Schork Oil Outlook: BP Oil Spill—What's Really Being Done?

This time he means it.

In Tuesday night’s address to the nation President Obama reminded us, again, that “…we will make BP pay for the damage…”

Yawn.

Yes Mr. President, we get that part. Go and google “Obama will make BP pay” and nearly 4,000 hits come up. Then type in “BP denies Deepwater responsibility” (or anything to that effect) and you get nothing, squat, no results found.

Now that we have coerced a blank check from BP, will you please tell us what else we are doing?

How about supplying some specifics on how assembling “a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers… led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist… [will] in the coming weeks and days… [actually] capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well.”

At a time when we need an oil man, we get a prizewinning academic. We need guys who wear hardhats calling the shots, not guys who sport propeller caps.

Bottom line, whenever BP gets this well plugged, Washington will take credit and leave the bill for London. Like a lot of the talks the president has given on the topic of Deepwater Horizon, the Tuesday night speech had plenty of sizzle, but very little steak.

As such, you know you have a problem when the commentariat on both the Left and Right hate what you say... or don’t say. In the meantime, the President also talked about how he authorized the deployment of over 17,000 National Guard members along the coast for cleanup efforts.

Seemingly good stuff, until you watch one of the guardsmen using the soapbox to extoll the virtues of the administration’s clean fuels agenda. (Watch the YouTube video here.)

Thus, the President still did not have an answer for us Tuesday night, but at least we know he is not going to let this crisis go to waste.

It’s relatively easy, not to mention costly, to organize hearings and point fingers. In the opinion of The Schork Report, this is political posturing (from both sides of the aisle) at its worst. At a time when so many fronts require strong leadership, let’s focus attentions on finding solutions.

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Stephen Schork is the Editor of The Schork Reportand has more than 17 years experience in physical commodity and derivatives trading, risk systems modeling and structured commodity finance.