Article’s focus misses point: oil industry deregulation

This news report shouldn’t be about how the Obama administration responded to the BP oil spill or the statistics of how much oil escaped, or didn’t escape; it should be a commentary on what a decade of total oil deregulation has done to the government’s ability to secure any kind of real information about the oil industry at all, let alone respond to a massive oil industry spill emergency [“White House downplayed oil spill’s size, report says,” page one, Oct. 7].

The total evisceration of all rules and regulations relative to the oil industry is what caused the BP oil spill, not the Obama administration’s response. All one has to look at is the published emergency spill-response plan from BP and a number of its oil brethren for the Gulf of Mexico.

Aside from being virtually identical, they all included a plan on how to mitigate the impact of an oil spill on the indigenous Walrus in the Gulf of Mexico. The last time a walrus graced the Gulf of Mexico might have been 3 million years ago; obviously a boilerplate cut-and-paste plan from the Exxon Valdez spill era.

The deregulation of oil during the Bush administration was so absolute and complete that no one was paying attention to what the oil business was doing at all. The oil industry itself was effectively wholly in charge of its own regulation. This kind of specious politically motivated nonsense is a sad commentary on the state of our local press. It’s insulting and intellectually dishonest.

— Mark C. Seaman, Seattle

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