Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Two executives showing their mojo

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The good guys scored another one this afternoon, with the announcement that Tony Hayward, BP chief executive, is stepping down from his role overseeing drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

Here’s the money quote:

BP’s chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told Sky News that Hayward is going to change his role in dealing with the spill and that the operation would be handed over to BP managing director Bob Dudley.

“It is clear Tony has made remarks that have upset people,” Svanberg told Sky News.

In my opinion, President Obama is giving us an object lesson in how an effective executive does his job — squawking from the normally-blue peanut gallery notwithstanding. Governor Patrick is doing an admirable job of stepping up to the plate and doing likewise.

Both President Obama and Governor Patrick are digging deep and showing their mojo in this important campaign season. If these two stay on their game, the evening of November 2, 2010 will be an enjoyable one for progressives.

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  1. <

    p>This is the chart for Democrats (less than 40 percent of the Massachusetts electorate, of course):

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    p>And this is the chart for Independents:

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    p>Note that the point where “disapprove” crossed “approve” most decisively in the first chart, for all adults, was at the end of May, right around the time oil started making landfall.

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    p>Awkward for your thesis. Maybe the charts have reversed since the $20 billion down payment agreement. I doubt it.

    • I think the polls reflect what the media broadcast — which was mostly pap that had little or nothing to do with reality.

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      p>The prior administration created a heap of bad doo-doo. A big, smelly, stinking, steaming, fly-covered heap. I think a great many Americans are accustomed to being spoon-fed pablum from squeaky-clean talking heads and don’t comprehend, at any basic level, that when a culture (corporate, military, religious) has been deeply polluted, it takes more than six months to correct it — and a lot of ugly smelly stuff gets surfaced along the way.

      <

      p>I’m not sure what you think President Obama should have done differently when the Deepwater Horizon blew up, perhaps you can highlight a few bullet points that you think should have been done differently.

      • 1) Asked environmental scientists about the possible scope of a burning oil rig.  Has this ever happened in the past?  It is clear Obama relied too much on the opinions of Ken Salazar, who is too close to the energy industry–often a problem with Colorado politicians.

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        p>2) Appointed an environmentalist to be Secretary of the Interior.  As green as our last Dem Prez (Clinton) was when he took office, appointing Bruce Babbitt to Interior did a lot of good.

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        p>3) Realized that even though oil industries have the deep water robots to work at the source of the gusher, the President, not BP, should be in charge of oil clean-up on the shores, and said so.  It is unAmerican that BP can intimidate the media from taking pictures of the clean-up on American beaches and wetlands and islands.

        • I don’t see how any of these would have made any substantive difference. It was clear from the beginning that the blowout is much larger than BP admitted. Federal scientists made their case, convincingly, after gathering the data. It isn’t clear to me, at all, that Ken Salazar played any negative role in the blowout or its aftermath.

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          p>The fundamental problem was, and is, that our addiction to oil results in our using technology for deepwater drilling long before we have any effective means of dealing with the concomitant risks. The Deepwater Horizon problem was created when the effort to dig the well began, long before President Obama was in office.

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          p>I think this complaining amounts to a temper tantrum. We, as a nation and society, created this problem. Not President Obama. Catastrophes like this will continue until we stop it. This kind of criticism only weakens President Obama and strengthens his GOP opposition.

          • Witness the Tea Party hijacking of healthcare reform.

            <

            p>A lot of good PR planning and execution helped Obama pull off the first upset ever of a favored candidate (and Hillary had a lot going for her), so it’s odd to argue that PR is inconsequential to Obama.

            <

            p>And if the US is to break out of its addiction to carbon fuels, it is going to take a lot of PR work to change the terms of the debate in America, and one might expect a Harvard-educated politician to understand that.

            • I meant that the PR was inconsequential to the cleanup. I thought that was clear from my comment, but let me emphasize it in case I’m mistaken. Here’s a edit of my lede:

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              p>I don’t see how any of these would have made any substantive difference to the cleanup.

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              p>

              And if the US is to break out of its addiction to carbon fuels, it is going to take a lot of PR work to change the terms of the debate in America, and one might expect a Harvard-educated politician to understand that.

              <

              p>I’m sick to death of snark like this about President Obama. I’m willing to wager he knows a lot more about the facts of what we can and cannot do then you, and I’m even more willing to wager that he knows a great deal more than you about how to change the terms of the debate. Such snarky attacks on President Obama — and, for that matter, on Harvard-educated public officials — epitomize the collapse of constructive political debate in today’s culture.

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              p>If the US is to break out of its addiction to carbon fuels, the US must face the reality of just how much damage they create. Damage like we’re seeing in the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

              <

              p>These disasters happen because we don’t know how to stop them. We figured out how to drill a thirteen thousand foot well a mile under the ocean. We did NOT figure out how to manage the predicted risks associated with that feat.

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              p>BP didn’t stop the oil from spilling into the ocean fifteen minutes after the break because we don’t know how. President Obama hasn’t stopped the oil yet because we don’t know how. The Coast Guard hasn’t stopped it. The US Navy hasn’t stopped it. Exxon couldn’t stop it if it had been an Exxon rig. We don’t know how to stop these things — and yet we drill them anyway.

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              p>Unlike the prior administration, President Obama has the courage and discipline to tell the truth about what is happening and about what we can and cannot do. I expect oppositional Republicans to attack him for doing so. I’m frustrated and disappointed by a mainstream media that attacks him for doing so.

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              p>I’m appalled by fellow progressives (not to mention alleged environmentalists) who do the same.

          • His administration granted an environmental waiver to BP to proceed with the rig in the first place, and then did not properly supervise the drilling once it got under way.

