America the Corrupt

The recent explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig owned by Transocean this past April released 90 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, making it the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the second largest in the world. Ironically, these 90 million gallons of oil would have powered the U.S. Economy for only four hours. This environmental catastrophe has put the social policy of off shore drilling with its risks and possible advantages of obtaining oil in this manner, into the national spot light.

The U.S. Minerals Management Service, U.S. Department of Interior, is supposed to regulate the offshore drilling industry. However, massive government corruption throughout the MMS makes this impossible.  The Inspector General of the Interior Department made public a report showing evidence that agency employees accepted meals, tickets to sports events and other gifts from oil companies, but that is petty in comparison to the corrupt deeds executed at the hand of Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Department of Interior. In 2009, attorneys for the Center for Biological Diversity were granted a court order to vacate the Bush Administration’s Five Year Off-Shore Drilling Plan.  In reaction Salazar filed and was granted a special motion to exempt approved oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, specifically identifying BP’s operation as one that should be released from the vacature.  The MMS also exempted BP’s offshore drilling plan from environmental review by using a loophole in the National Environmental Policy Act meant only to apply to projects with no, or minimal, negative effects like outhouses. The MMS exempts hundreds of dangerous offshore oil drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico every year.  Salazar has illegally approved four hundred oil projects in the Gulf of Mexico. Twenty seven offshore gulf drilling operations have been approved since the BP spill, two of which were awarded to BP; and twenty-six of those were approved under the same loophole environmental review exemption used to approve the disastrous BP drilling.

An example of how an understanding of human development could inform legislators on how to approach this issue is Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory, which states that development reflects the influence of an individual’s five environmental systems; the Microsystem, Mesosystem, Exosystem, Macrosystem and Chronosystem. Issuing legislation providing for a clean world in which to live would fall into the Ecological Theory’s Macrosystem, which is the largest and most remote set of people and things, which still has a great influence, thus our nation’s environmental health and the legislation of same is directly involved with human development. Unfortunately it is likely not a lack of understanding that legislators are suffering from in regard to oil-drilling, but is instead the broader problem of lack of moral responsibility in government which encourages it’s corruption.