Oil spillsReliance on BP, feeble regulations make U.S. partially culpable in Deepwater Horizon oil spill
A recent ruling by a federal judge that BP was “grossly negligent” in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill in the Gulf of Mexico placed the majority of blame on the multinational oil and gas company. Although not on trial in this case, the federal government was also culpable in the largest oil spill in U.S. history, according to a new paper. Based on reports from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, the Chief Council’s Report and other government documents, the report’s authors determined that the government’s reliance on market-based accountability mechanisms and its failure to implement a regulatory process based on a mutually agreed upon set of robust standards and voluntary information disclosure led to the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
A recent ruling by a federal judge that BP was “grossly negligent” in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill in the Gulf of Mexico placed the majority of blame on the multinational oil and gas company. Although not on trial in this case, the federal government was also culpable in the largest oil spill in U.S. history, according to a new paper by Christopher Koliba, a University of Vermont professor in Community Development and Applied Economics, and one of his former students.
A University of Vermont release reports that based on reports from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, the Chief Council’s Report and other government documents, Koliba and Russell Mills, assistant professor in political science at Bowling Green State University, determined that the government’s reliance on market-based accountability mechanisms and its failure to implement a regulatory process based on a mutually agreed upon set of robust standards and voluntary information disclosure led to the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
“The federal agency that was supposed to be regulating the oil industry had competing objectives,” says Koliba. “They were charged with both promulgating economic development and ensuring public safety and environmental safety, and so when you get the same entity that’s trying to both advance and also regulate, you get these convoluted lines of accountability, and I think the recent court ruling betrays that element. They totally ignored what the federal government didn’t do in the environment for letting this situation evolve the way it did.”
Mills, a 2007 graduate of UVM’s Master of Public Administration program, which Koliba directs, agrees with the blame assigned to BP, but says he’d give the U.S. Office of Management and Business (OMB) a quarter of the overall responsibility for the disaster.
“Ultimately, OMB could have decided to force industry to implement more regulated practices, and they didn’t.”
Assigning blame, which the judge split among BP (67 percent), Transocean (30 percent), and Halliburton (3 percent), was not the only focus of Koliba and Mills’ paper “The Challenges of Accountability in Complex Regulatory Networks: The Case of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill,” however. The article, published in the Regulation & Governance, highlights the challenges facing public administrators as they defer to the professional expertise of the private sector in highly complex industries like aviation or deepwater drilling.
