President Obama says his administration is “doing everything we can” about the BP oil problem.
I doubt it.
There are simply more of “us,” the folks out here in the world, than there are of “them,” the folks in his administration, the ones he probably means by “we.” We out here should be part of the “we” working on this because it would greatly magnify the amount of brain power involved.
That is the unexploited value of the “transparency” matter. It's an issue that always sounds so abstract, but right now this month we can see the cost of lack of transparency in terms exceedingly concrete. There will probably never be a moment where transparency is any more clearly important. Yet it continues to take a back seat to other concerns.
Who knows what is being overlooked? Well, who knows what is being considered or tried? Obviously, we out here do not. Reporters are clawing for the information, but it comes grudgingly and at intervals—not the property of a transparent system. Neither is it the property of a system intent on leveraging the full potential of America. There are a lot of smart people out here. And with unemployment being what it is, many of them don't even have pesky job responsibilities to stand in their way of giving the matter their full attention.
Hence claims about “doing everything we can” are just false, Mr. President. You can improve transparency, and you're not doing that. It doesn't require legislation to open this process. The president can just order someone to post what's going on regularly to a blog. He can order someone to read an email box or to man the phones. There are low-tech ways to address this.
Sure, there are already telephones and email boxes. But without information about what is going on—what's being tried and why, what's not being tried and why not, what are the known parameters?—our suggestions will be low-grade and off-topic, and then they'll complain, improperly, that it's not worth asking us. Our suggestions can only be of good quality if we have the same quality information on the outside as those on the inside have.
There is no reason whatsoever for privacy here in determining how to proceed. As soon as it was shown that BP couldn't immediately handle the problem and the matter went into “problem solving” mode, rather than executing a known, debugged script for fixing a well-understood and well-anticipated problem, whoever was in charge (and we're led to believe at some level that's Obama), there should have been plans to open the process so that anyone anywhere in the world could read about what they were doing. There should have been a clearinghouse to dispense detailed technical updates and to receive suggestions. The good suggestions should have been making it into what to consider.
Quite honestly, for something that's at risk of losing us an entire coastline, I don't see reason why C-SPAN should not have been called in to televise the ongoing discussions. Outrageous? I don't think so. Nuclear holocaust movies almost invariably suggest that at the time things are running out of control, the war room should be opened to political opponents, even those in other countries, just to avoid fear that something underhanded is afoot. That's not happening.
Doing everything we can means involving all of us. Maybe he just meant “we're throwing lots of money and important-sounding people at the things that seemed obvious to our insular group.” That's not clearly the same thing.
Or we can break this problem down another way. Here's a phrase I've made up to use at work when I'm assigned impossible tasks without being given the right resources to do them: No responsibility without authority. I'm feeling in this circumstance like there's got to be a companion to this: No authority without responsibility.
The value of transparency is that it shares responsibility. By saying “don't you mind about this, we've got it under control,” you're holding the authority close to the vest. Expect a lot of responsibility to go with that. If the President wants a tool to allow the responsibility to be shared, he should open up the process to more people. Then if nothing comes he can really say we tried everything, or at least considered everything. But it takes more than merely saying it to be able to claim you tried everything, and so it's going to take more than mere words to get rid of the responsibility.
Increasingly, we in our democracy are told that government is too important for ordinary people to know what affects their fate. We have gigantic secretive intelligence agencies that dispense all kinds of advice about how we should or shouldn't manage all kinds of security issues. Their recommendations often seem irrational to people on the street, but we're assured that if we knew what they knew, we'd agree this was sfine. There's no way to judge such assurances, yet we're forced to judge them anyway at election time, based often just on an incumbent candidate's impossible-to-verify words. Democracy can't withstand that in the long run. We end up either not trusting government at all or trusting it too much. Free flow of information could fix that. It allows us to distinguish good action from bad action, good trust from bad trust. It is the life blood of our society.
We need more transparency generally, but we need it now specifically. We need it not just legislatively but pragmatically. It could begin today as a matter of administrative policy with the stroke of a pen or the utterance of a word. It doesn't have to wait.
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Comments
On reflection, though, the answer to why they haven't asked for ideas from the rest of the world is likely to be two-fold; 1) They're hiding or trying to hide something, for example, there's some kind of "industrial secret" they don't want the rest of us to know about , and
2) they're terrified of losing face - "We are Big Oil, and we know what we're doing" .
Salvation can come from the unlikeliest of places, and I'll guarantee there are people like us sitting, yelling the very cure for the leak at the footage on TV etc.
