BP OIL SPILL - WORST ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE IN US HISTORY

On April 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 crew members and sparked the greatest environmental disaster in United States history. Combined with the Texas City Refinery Explosion and the Prudohoe Bay Oil Spill, this marks the third serious incident at a BP-operated site in the United States. Current estimates for the amount of oil being discharged from the broken well range from 500,000 US Gallons to 4.2 Million US Gallons per day. Over 400 different species of animals live in the area affected by the spill. Hundreds of dead sea turtles and dead dolphins have been found within the spill area. Hundreds more marine animals are certain to perish needlessly due to the careless disregard for the marine environment by oil interests and the powerful oil industry lobby in the US government.

As President Barack Obama struggles to come to grips with the slippery mess in the Gulf of Mexico, it remains unclear exactly what he can do to stop the oil that's been gushing from a shattered BP well for six weeks. "I take responsibility," Obama said Thursday at a news conference. "It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down." Carol Browner, the president's chief energy policy adviser, insisted as she made the rounds of weekend talk shows that the federal government has always been in charge of the situation. But the president "is not legally in charge," Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out on his blog.

"As long as BP is not under the direct control of the government, he has no direct line of authority, and responsibility is totally confused," wrote Reich, who's now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. The only way to make sure the president is "ultimately in charge" and that BP is working in the interest of the American public instead of its stockholders, Reich said, is for Obama to take over the oil giant's operations in the Gulf until the crisis ends. If the government can take over AIG and General Motors to prevent a financial meltdown, "it should be able to put BP's North American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history," Reich argued."

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"If a bank is too big to fail, it's way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it's too deep to be drilled in the first place," declared New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. BP and the White House have been "equally clueless" about how to stop the spewing crude, said Herbert, who called for "dynamic leadership" to address the nation's dependence on oil. Kuttner agreed, saying the president "seems congenitally unable to rise to the occasion" and use this disaster to change public opinion.

"If ever there were a moment to make clear that our energy future cannot be left to the energy industry, and to rally the public on behalf of a long-term shift away from carbon fuels to renewable sources, it is now," Kuttner wrote.

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