 Good evening, good evening. Hi, welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I'm Andrew Schwartz, our Vice President for External Relations. Thank you for coming out on this beautiful evening in Washington. We have a terrific panel here today. And in just a minute, I'm going to throw this to our colleague Bob Schieffer. But first I want to say thank you to United Technologies. And Greg Ward is here from United Technologies. And I'd like to thank Greg specifically for everything and being our great sponsor and allowing us to do this series. I'd also like to thank Texas Christian University and specifically the Schieffer School of Journalism. I don't know how many of you are baseball fans, but TCU is in the College World Series tonight. And it's a must-win game. So we're all pulling for the frogs tonight. This is a great panel, a very timely issue. And with that, I'll send it over to Bob Schieffer. Thank you very much, Andrew. And thank you all for coming. It's a real pleasure for me, because when I was a young reporter, my first assignment in Washington was to cover the Pentagon. And the first secretary of defense I covered was Mel Laird. And then Elliot Richardson came for about two months. And then he went on to commerce or someplace. And then along came James Lessinger. And we became good friends. And it was really fun. I learned a lot in those two years that I covered the Pentagon when you were there, Dr. Lessinger. So it's nice to be back again. He was also our first secretary of energy. He took the oath one day after President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation creating the department, served in that position from August 1977 to 1979. In the previous year, the president-elect had asked Dr. Lessinger to become assistant to the president, charged with the responsibility of drafting a plan for the establishment of the Department of Energy and a national energy policy. And he's gone on to have a distinguished career, both in and out of government. Since then, Phil Sharp became the president of Resources for the Future on September 1, 2005. His career in public service includes 10 terms as a member of the House of Representatives from Indiana and a lengthy tenure on the faculty of the John F. Kennedy School of Government in the Institute of Politics at Harvard. Frank Verrastro, say your name. Verrastro. Verrastro. Verrastro. Verrastro, I apologize. That's better. He is the senior vice president and director of the Energy and National Security Program here at CSIS, has extensive energy experience. He spent 30 years in energy policy and project management positions in the US government and in the private sector. Government service includes staff positions at the White House on energy policy and planning staff and at the departments of the interior and also at the energy department. And then Steve Mufson is the Washington Post's energy correspondent, worked at the Post for 19 years, including as deputy editor of the Post's Outlook section for three years. Been the Post's chief economics correspondent. It's Beijing bureau chief and diplomatic correspondent. Before that, he worked at the Wall Street Journal. He has been a contributor to various publications, including the New Republic, which was in the monthly foreign affairs, and the Village Voice. Steve, I'm going to just start with you, because we all looked on the television sets today, and the picture looked different. All of a sudden, it looked like a volcano down there at the bottom of the ocean. What happened? It's quite a gusher. But what happened was that they noticed some fluids coming up, one of the pipes that weren't supposed to be there. They took a closer look, decided that one of the remotely operated vehicles, these subsea machines that are looking around and doing all the tasks down there, had it bumped into one of the pipes. And they moved the pipe that was catching the oil and gas coming up, and they moved that off the well. And so what you're seeing is the full flow of that well coming up into the ocean now. So it's now just going at full strength again? It is. Is there any idea when they're going to be able to bring it back to at least where it was before they? I think they may be trying something later today, even. If you look at the video from the BOP site, you can see that they're pictures of the containment pipe. And it looks like they're moving it back in that direction. But how long it'll be, I'm not really sure. Another episode of Errol is baseball. Dr. Schlesinger, we do reserve the right here at these symposiums that no matter what the subject, if there's a big news story and there's somebody that might have some idea about it, that we always ask them. So I guess I've got to ask you before we get to anything else. What about the dismissal of General McChrystal today and bringing on General Petraeus? It's all a cover. Would you have done that had you been Secretary of Defense? I guess the president had to do this. Yes. Unlike Harry Truman, he didn't have to fly to Wake Island to dismiss McArthur. But you think it had to be done? I would have shown great weakness if he failed to do so. This was insubordination. Whether deliberate or not is another question. McArthur's case, it was deliberate. All right, well, let's get back to what we all came here for then. That's the news story today. If you were the Secretary of Energy today, what would be your advice to the White House about what to do about this? And I'm talking about this situation in the Gulf. And what is government role here? We have a regulatory mechanism. The problem for BP was its failure to follow a checklist. You've got to go down that list. And it was human error just as it was in the Three Mile Island episode. Unfortunately, this was not as well handled politically as the Three Mile Island episode in which Governor Thornberg very carefully discouraged the Washington community from getting too involved. And that meant that he just ignored the suggestion from Washington that the whole damn community around Three Mile Island be evacuated. All right, Bill. What would you tell the President like that? Well, looking forward, I think there are several things that they might be doing with industry and it probably will have legislation to back it up. And that is, for the future, finding a better technique for industry cooperation in terms of both prevention and in terms of cleanup. Out of the Exxon Valdez, there was a system that grew up, a modest system which now is