Hard on the heels of Obama's talk to the nation yesterday evening, regressives are busily criticizing him for trying to "exploit" the Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis to advance "his" agenda.
These critics are people whose attitudes about the environment appear to have been shaped back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and all that underground petroleum was being formed. The basic premise is, "what good is the gol-durn environment anyway, if we can't exploit it however we want?"
Many in this group would also put a religious spin on it, too: "Gawd gave us this environment to be exploited by man." So of course God (whose name in Slavic languages, "bog," bears a clear relationship to the cradle of petroleum) must either have a plan (is he/she just trying to give us an on-the-surface pool of oil to make it easier for us to get at?) or is going to fix it for us in the end.
Other critics don't have a "prophet" motive, but a clearer and more rational, if also more venal, $profit$ motive. They are the oil/gas/coal industries and their well-paid representatives in Congress. This group is working hard to paint BP as the only bad apple among them; and they're working hard against government efforts to tighten inspection of their activities, and to prevent even a temporary halt to drilling still more offshore wells. This perception (or lack of perception) of the issues raised by is no less antediluvian. It doesn't even seem reliably self-preserving, because one oil company (BP) is almost certain to disappear as a result of this spill and the same fate may stalk others.
In coal mines, canaries were used to detect the presence of deadly gasses. (Technology put the canaries out of work but that's OK, it was hard on the canaries.) The pelicans might be seen as the equivalent messengers of catastrophe in the petroleum mines. So, this little accident involving one underwater well and one oil company is a wake-up call.
Just as our last President "exploited" the terrorist attacks of September 11 to accomplish things he considered necessary to enhance our security in the longer term, our current President is entirely correct to try to "exploit" the current disaster to break us out of our uncritical reliance on fossil fuels. Presidents' calls for action are not (or shouldn't be seen as) "their" personal agendas; they are trying to deal with issues that are (or should be) on "our" agenda.
By the way, it's worth noting that what Bush was able to do in anti-terrorism at the time was really only baby steps toward improved vigilance, more intelligence, and better focus on combating the problem. Some of those steps were difficult and costly; some are only now bearing fruit; some never will; and the truth is that despite the lack of terrorist successes so far in bringing off another attack on the U.S., we can't really say we've eliminated the problem. The same undoubtedly will be true of measures we take now to revamp our energy policies. Change in this area will also be difficult, possibly costly, but a start needs to be made.
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