Buzztab has referred to it as an internet sensation:
"Spill Cam: Another hypnotic internet sensation for the netizens through out America as every body wants to see the video of mud, gas and oil gushing out from the sea floor at Gulf of Mexico while guessing about the BP efforts ‘success to plug the gusher."
If they have to take steps beyond the kill shot, the cam will become more popular and it will be like watching Apollo 13 in real time.
Throw in some wagering and this will become viral.
At a restaurant a few weeks ago, a waitress said she'd bring bread and she didn't for a very long time. I saw her walk past several times. I said to my family “she's forgotten.” Maybe she had, maybe she hadn't. Eventually she showed up late with bread. The manager came by later, thankfully without my having to ask, and suggested it was not her fault. The bread unavailability, maybe so. But she is my interface to the kitchen, and she wasn't bringing me word about the problem until later. That's as much her role as bringing me food.
That's Obama's problem. He thinks the only thing we care about is the end solution. But we need information on what's going on in between. And he should know it. Because he campaigned on it. That's what transparency—timely information as things happen, not as part of some historical summary much later, too late for it to matter.
Lezlie
They obviously didn't think so, since they did it under pressure, but in my opinion, it has. I would put a camera in their command headquarters that is manned 24 hours/day, also.
Here is a video from last week. http://bp.concerts.com/gom/rovs_24052010.htm
At about the 1:30 mark, they show a robot picking up a wrench and fixing a line. It answered the question I had regarding WTF was taking so long.
The more transparency the better.
What are your thoughts about transparency of the Federal Reserve System (loaded question)?
I see no reason to oppose, but many claim that would be a case where transparency would be harmful.
Anyway, thank you for the thoughts re oil. I often recommend your blog to others for your well-reasoned, polite approach (whatever that means). Maybe I'll start blogging instead of just being a snobby commenter all the time! Rated.
It would seem that throwing this disaster open to the public would be the thing to do and we could call in a whole range of scientists, academicians, etc. to help. But no, that is NOT what is happening here.
Living right here where the spill is I know all too well. For instance, even getting to where the oil is coming ashore is much harder than one might think. Just access to some beaches and wildlife preserves is impossible. Workers doing cleanup sign contracts stating they will not even admit to doing so.
The wider view? Why do we need all the secret/behind the scenes mumbo jumbo? Are things so bad the public has no right to know??
Can we not judge for ourselves now??
Our gov't cannot stand as a democracy in my view with no daylight shining on its proceedings. Hiding things from public view and public knowledge will be the death knell of this gov't. We have now one of the biggest movements towards gov't secrecy on record, and despite The big 'O's promise to run an open administration he is passing Bush with his classified/top secret document deals.
Your web site idea is perfect. No reason that couldn't be implemented in short order. Someplace to go to get some answers. What's been tried and what hasn't and more importantly, WHY?
I've had thirty e-mails from Obama's website since the leak started (none mentioned the spill) so I know it's doable.
The Republicans may have just found the Waterloo they've been seeking. Heaven help us.
Why don't the booms have weighted skirts so the oil doesn't just slide beneath them like it does?
Why aren't they honest and just tell us that the only way to stop this thing is the relief well, so don't expect this to get plugged until Mid-August? Everything they are trying is just stall tactics to give us hope, rather than the truth.
The junk shot has 60-70% chance of working. Bullshit. More like 6-7% chance. I'm not saying stop trying, I'm just saying a little blunt honesty is in order.
As always Kent, You get directly to the problem. Great post!
I visited a friend's house one time. People who were once more well-off than they were at the time of my visit. Plastic covers were on the chairs. Why? I asked. Well, to preserve what's underneath. So they get no use out of the things, but they preserve them anyway, just to have. Here I was company and I couldn't see either because they were being preserved for who knows what... I imagine such plastic covers over the beaches... to preserve their value. For whom? If the media can't get there, neither can the tourists. Maybe there's some legit reason I'm not thinking of.
I'm also assuming that this is a (metaphorical and perhaps literal) tide that will keep coming, and so in my mind “cleanup” suggests that you do it once and it's over. So it seems futile that way, too. Though maybe they think the cleanup will be impossible if they don't keep doing it incrementally. That would make sense, I guess. I don't know. Sorry, I'm just thinking aloud because it's hard for me to describe otherwise what's puzzling me. Maybe someone reading along can set me straight on some of this, at least.
I'm reminded of the advice by Deep Throat in the Watergate case—follow the money. The money probably explains it. Who's paying for the beach cleanup that is requiring the signing of the contracts? The government should be handling it, so we can FOIA the contracts, and when they should bill BP. If BP is handling it and then requiring the contracts, that sounds wrong. BP may have special expertise in deep sea drilling, but that doesn't mean they're experts on loving care of the beaches. We're leaving them in charge only because we can't afford not to on the drilling; on the other matters, they should be required by law to leave well enough alone and just to pay whatever bills get sent to them.