being used, the booms are in place and those kind of things because there was a collective industry action required at that time. It obviously is insufficient to the task. That could be upgraded. But if you look at what happened after Three Mile Island, we had the creation of something called INPO, which is a self-regulator and admittedly that was an easier industry to do that with in the competitive oil industry. But there are some lessons that we could take from that and we could clearly do. One of those is making sure the expertise is available instantaneously from other companies on this score. And as I, while we have at this point a Scuttlebutt, but certainly some of the things we've heard is that, in fact, they did bring in or tried to bring in people from other companies, but the lawyers were right in there with them and the lawyers said, whoa, don't you give any advice unless we're clear of any liability for what happens if you take our advice. And so there was that minimum delay, if not lost opportunity in some cases. One story has it that took three days and the expert went back to his company and said, I give up, I'm not going to mess with it. Now, I don't know what the truth of that is, but it shows you a problem that needs to be solved and have to get in. The third part of coordination is something that happens if today in a nuclear power plant, a plant has trouble with a valve, not necessarily a big deal, has trouble with a valve. It will have, by email, a very short order. Who else in the industry has that valve? Who owns, who repairs that valve? They have any trouble with that valve? They can know that within minutes from other members of the companies. That's, I dare say, is not happening in this instance and part of that I suspect is an intensely competitive. Now, I don't know how much cooperation does go on, so there may be more than I'm aware of, but we certainly could get a formal thing to help do that. And obviously, given the massive cleanup, there needs to be an incredibly coordinated advanced preparation on that score. Swimile Island killed nuclear power for 30 years. And what this will do will be to reduce the domestic supply of oil for the foreseeable future, which means higher import bills and higher imports. Well, the part we don't know, Jim, is what it's going to do to other governments and other political movements elsewhere in the world, in which some of them are clearly going to look at how far they're willing to go. I have no doubt drilling's gonna continue both in this country and abroad. But the question is, is at what additional cost and what additional delay is going to happen elsewhere because other governments are gonna be under pressure to say, oh, wait a minute, are you gonna do that here in the Amazon? Frank, what would be your advice? Well, I would echo Phil's sentiments to start with, but I think that one of the problems with the administration coming in was demonizing industry. And the US government doesn't have the capability to cap a well. So when Secretary Salazar said, well, if this isn't done tomorrow, we're gonna do it, Commander Allen said, we can't. I was surprised that the president actually took on the notion of capping the well when his real Katrina is cleanup and containment at that point. So that's the responsibility of the US government. I do think this collaboration is occurring a little bit. I know the service companies and a lot of the other majors are on site and providing expertise. I think the administration understands the loss of production from the Gulf and actually tanker accidents are responsible for more spills than production, platform accidents. But the question is, how do you walk back from it in a responsible manner? Well, this latest thing that's happened here, I mean, what does this mean? I mean, how significant is this? Well, by itself it's not significant, but I think it's just a sign that this situation is not under control. There's a long way to go here. I mean, one of the big unknowns is the weather. Hurricane comes through and we're gonna have to evacuate all these platforms and all these ships that are trying to contain this damaged well. That could mean stopping operations for anywhere from three to seven days. And during that entire time, they're gonna have to disconnect the pipe that's attached to the containment pipe and the oil will be flowing freely into the Gulf during that time period. So if we have a few hurricanes or even hurricane warnings, there's gonna be a lot more oil in the Gulf and more delay before getting this under control. What, go ahead. Well, I was gonna say also, we're all assuming at the moment another one of those big assumptions that those relief wells are going to be able to pinpoint and hit the right spot to cure this. Now, this industry is highly skilled and they may well do it, but nobody should assume that's just a home run that is automatic. Everybody's just sort of built that into their thinking that meant the well gets there. We got it. It seems pretty likely, but it's not necessarily something you do in the first try. In the well that had a similar problem off the coast of Australia in the Teamworth Sea, I believe it took them five tries. Because what you're looking at is, while it's an 18,000 foot column, you're aiming at a diameter the size of a dinner plate. So the relief well, the success rate in the industry is 100%. We always get them. But the question is how long and how many times you have to go back to do it. Is there any way to give an estimate of how this thing's going? I mean, we now told that it might be a hit of schedule, but then this thing happened today. So the danger always in on the relief wells is the early drilling is actually pretty easy. So the first relief well is down to about 16,000 feet. They're looking at what they call a bottom kill to actually get close to the reservoir, pump in drilling fluids and stop the flow at that point. And then whatever in the riser will then be suctioned off and that production will come up and then they can cap the main well. The reason we have two relief wells going is to the extent that you run into the same problems running through horizons or a gas burp with the relief well that you had in the original well, it's probably prudent to have a second well. It's just, it's a time issue. And I go back to Phil's point, I think where the industry is right on prevention, drilling has just been terrific. I mean, we can drill down six miles from where we're sitting