries. The slick will dissipate and things will return to normal. The fishermaen will fish again and the “swallows will return to Capistrano.”
Unfortunatly and as usual snake lawyers will be feeding off the flesh of other’s misfortunes and grabbing a quick buck from big oil.
Thanks to Dr Schmitt for an incisive and balanced analysis of the Gulf oil spill. The rigorous decision-making technique NASA used at the time of Apollo 13, and still uses today is the Kepner-Tregoe decision-making method framework.
http://www.decision-making-confidence.com/kepner-tregoe-decision-making.html
Its rigorous application produced a plan for getting the astronauts back safely, and also for fixing the problems that led to the Apollo capsule fire.
Kepner-Tregoe analyses and evaluates all factors involved in a decision-making process, “gut-reacti0n” and emotion are eliminated. I’ve used it as part of a team (that’s essential) making unbiased decisions about expenditure on expensive equipment, viability of projects, and problem-solving. Put simply, it works.
In effect, the method introduces an in-built “Team B” approach, where no statement, attitude or statistic is allowed unchallenged. It can produce surprising results, for example that a “do nothing” decision is the cheapest and least damaging outcome. On occasion, because of its impartiality, it’ll produce a result that no-one wants or is willing to support, but that’s rare, and a review often reveals an early mistake.
IMHO it would be a valuable tool to apply to the Gulf spill, for scientists, and also for policy-makers in evaluating responses to current or pending disasters (perceived or otherwise).
Benjamin says:
June 2, 2010 at 12:42 am
RACookPE1978 says: “Posted also at http://www.freerepublic.com ”
Um, which story did you want to share with us? Or do you recommend all of them? 🙂
—…—…
Lettuce hope there is no confusion. 8<) This story was posted at http://www.FreeRepublic.com for those 125,000 odd daily readers over there to read it.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2525803/posts
Now, if anyone over here wants to read the hundreds of threads and analysis columns going on over there, please feel free.
“previously established sea surface burn-off …procedures”: yes, I had wondered why they hadn’t tried “Greek Fire”: maybe it’s because BP is so anti-CO2?
Otherwise, what is there to say? Obama makes it three-duds-in-a-row as President.
It’s disgusting that the media give Obama a “pass” on this issue, like they have on every issue. They demonized Bush for Katrina, yet Obama is rarely mentioned. The only
time I see him on the news connected to this catastrophe they have him behind a podium
pointing his finger and claiming he’s very upset. Stop with the drama and do something effective. He’s an inexperienced joke of a president. It’s sad the main stream media are too afraid to expose this fraud.
Why do the Greens bewail the oil leak? Are not all life forms equally valuable? Can they not see that something organic and unprocessed has been released from the breast of Gaia to feed her oldest and greatest child, by mass, Bacteria?
What we are witnessing is the result of years of astonishing complacency from successive governments around the world that transport or drill for oil in the oceans. Every few years we have a major oil spill of some kind and yet we still have no proper response to such spills. Why? Would it not be possible to force the various oil companies and oil shipping companies to pay into an international fund to ensure that we have an ample supply of dispersants, booms and other equipment at the ready to ensure that any oil spill can at least be contained and dispersed quickly, rather than pointing the finger of blame for such incidents at the particular culprit at the time when the reality is that ALL oil companies are simply on borrowed time before they are responsible for the next accident.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster not only exposes the dangers of years of complacency in the face of multiple previous oil spills, but exposes the danger of drilling in deep water. This was an accident just waiting to happen. Hurricanes or ground subsidence could equally have caused the pipeline to rupture – it happens that so far the blame has been put on a faulty blow-out device on the rig operated by Transocean, although the latest information suggests that the cementing of the well-head by Halliburton may be the cause of failure. The fact is there is no “Plan B” for any of these deepwater pipeline failures.
Blaming BP at this moment in time is not helpful. It seems that BP is doing everything it can to try and resolve this problem. But it may need more than BP can provide. It is not even clear just how much BP is to blame on a rig operated by Transocean and with a well-head constructed by Halliburton, at least in terms of the mechanics. BP is simply the “least American” part of the whole process, and therefore the least connected to American politicians and consequently the easiest to blame, particularly when it comes to the law as leaseholder. From what I have been reading nobody was really to blame as such for the disaster – Mother Nature just pulled a stunt to show how powerful she is and blew so much gas back up the well-head with such force that no existing safety mechanisms could cope. A huge bubble of gas and water engulfed the entire rig and exploded. Now we have the problem that the oil is being forced out of the well at such pressure that only a properly constructed method to cap the well can prevent the oil reaching the surface. And since that “Plan B” had never been thought-out before, the solution could take months, even years to stop the oil from flowing – especially if it is left to BP alone to resolve the problem.
What the US needs right now is a proper president that can take control of the situation, get a method of capping the well designed and get it built in double-quick time. It doesn’t need to be engineered – it needs to be over-engineered. This should be run like a military operation, with every resource that the US can apply utilised. It doesn’t need Obama to be competent in well capping, it just needs him to be focussed on the right things to manage this situation. But it seems to me the only focus that Obama has ever worried about is the focus of the camera that’s pointing at his pretty face.