President Obama tonight called for a long-term plan to restore the Gulf Coast after the devastating oil spill and promised there would be third-party oversight of BP’s payment of damage claims. Obama planned to say he wants to work with state officials, local communities, fisherman, conservationists and gulf businesses to develop a restoration plan for the coast. A senior administration official told reporters before the speech the plan would include a requirement that BP “will pay for the environmental degradation that it has caused.”
“But make no mistake: we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes,” Obama said from the Oval Office, his first televised address from the room since taking office. The speech capped Obama’s two-day trip to the region, during which he spoke with the Gulf’s Republican governors, local business owners and National Guard troops helping with cleanup efforts.
“We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy,” Obama said. Read his prepared remarks here.
The speech was to be a broad outline of what went wrong and how Obama wants his administration to put in place a system making sure it won’t happen again. The president laid out the recent news that the new containment structure would capture 90 percent of the oil leaking from the well, and detailed the thousands of people helping along the Gulf Coast.
The address teed up Obama’s meeting tomorrow with BP CEO Tony Hayward. He told the American people he will lay down the line for action:
I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party.
Senior administration officials said before the speech that Obama wanted to pledge to the American people that his government is going “to make sure such a catastrophe never happens again.”
As part of that promise, Obama would say that all legitimate claims against BP must be paid out in a fair and timely manner. He planned to tout the creation of his new national commission to understand the causes of the spill and to impose new safety and environmental standards. Obama planned to say that the compensation fund would have an independent inspector general who would “act as the oil industry’s watchdog, not its partner.”
But those hoping that Obama would use the spill to make a strong and specific push for regulating carbon emissions as part of climate change legislation would be disappointed by the evening’s address. Administration officials said that the president would close his speech by saying the spill is one consequence of failing to act on a need for clean energy legislation.
The broad terms sound familiar because Obama has made similar calls to action for months, including on the presidential campaign trail. But that doesn’t change the math in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to break a filibuster on any legislation of such consequence.
Obama planned to recognize clean energy tax credits from the stimulus bill, to thank the House for passing a cap-and-trade bill last summer and talk about “many ideas that have been put forward” by the Senate, a far cry from asking for action this year.
Officials said Obama would say “We need to do something, that inaction is not acceptable.” They said the president would promise to help secure passage of such important legislation.
