The WaPo has a piece this morning in which the authors discuss what I've been wondering for some time now- if, and when, any environmental reforms will come out of the largest environmental disaster in our nation's history. To this point, every change seems either temporary or in a different area. There is a moratorium on offshore drilling, but even that is limited in its scope, and now being challenged by a lawsuit down South. The Minerals Management Service has new leadership, was broken up into three divisions, and renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. But I agree with Leiserowitz:
The difference between now and the awakenings that followed past disasters is as stark as "on versus off," said Anthony Leiserowitz, a researcher at Yale University who tracks public opinion on climate change.
"People's outrage is focused on BP," Leiserowitz said. The spill "hasn't been automatically connected to some sense that there's something more fundamental wrong with our relationship with the natural world," he said.
The story of 2010 is not that nothing happened after the BP spill, or after the coal-mine explosion that killed 29 in West Virginia on April 5. It's that much of the reaction has focused on preventing accidents -- on tighter scrutiny of rigs and mines -- rather than broader changes in the use of oil and coal.
With the caveat that this opinion is from merely being an observer of public interest and the media coverage, from what I've seen the public interest and focus has definitely been on safety and revenge on BP, rather than on environmental reforms. Traditional media coverage has followed that, along with ongoing coverage of the leak itself. Attitudes may have changed- polling in Florida has shown dramatic shifts from support for offshore drilling to opposition- but nothing seems to have translated into action, even at the state level. That hasn't meant no one's trying- even as I type this, there are ads running at the top of OpenLeft from VoteVets pressuring folks like Sen. Burr over his ties to oil companies, and from Clean Energy Works to call Congress around the climate bill. But in making a case for reforms- even for those smaller than the climate bill- our side seems to have failed. I don't traffic enough in the environmental space to know why, but as a number of friends have commented over the weekend that an opportunity is being missed, they may be right.
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