I entirely agree, Kent. One of the problems that keeps coming up here, I think, is the dysfunctional relationship between private industry and government. As you suggested in your last post (if I recall correctly--sorry if not), it's ridiculous to allow private companies to take on so much risk with public goods, like the environment, and expect them to simply their good behavior. This kind of disaster might have been avoided with better regulation and more transparency at the start; now that we're in the middle of it, I can't see how transparency could hurt the situation, and it certainly has the potential to improve it, as you point out.
'Tis easy to block off the waterways to traffic, and especially media folk toting cameras.
And the food is much higher and many are not buying even it for fear it will taste like the oil. I have heard too many jokes already of fish fried in deep oil I want to scream here.
The folks here say Bee Pee is running the whole, complete show.
The contract workers make $10.00 an hour and cannot wear respirators. Many are getting sick from the fumes laying booms.
I do not understand the why of the media cutting the minutes of play this gets on the evening news nor the spot light on the Bee Pee clowns latest failed effort to fix this mess of a failed rig.
The complete lost of so many estuaries is going to be around for many generations. The oil eating bacteria will not make it all disappear any faster than the chemical dispersant soap sprayed by planes to make it sink beneath the water surface.
Rob, I don't know if I said that or not, but I agree with it. Letting a private company with a conflict of interest take on such an important function should be done narrowly and with lots of oversight. There is a big opportunity at all times for the creation of negative externalities, which are like windfalls to the company, allowing it to offload something it doesn't want to a waiting dupe.
Mission, the business of requiring people not to take safety precautions, lamentable as it is, may also be the way they hang themselves. Someone should install some good laws right away to protect those people if they're not protected already, and then no one can claim it's retroactive law if BP continues to violate them and gets prosecuted for it. That's shameful.
As far as "transparency" they are protecting their asses, and assets. They don't want to allow just anyone to solve the problem. But then there is also the old adage, "too many cooks". I am sure they are listening to people who have some idea of what to try.
Right on the money about the transparency. The other difficulty is communication which is the first casualty of any oil spill. This is taken advantage of by Big Oil to hide any truth they can.
you can't have the transparency you want without democracy. with democracy, you can't avoid having transparency. you also get the power to act. until you get the power to act, you and 300 million americans are second class people, the subjects in this elective monarchy.
By the way, have you ever thought of getting into the business of making affirmative suggestions? What you suggest is sort of vaguely phrased like it's affirmative (stop using the term democracy where you don't mean it) but it doesn't really say what to do. My suggestions here and in my other piece are relatively concrete in order to get people to react with a “yeah, let's do that” or “no, let's do the following other very specific thing...”
I don't care that you agree or disagree, but I care a lot that you go out on a limb and suggest something tangibly executable and pragmatically within the realm of individual action by some specific person. There are advantages to democracy, but one of the serious disadvantages of democracy is that it's diffuse, and it's critically important to identify the real actions individuals can take to make it lean one way or another. The “you” in your criticisms are often “society” but society is rarely doing any one thing in a concerted way and so, in sum, is not listening. Speak to the individuals who are listening.
Yesterday I heard a conversation with an o&g engineer, a fellow self-identified as having worked on mitigation issues rather than exploration issues. He discussed calling the WH, the EPA and whoever in Louisiana is responsible for the state's environmental agency to offer his help. He said in each case he was shunted off to the BP hotline for public suggestions, meaning that even our gov't was not taking public input seriously and leaving all the issues up to BP. From that it appears that the gov't's refrain of them being in charge might be a little less than accurate.
As a man who campaigned on transparency and integrity after an administration who understood those terms and practiced neither, Obama could be doing a great deal more than just letting us see the blowout on the ocean floor. Allowing BP to dump ineffective and toxic chemicals to disburse surface oil underscores his support of BPs PR regarding this disaster. Dont fix the problem, fix the perception, only the problem is so huge that it is impossible to hide.
Tangentially, I was with a friend back when the rig first went down and before the magnitude of the issue was understood publicly. This friend is the spouse of a retired BP engineering exec. While discussing how the problem might be mitigated (I also spent 6 years in the E&P dept of a large oil company) he predicted that although there were ways to shut down the well explosively, and that the Russians had done so in similar situations, they would have resulted in a loss of the borehole which would mean it could never be produced. He went on to say no matter what is tried (and this was before the big containment dome was even discussed) the well would not stop spewing for 90 days - as thats how long it would take to drill another hole that intercepted the broken one and cement it closed. Looks like he was right on.