In Oval Office Speech, Obama Calls for New Focus on Energy Policy
By HELENE COOPER and JACKIE CALMES
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: June 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/us/politics/16obama.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — President Obama summoned Americans on Tuesday to a “national mission” to move away from reliance on oil and develop alternative sources of energy, casting the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as an imperative for Congress to act quickly to overcome “a lack of political courage and candor.”
Speaking to a national television audience for the first time from the Oval Office, Mr. Obama also promised a long-term plan to make sure that the gulf states suffering from the oil spill are made whole again. He said he was appointing Ray Mabus, the secretary of the Navy and the former governor of Mississippi, to develop a Gulf Coast restoration plan in cooperation with states, local communities, tribes, fishermen, conservationists and gulf residents.
Even as Mr. Obama was preparing his speech, the government on Tuesday released a new estimate of the amount of oil flowing from the well. It said as much as 60,000 barrels could be spewing into the Gulf of Mexico each day, a sharp increase over the estimate last week of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day.
The new estimate, reflecting the increased oil flow that began after a pipe was deliberately cut to help capture some of the oil coming from the well, continues a pattern in which every new estimate has been sharply higher than the one before. With the broken well’s owner, BP, capturing roughly 15,000 barrels a day, the new estimate suggests that as much as 45,000 barrels a day is escaping into the gulf, punctuating the scale of the substantive and political problems facing Mr. Obama.
“Today, as we look to the gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude,” Mr. Obama said. “We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.”
Mr. Obama’s 18-minute address, delivered at his desk, took place in an atmosphere far different from the crowded campaign rallies and international university halls where he has produced some of his most soaring speeches. This time, Mr. Obama, wearing a dark blue suit and light blue tie, struck a solemn but hopeful tone, invoked military terminology to create a sense of urgency around his response to the crisis, and spoke of the American ingenuity he said was needed to help the country rein in its reliance on oil.
He said he had authorized the use of 17,000 National Guard members to help with the cleanup effort, but only a small number have actually been dispatched by the governors in the region even though Mr. Obama has said that BP will pick up the cost. He also continued to strike an adversarial tone toward BP.
“We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes,” he said. “We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever is necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”
Seizing on the widening calamity in the Gulf of Mexico to push for legislation he has advocated since his campaign, Mr. Obama said he was willing to look at approaches from Republicans as well as Democrats, including raising efficiency standards for buildings as well as cars and trucks.
He said progress had been blocked time and time again by “oil industry lobbyists,” and he suggested that achieving energy independence was an issue of national security, saying the time has come for the United States to “seize control of our own destiny.”
But, he warned: “The one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet.”
Mr. Obama delivered the speech the evening before he was to meet at the White House with the top executives of BP to demand that they agree to establish an independently administered escrow account of billions of dollars to pay claims stemming from the disaster.
He said he would inform the chairman of BP’s board, Carl-Henric Svanberg, “that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness.”
Lawyers at the White House and for BP have been negotiating for days about an escrow account. While Mr. Obama has not put a figure on the account, Senate Democrats have called for $20 billion.
BP released a statement after Mr. Obama’s address. “We share the president’s goal of shutting off the well as quickly as possible, cleaning up the oil and mitigating the impact on the people and environment of the Gulf Coast,” the company said from London. “We look forward to meeting with President Obama tomorrow for a constructive discussion about how best to achieve these mutual goals.”
Mr. Obama also moved to address one of the weaknesses exposed by the spill, lax oversight from the agency with the most direct authority to regulate offshore drilling, the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. He said he had named Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department prosecutor and inspector general, to restructure the agency to make it a tougher regulator.
Administration officials said the speech marked “an inflection point” in the nearly two-month-old crisis: the end of a phase in which BP tried and failed to stop the leak using the quickest available options, and the beginning of the “new reality” that plugging the leak could take months and the cleanup months or even years past that.
The new estimate for the amount of oil spewing from the well is far above the figure of 5,000 barrels a day that the government and BP clung to for weeks after the spill began. It reflects a possible increase in the flow rate that occurred after BP cut an underwater pipe called a riser on June 3 to install a new device to capture part of the oil.
It is based on new information, including high-resolution video made after the riser cut, and on pressure readings taken by a device that was inserted this week into the equipment at the sea floor. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, was personally involved in using those pressure readings to help make the latest calculation.
“This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP’s well,” Secretary Chu said in a statement. “As we continue to collect additional data and refine these estimates, it is important to realize that the numbers can change.”
The company has proven in recent days that it can capture roughly 15,000 barrels of oil a day, though the operation was interrupted briefly on Tuesday by a small fire after the Discoverer Enterprise drilling ship was apparently struck by lightning.
BP has outlined plans to deploy new equipment so that it can capture a minimum of 40,000 barrels a day by the end of June, and a minimum of 60,000 barrels a day by mid-July.
If the new range of flow estimates proves correct, and if BP is ultimately found guilty of gross negligence in actions it took that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, that would mean the company could be assessed fines of up to $258 million a day. Those fines could come on top of payments for cleanup costs and economic damage to Gulf Coast businesses.
Fearful that the spill could ultimately cost BP tens of billions of dollars, investors have driven the company’s market valuation down by 48 percent since the spill began, erasing $91 billion of shareholder value. BP shares rose more than 2 percent during regular trading on Tuesday, but then gave up all that gain and more in after-hours trading.
