Oil and Politics

Oil and Politics
Steffen Schmidt **

I have been an affiliate of the Nova Oceanographic Center for over ten years and this year the value of that relationship is bearing huge but tragic fruit. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has put a white-hot light coastal zone problems and challenges.

One of the odd side effects of this has been the focus this week on the Federal Minerals Management Service. The Interior plans to split this agency dividing the section that ensures that energy companies comply with federal safety and environmental regulations from another section of the MMS that gets billions in drilling royalties for the federal government each year. This is second only to the revenue generated by the Internal Revenue Service!

The move, he said, was designed to guarantee "there is no conflict, real or perceived, with respect to those functions."

The drill-baby-drill cheerleading of John McCain and Sarah Palin when they were running for the White House and Newt Gingrich the intellectual guru of the GOP has lost all of its cachet.

In May of 2010 more than a third of all Americans in a new CBS News poll says, “…The big spill is indicative of a broad problem with offshore exploration.” A recent Pew survey shows just 38 percent approvals for the president's handling of the issue of oil.

This disaster is one of the most complex and pervasive coastal policy challenges I have ever seen. It is much bigger than Katrina. I just spoke with some of my colleagues at Nova Oceanographic and they are now tracking the Gulf of Mexico currents that swirl east, take material from the gulf to the Florida Keys, enter the Gulf of Florida and then enter the Gulf Stream which runs north along the entire US coast and then swirls around past Ireland and England. (See maps below)

According to Joanna Gyory, Arthur J. Mariano, Edward H. Ryan, “The Loop Current (1) feeds the Florida Current that transports significant amounts of heat poleward; (2) transports surface waters of tropical origin into the Gulf of Mexico; and (3) is fed by the Caribbean current and the Yucatan Current.”

This could add to the enormous political firestorm that has already exploded over oil drilling offshore and the environment. For the Republicans this is bad news all up and down the East Coast with repercussions up and down the West Coast.

As a coastal policy expert (I teach over 70 student this summer on line in my Iowa State University class) this is one of the most compelling coastal policy and politics issues I have ever integrated into my classes.

Should we stop offshore drilling?

We can’t. Our dependence on carbon-based fuels is so huge that we will be struggling with how to make coal, oil, and natural gas “environment friendly” for many, many decades.

But, “drill-baby-drill” will not be the bumper sticker of any political party or group anytime soon.


** Steffen Schmidt is Professor of Political Science, Public Policy, and Coastal Policy at Iowa State University.