BP Gulf Oil Crisis: The cleanup effort wasn't hopeless, you ass

Richard Wolff, The Daily Beast, June 4, 2010

Obama Knew the Spill Was Hopeless

Critics have bashed President Obama for being slow to seize the political initiative in combating the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now widely believed to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The White House has battled back, releasing a timeline of events showing that Obama was briefed -- and deploying the Coast Guard -- within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

What has not been previously disclosed: The president was not only briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also on just how bad it would be -- and how hard it would be to plug the hole.

Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama at one of the earliest briefings in late April that the blowout would likely lead to an unprecedented environmental disaster, senior White House aides told The Daily Beast. Browner warned that capping a well at such depths had never been done before, and that they ought to expect an oil spill that would continue until a relief well was drilled in August, the aide said.

That early briefing on the scope of the spill -- and enormous technical challenges involved in fixing it -- might help explain the sense of fatalism that has infused Obama's team from the start.

Little that has happened since has changed their mindset. Now six weeks later, the president’s top advisers expect the oil spill -- and the negative stories -- to continue through August.

The fact that Team Obama was warned of the extent of the disaster so early on suggests that White House officials were aware of the environmental challenge long before they decided to demonstrate concern via presidential visits to the Gulf.
[...]
Given the lack of technical capabilities on the sea floor, there’s not much the White House can do to plug the hole. And there are limited options for effectively preventing the oil from reaching large stretches of coastline. Instead, Obama’s team is focusing on the options at their immediate disposal -- methods of news management and presidential communication.[...]

There were many cleanup options that were not pursued and the few taken up came only after leaders such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal spent weeks pushing for their implementation.