In former President Barack Obamas latest memoir he shamed the American people for liking “cheap gas and big cars” more than they ever cared about “the environment” even during the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Obama made these criticisms in “A Promised Land,” his newest 700-page book released in early November.
On the 570th page, the former commander in chief recalls a press conference held a month over the beginning of the oil spill, which has now been considered one of the largest in history. He said his comments at the time did not adequately express the true frustration he felt.
From Fox News:
“Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound,” Obama writes in his book. “Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps.”
What he really wanted to say was that government regulatory agencies were not fully equipped to address an environmental accident because many American voters for decades had “bought into the idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters to do whatever the hell they wanted to do.”
He then chastised Americans for not being willing to foot the bill for technology to “quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet.”
The only way to truly prevent another catastrophe, like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Obama says, “was to stop drilling entirely.”
“But that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face,” he writes.
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killed 11 people and injured 17 others in April 2010 then for nearly three months over 200 million gallons of crude oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico polluting 16,000 miles of coastline in the southern United States and killing over 8,000 animals.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said it was “the worst environmental disaster in American history.”
According to new research published this year, the toxic oil spread far beyond the initial footprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
