Why not cede that the government shares partial responsibility for this?
Only in a minimal sense.
The government is responsible for off-shore drilling oversight through the Minerals Management Service. The Bush administration did not enforce that oversight
at all, allowing the MMS to become nothing more than a drug/porn good-ol'-oil-boys party club.
Ten days after taking office, the Obama administration began an investigation into the MMS failures, and issued new and more stringent ethics requirements. Many MMS employees were fired; others were prosecuted.
Today, Salazar announced another investigation into the workings of the MMS
since January 2009, to see what more, if anything, could have been done to eliminate the culture of criminality that Bush/Cheney allowed to develop within the MMS.
Salazar has also signed a secretarial order splitting MMS into three distinct agencies to separate its energy development, enforcement, and revenue collecting functions. Beyond this, I don't know what more the Obama administration could be expected to have done...
... unless you're advocating that the president himself should be doing the inspections.
So, what more would YOU have had the Obama administration do?
Someone who knows, and who's paycheck is partly funded by the oil industry, is Larry Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. He has gone on record saying "
If they [the administration] could have handled this situation better, they would have already."
If we authorize safety regulations and pay millions to regulate an industry, we should certainly expect they take some responsibility for getting the job done.
I agree. Salazar is making
sure the Bush-era MMS free-for-all is a thing of the past. Going forward - at least under Obama's watch - I expect no more such MMS corruption issues to occur.