Mr. Obama has said all along that BP will pay for everything. People close to BP said that as asset-rich as the global oil giant is, its holdings are not so liquid that it can instantly set aside as many billions of dollars as the White House and leaders in Congress are seeking. Also being worked out are the terms by which BP would have to replenish the fund as it is drawn down.
BP officials are adamant that the company should not be liable for the lost wages of oil workers laid off because of the six-month moratorium that the Obama administration imposed on deepwater offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire. But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and other administration officials repeatedly have cited idled oil workers as among those who could press claims.
Justin Gillis contributed reporting from New York.
With Call to Arms, Obama Seeks to Shift Arc of Oil Crisis
By PETER BAKER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: June 15, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/us/politics/16assess.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — Fifty-six days, millions of gallons of oil and countless hours of cable television second-guessing later, President Obama finally addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night to declare war.
His enemies were oil industry lobbyists and corrupt regulators, foreign energy suppliers and conservative policy makers, and a stubborn gushing well at the bottom of the sea. And ultimately, he was fighting his own powerlessness, as a president castigated for failing to stop the nation’s worst-ever oil spill tried to turn disaster into opportunity.
While laying out his “battle plan” to break “this siege” from a spill “assaulting our shores,” the commander in chief hoped to pivot from defense to offense, using the still-unresolved crisis in the Gulf of Mexico to press for sweeping change in energy policy. Evoking the spirit and language of predecessors who used the same setting to send troops into harm’s way, Mr. Obama cast the effort to cap a well as part of the American determination to shape its own destiny.
“The one approach I will not accept is inaction,” Mr. Obama said from behind the presidential desk named Resolute with the traditional flags in the background. “The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is somehow too big and too difficult to meet.”
For eight weeks, the spill has seemed somehow too big and too difficult to meet as the president struggled to contain it while trying to demonstrate leadership, sympathy and anger. It was not clear that this was one of those dramatic moments that alter the arc of a political crisis.
Until now he has employed most of the tools of his office, imposing a deepwater drilling moratorium, traveling repeatedly to the region, firing an agency director and appointing a commission. He used a few more Tuesday night, summoning the cameras to the Oval Office, appointing a long-term recovery coordinator and demanding that the company responsible, BP, set up a multibillion-dollar escrow account to compensate the victims.
And for good measure, on Wednesday he will subject BP executives to a perp walk of sorts across the White House driveway into the West Wing for a presidential scolding.
That he would feel compelled to devote his first Oval Office address to the nation after 17 months to the spill, and not to the Great Recession or two actual shooting wars still raging overseas, only underscored the profound impact on his presidency. By this point in their tenures, his four most recent predecessors had all spoken from the Oval Office (Ronald Reagan had five times already), according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University scholar.
The reluctance may be understandable. The format frustrated George W. Bush, who never felt comfortable in the setting and sought out other sites for major addresses both in the White House and on the road. In a different way, it does not play to Mr. Obama’s particular oratorical skills, which are at their most effective before large, receptive audiences.
In his first use of the trappings of the office, Mr. Obama seemed at ease and filled the screen, as political professionals put it. While not projecting Reagan’s fatherly folksiness or Bill Clinton’s feel-your-pain empathy, or even reaching the rhetorical flourishes of his own most famous speeches, Mr. Obama came across as confident and presidential, curbing his natural instincts for professorial lecturing (if not the constant hand gesturing, which proved distracting on television).
He required more time from viewers than many Oval Office addresses, about 18 minutes compared with the 4 or 5 consumed by John F. Kennedy’s civil rights speech, Reagan’s paean to the Challenger crew or Mr. Bush’s addresses after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or the opening of the Iraq war. But he adopted some of the martial language often heard in such moments. He had spent part of his day at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., where he linked the challenge of the gulf to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the time he looked into the camera back in Washington, he vowed to win “the battle we’re waging against an oil spill that is assaulting our shores and our citizens.”
The purpose, though, was to go beyond the immediate and make the case that the spill justifies his plans for energy and climate change legislation, a way of turning a political burden into a political weapon. He called on Americans to “seize the moment” to “end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.”
“The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now,” he said. “Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.”
The connection to the spill, of course, goes only so far. While he called for more wind turbines and solar panels, for instance, neither fills gasoline tanks in cars and trucks, and so their expansion would not particularly reduce the need for the sort of deepwater drilling that resulted in the spill.
And Republicans quickly accused Mr. Obama of capitalizing on the leaking oil to pass a bill that otherwise seemed stalled. “President Obama should not exploit this crisis to impose a job-killing national energy tax on struggling families and small businesses,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader.
On the other side, some environmentalists fretted that Mr. Obama would be too timid. “Will President Obama give a grandiose speech followed by more politically expedient baby steps, or will he set America on a new path?” Philip Radford, executive director of Greenpeace, asked before the address.
Grandiose or not, Mr. Obama has used speeches in big moments before to turn around political troubles, including his speech on race when his campaign appeared likely to implode because of his association with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright or addresses to a joint session of Congress at two different points when his health care program was in jeopardy.
He ended Tuesday night’s address with a prayer for courage and for the people of the gulf and for a hand to “guide us through the storm towards a brighter day.”
But he knows if he gets through this one, there will be another storm. “The oil spill,” he said, “is not the last crisis America will face.”
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