Russell Trimmer | Give universities a crack at it

If the world made sense, the people responsible for causing a problem would take on the responsibility for fixing it. Unfortunately, we have created a world that is too complex to easily apply the lessons of simple childhood decency. This is especially true for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We cannot depend on those immediately responsible to provide an adequate solution. Instead, President Barack Obama should make the data public to allow research universities to help deal with the crisis.

There are numerous parties that have a share of the responsibility. In the broadest sense, those who use oil are all complicit in causing the spill; as consumers, we demand cheap fuel, and even now 60 percent of Americans support increased offshore drilling. The stockholders of British Petroleum and Transocean and Halliburton are complicit as well, because they profited from eliminating costly safety measures. The managers of those companies are all complicit, too, because they repeatedly made rash and unsafe decisions. And finally, our government is complicit because of its lax regulations and its push to increase offshore drilling.

We could find blame with each of these parties and require them to fix the problem that they caused. BP and the government are the most obvious targets for critics. Indeed, both have expressed some degree of ownership of the problem. Most recently, Obama made a display of responsibility at a White House news conference last Thursday, stating, “In case you’re wondering who’s responsible, I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down.”

But focusing on who to blame is dangerous; regardless of who we blame for causing the spill, we cannot depend only on Obama or only on BP for finding a solution. The crisis is too complex and the implications for the environment, for communities of the Gulf, and for the U.S. economy as a whole are too profound. By dwelling on the issue of responsibility, Obama has limited the valuable potential that research universities have in finding a way to stop the leaking oil.

Universities have no responsibility to fix a problem that they did not cause. But academics do have valuable knowledge and resources about the ecology of the gulf, the properties of crude oil, etc. To take the most optimistic view, they could fix the leak and minimize the damage of the oil. To take the most pessimistic, they could simply try and fail.

We do not know how valuable academic research could be because BP and the government have held back data on the spill. As a publicly traded company, BP has an interest in limiting information about the extent of the spill. We have seen this already in BP’s estimates about the rate of oil spilling into the gulf: originally quoted at 5000 barrels of oil each day, independent estimates have since put the flow rate at anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000. Meanwhile, RTTNews reports that Thad Allen, the top federal official in charge of the spill, has said that the responsibility of the federal government is to “make sure [BP] execute[s] their responsibilities as the responsible party.”

Given BP’s continued failures, Obama ought to look beyond the parties immediately responsible for the crisis and open up data to independent researchers who might contribute their expertise. As quoted in the Pensacola News Journal, Frank Brogan, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, expressed frustration, saying “this whole thing strings on data at the end of the day. Without the data, we don’t know how to deal with the spill. We don’t know where it’s going.”

Obama must now compel BP to make the spill data public. He has led the government in its response to the crisis, but he needs to use more than just the government to help the nation.

Russell Trimmer is a rising Wharton junior from Lexington, Va. HIs e-mail address is trimmerr@wharton.upenn.edu

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