While keeping tabs on progressive letters to the editor in newspapers around the state, I came across this in the Columnist section of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. 

Let's don't make Deepwater Horizon the president's disaster. Let's place the responsibility squarely where it belongs – on BP, its oil industry confederates, shareholders and ourselves – the oil-guzzling citizenry.

Sixteen months in office, even if Barack Obama were Superman, could not possibly transform many decades of industry-regulator coziness, inept oversight, civil service protections for incompetent and blatantly cynical workers and politicization of what should be merely a common-sense approach to human and environmental safety.

The president and his team have made significant advances in many areas of great need, including promoting equal pay for women, health care reform, economic stimulus, military downsizing in Iraq, increased support for scientific research and education, body armor for our soldiers, nuclear nonproliferation progress, rules and incentives to support energy-efficient appliances and vehicles, protection of national parks, limits on credit card company abuses, better care for military families and wounded soldiers, strengthening of the Food and Drug Administration and support for renewable energy source development.

You won't get the whole story from television news; you have to read. If you only listen to TV, you might easily think the disaster in the Gulf was the president's personal fault.

“Strap on your oxygen tanks and go plug that leak, Obama-Man!” Ridiculous.

So who are the villains? Certainly regulation can be toughened and smartened, but we are a nation that glorifies oil, demands great quantities of oil, lives and dies for oil.

America isn't alone in this, nor do we suffer the worst consequences of the globe's oil gluttony. The developing world is rapidly putting more oil-burning vehicles on the roads, and it is there that oil companies can indifferently destroy land and water with pipelines that leak, dump toxic wastes in residential and fishing areas, and burn off precious natural gas that's “too expensive” to pipe over to the villages that could use it.

What's the answer? Well, ending the regulatory-industrial revolving door might help. Lobbyists and industry executives get key jobs in regulatory agencies; civil service regulators have their income tripled or better when they move to industry and help companies with their “government relations” activities. It's ubiquitous, not partisan.

But accidents are going to happen, no matter how good the regulation. So another thing that must be done is comprehensive disaster preparation, including more attention to scientific research that would help us learn to contain and mitigate the damage from such disasters and prevent them in the first place.

Why not hold shareholders accountable for oil spills? The common wisdom for a number of decades has been that publicly held companies exist only to grow the wealth of shareholders. Those who really believe this have also been behind the efforts of the right to eviscerate the government's regulatory power and reach. But when a company's actions (or failures to act) cause such severe damage to environments, economies, and lives, why shouldn't shareholders pay? BP's share price is down, but there's no evidence that the dip won't be made up.

Full disclosure: I own shares of two oil companies. Every year, a package arrives announcing each company's upcoming annual meeting and the resolutions being presented to shareholders for a vote. I read the material and vote my shares. I vote for the resolutions demanding more transparency and better care for people and the environment. Management invariably recommends voting against them. Those resolutions generally fail to receive enough votes to guide the board's future decision making.

Finally, we who consume so much oil, gasoline, plastic, etc., must step up and claim our responsibility for what's happening in the Gulf and for the disasters that have happened, and will happen, elsewhere. We demand, the market supplies. It's not Obama's disaster; it's ours.

Conservation, serious renewable energy sources, research, and a shift in priorities from “I have a right to an SUV, dammit,” to “We're all in this together” would be steps in the right direction. Let's do it.