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            p>As to what he should have done, I’ve already said that BP should have been put into temporary receivership and certainly not, as under Obama, been left in charge of the operation as a practical matter. By all means, make BP pay, but put administration of the recovery effort in the hands of an entity without such a glaring conflict of interest. As a minimum, the US should have assumed more direct control of the accident site, in particular direct access to information about how much oil was being spilled.

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            p>

            • I note the following from your link (emphasis mine):

              MMS inspection reports dating back to September 2001 show five red flags or incidents of non-compliance. The last incident was from February 2007. Back in 2003, the reports note there was a pollution event on the rig that was investigated.

              <

              p>The Department of Interior report cited in your link opens with the following (emphasis mine):

              With this memorandum, I am forwarding our investigative report entitled “Island Operating Company, et. al” which addresses a number of allegations that Minerals Management Service (MMS) employees at the Lake Charles District Office had accepted gifts from oil-and gas production companies.

              At the outset, I want to note that all of the conduct chronicled in this report occurred prior to 2007, and pre-dating your tenure as Secretary and your January 2009 Ethics Guide. While this conduct is dated, it is more evidence that there was, indeed, a much-needed change to the ethical culture of MMS.

              <

              p>I think you dramatically underestimate the extent to which the mechanisms of the US government have been permeated and infected by the corruption of the prior administration. I think you therefore equally dramatically understate the challenge of rooting out that corruption — especially in the context of an economy lying in shards on the ground and a health care system in quivering in its death throes, with an opposition party dedicating to bringing down the administration at all costs.

              <

              p>I think you therefore come to an utterly false assessment of who the good guys and bad guys are in this environmental catastrophe.

              • The facts are pretty clear. The decision to grant B.P. an environmental waiver for the Deepwater Horizon were made by the Obama administration not the Bush administration. Salazar was well aware of the way MMS was managing the process. An Obama appointee was in charge. Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity:

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                p>

                The White House and the Department of Interior are really sort of ducking their heads on this issue right now, because it’s an enormous problem, especially since just a few months ago the Government Accountability Office came out with a report on MMS’s operations in Alaska, where they also have offshore oil drilling, and specifically said the agency is not doing these environmental studies properly. They’re avoiding doing them at all. And then they went ahead knowing that the GAO had just done this study and continued to put them out. So, this is not something new. MMS knew they had a problem. In fact, when Interior Secretary Salazar first came into office, he announced, “There’s a new sheriff in town. I’m going to clean up this corrupt agency.” And instead of doing that, he’s pushed them to put out more offshore oil drilling permits, while not cleaning up what is clearly a broken process of doing any environmental review at all.

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                p>Here is an excellent review by McClatchy:

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                p>

                Weeks before the world had ever heard of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, President Barack Obama stood in the Roosevelt Room of the White House poring over maps of oil drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska and elsewhere.

                Satisfied that he knew all he needed to know and confident that it was safe, he decided to propose expanded offshore drilling.

                “This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly,” he said when he unveiled his proposal on March 31.

                “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” he added two days later. “They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.”

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                p>I support Obama, in general. I think he is miles better than the Republicans. But we don’t do him any favors by not criticizing him when he is wrong. Instead, we should push him to do better.

  2. why are floating oil rigs in American waters drilling American resources allowed to post flags of other nations?  Why not require that the Port of Registry be an American one?

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    p>I don’t know if this is legal, as maritime law is really complex.  Thing is, I’ve got to believe that it wouldn’t lead to a less safe or less economically fair situation… I mean, there’s a reason that BP et al register their oil rigs in places like the Marshall Islands, and it ain’t because it’s closer (they’re near Australia) and it ain’t because the good folks at the Marshall Islands have a monopoly on the kind of port or industrial expertise necessary.

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    p>These are the places where populism and environmentalism can work together — figure out where the oil, gas, and coal companies are able to offer lower energy prices because they’re skirting domestic jobs or domestic safety at those jobs.  Then, ratchet up the requirements.  Price of fossil energy goes up (good), number/safety of American jobs goes up (good).  Even better, you just might get the support of Democratic legislators from the places where they’ve got pressure to fight the reduction of dependence of domestic fossil fuel due to jobs in their districts.

  3. In my opinion, President Obama is giving us an object lesson in how an effective executive does his job

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    p>I think you are the only person on the planet who believes this.

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    p>Here is an alternate view from one of my favorite political writers, Mark Steyn:

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    p>

    For example, he could have demonstrated, as he and his energy secretary (whoops, Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary) have so signally failed to do, an understanding of what is actually happening 5,000 feet underwater and why it’s hard to stop. Instead, lazy and incurious, this is what the technocratic mastermind offered: “Just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge – a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.

    “As a result of these efforts, we’ve directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology.”

    Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize-winning head of meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing the assembling of the tackling of the challenge of mobilization, at the end of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit. Thank you, Mr. President. That and $4.95 will get you a venti at Starbucks.

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    p>Elsewhere, we find headlines such as “White House hits BP for yacht trip while Obama golfs”

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    p>And just in case you missed what other important things he’s been up to, here’s a sampling (from a GOP ad, sorry but someone had to do it!)

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    p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

    • I think you are the only person on the planet who believes this.

      <

      p>Well, so do I, so at least there’s two of us.

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      p>Also, like most of what Mark Steyn writes, his statements are utter nonsense. He may think that it’s “lazy and incurious” to actually get good people together to try and solve a problem caused by gross private sector negligence, but I don’t see how. What’s “lazy and incurious” is criticizing the President on this while (1) not offering any ideas whatsoever yourself and (2) not having even noticing a whiff of irony in your criticism of the President’s alleged failure to act when you’ve built your career lazily criticizing liberal attempts to check the failures of the free market.

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