Читать книгу American Energy - Walter A. Rosenbaum - Страница 13

For more than four decades preceding the Gulf event, a broad coalition of conservationists, environmentalists, and numerous allies had been waging a strenuous campaign to compel federal agencies to become more aggressive and rigorous in their regulation of domestic offshore energy exploration. Seven major Gulf oil spills had already occurred in the decade preceding the Deepwater incident.¹⁰ For the critics, the Gulf had become a flagrant example of environmental risk and laggard regulatory oversight. But progress was slow and unsatisfactory, even though the Barack Obama administration had promised to deliver better regulatory management of offshore energy development.

Energy reformers were confronting a stubborn reality inherent in the design of the national governmental system: the powerful and pervasive tendency for national policy to change slowly and fitfully—an “incremental” policy style created by the American Constitution. But sudden bursts of rapid innovation and expansive policy reform do occur, albeit infrequently. This pattern of persistent incrementalism occasionally interrupted by bursts of accelerated change produces what has been called in policy studies a “punctuated equilibrium.”¹¹ Just such a surge of policy transformation is what reformers might have expected from the Deepwater affair.

Critics had hoped the Gulf catastrophe would pack a political punch potent enough to drive Obama’s relatively moderate offshore regulatory reforms in a much more aggressive and ambitious direction. The opportunity seemed obvious. The disaster, it was concluded in a later presidential investigation, had “undermined public faith in the energy industry, governmental regulators, and even our own capability as a nation to respond to crises” and thus seemed a compelling demonstration that something was dangerously deficient in current energy regulation.¹² Even while emergency workers were still fighting to control the underwater spill, the repercussions began to alter the Obama administration’s regulatory reform agenda and unsettle the federal government’s energy regulatory agencies. But, well into Obama’s second presidency, the actual policy impact is disputed, and the sweeping reform of offshore energy regulation apparently so plausible in the wake of the crisis remains elusive.