Did Obama and BP react fast enough to Gulf oil spill? Environmental expert’s evaluation

(In Part One of the interview, Thomas described the spill’s projected impact on area wildlife as well as on the nation’s food systems.

In Part Two, he discussed the relative safety of deepwater drilling off American shores as opposed to importing oil from overseas.)

Animal Beat (AB): We talked a little about policy, and while we’re on that subject, I don’t know if you’d want to comment at all on the performance of two entities—one, British Petroleum, and the other, the Obama administration and government agencies in response to this crisis.

Dr. Robert Thomas: Well, of course I do. First of all Obama. There were a number of days that passed here before they really, really, really got serious about this. You know, he’s running a country, and when this thing first happens everybody goes, “Oh that looks bad.” But you don’t realize how big it really is. So now he’s very serious about it, he’s very much on top of it, it seems, as much as he can be.

Of course the Coast Guard is by law in charge of this cleanup and I guess you could argue they’re under the president, so I guess you could argue he was on this right away if you look at it that way.

But it didn’t get his attention. Just like Bush. You know we all fault Bush for Katrina, but my personal opinion is that Obama didn’t do a whole heck of a lot better here.

But now we’ll see. The proof is in the pudding on what he really does, instead of what he says.

And BP? Of course you’ve got to be shocked immediately when you’ve got that kind of fire on one of your rigs and you’ve lost 11 lives. But again the proof is going to be in how well they do over the next week or so.

I see them in their press conferences every day. They’ve got that deer in the headlights look. They’re scared to death. I don’t know how much of what they say you can believe.

But they’re a great company. They don’t want this to be happening. This is killing them. It’s costing them between six and seven million dollars a day just for what they’re doing trying to deal with it.

And that doesn’t include their financial losses from not being able to sell routinely the oil that they would have been getting out of the ground. So this is hurting them.

You know, something this huge if it continues to go could destroy the corporation. And it’s an international corporation. It’s terrible to think about.

AB: Would you say that most of the folks you talk with in the region there would agree with the evaluations you just gave us?

Dr. Thomas: Yeah, unless they’re in the oil industry. They’re all being very defensive. Though they’re shocked, of course they’re defending and saying “They’re doing the best they can and they really care.” Because if you were to go talk with the people at BP, regardless of how you feel, you’d see that they’re very sincere about what they’re doing. They really want to stop this thing for all the right reasons as well as their financial reasons.

You know they’re a good corporation. But people who find fault with corporate capitalism can very easily find fault with how this is going and have all kinds of conspiracy theories on how hard they’re really working to stop it.

But they [BP] would be idiots to not be working on this diligently. It’s costing them an arm and a leg. So I don’t know.

But I do think that they need to be constantly reminded that it’s their responsibility. I do really appreciate that every time Obama speaks about this he says BP will pay for this. And he did what I like to see a president do—he put the Defense Department on this and made our military available, and then he says, “and BP will pay for this.” I’m assuming he’ll give them a bill at the end of it. Which I think is absolutely appropriate.