with a home computer and hit a spot underneath the capital and come within 36 inches of where we wanna be. But containment policy is back in the 1980s in part because we are so confident that blowout preventers worked. Well, just... And in part because there's no money in doing spill control. Well, it's... There's big reservoirs to discover about making advances in drilling. There's, it's a dirty, thankless business cleaning up. Some people would make the argument that it's been made, it's not an original thought with me, that we, if a well, if we can't cap a well, if it's too deep to cap, then maybe we shouldn't have drilled it in the first place. What... Yeah, so go back to the technology side. The ability of capping, there's two, there's a number of fallbacks and there's redundancies built into the system. The reason that oil and gas came up the pipe and that's the one thing we're sure of that happened because pressure coming on the reservoir on the Deepwater Horizon is that number one, the first fail safe is the drill mud that keeps the pressure in the pipe to keep the upflow from coming up. The second is the casing around the pipe and that's the cement job and then the third is the blowout preventer. So we haven't seen accidents of this magnitude and I think Steve's absolutely right. It's a question of risk, right? If none of this happens, we didn't have double hull tankers until the Valdez. I'm sure the technology will emerge but the drill relief well can't be the solution because it takes three months to drill it. Dr. Slosinger, was the President right to order a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf now? No, it's not due process of law. I mean, we now know that a federal judge has overturned that ruling and it's now been completed. At least temporarily, yes. We will see an effort by the administration to overcome it. Why is that not a good thing to do? Why is it not a good thing to put a moratorium on drilling? Because it follows from your previous question about since we discovered this risk, why would it be a good idea to do any more drilling? The answer is that we will have greater imports and it will be more costly in terms of the balance of trade. The reality is that there's good news here. This may kill off the fantasy of energy independence which we hear regularly from the various political quarters. Well, anybody down there will tell you that the problem is you're putting all these people out of work and I guess Congressman Gall has said, well, let's just have a partial program. Let's continue drilling but stop before we get to the place where the oil is. Well, of course, I mean, we have to distinguish. We have to know what it is. Yeah, well, that'll help. That sounds like a congressional solution. I mean, he makes it very, he very seriously has made that decision. I know he's saying you could drill so far but obviously he means for a temporary period of time. I mean, I think the real, the tougher thing which I don't have a handle on and I'm not sure whether who has a handle on this is how weak is the regulatory system and the way it oversight been and even though I know there's been efforts to go in and take a quick look and see if it and the performance is likely to be there because I can assure you we'll all talk differently next week if there's another well that goes and of course everybody said, no, well, that won't happen. Well, that's what they all said before. So I don't know what the answer is. I mean, because I think we do not, we cannot afford to shut off all drilling. We cannot afford, unless you were ready to just throw in the towel and let the prices rise extremely but the welling that's been restricted is in the deep water area. Now that's very lucrative oil. That's where the big stuff is and we clearly have had wells successfully drilled there so it's not brand new, it's not either or. The question is whether there's a reasonable justification for a temporary to get the regulatory system in order and to make sure the industry, the various drillers have their act in order and I'm not willing to certify that that I know that's the case. But I mean, I think in the defense of the administration and we do, the judge asked, you know, you don't necessarily shut off all tanker business or ground all airplanes every time there's an accident but in fact when there is an airplane accident you do sometimes ground planes that are of a similar type. So it's not a completely crazy idea but they haven't actually determined which wells are the same type or not and so I think that's where the judge found some faults. Six months, I don't know whether they'll be done in more than six months, less than six months. I mean, the time period is kind of a political pause, gets them past the elections. It shows that they're thinking it over so there's some weakness in the interior department argument there but ultimately we have to go back to the deep water because as you say, that's where the best prospects are. The on land United States is kind of like a pin cushion after over a hundred years of drilling. Two thirds of exons exploration acreage is in deep water whether it's in the Gulf of Mexico or other places around the world and increasing portion of our domestic oil supplies come not only from the Gulf but from the deep water portion of the Gulf. 30% of our supplies are from the Gulf and 26% of those Gulf supplies are from deep water and those numbers are growing bigger and bigger so sooner or later we're gonna be back there I think. The question is, how long will it take? How much more costs there will be? What can we really come up with some guidelines to make this safer? What the judge said was that the department of the interior had misrepresented deliberately the judgment of the experts from the National Academy of Engineering who never recommended. So they're redoing their case now, they're going back in. A BP has said from the beginning that the oil is on top, that it's on top but our reporting just at CBS and other people suggest that maybe there's more oil down below. Tell us about that, who can talk about that? What do you make of these reports? Well two things are happening, one is the water depth, right? So we're in a mile deep just water to where the well hit is on the surface, on the seabed. So this notion that oil is lighter than water it always comes to the top, I think that was prevailing wisdom when you've got currents, ocean currents and you've used dispersants, you can actually lose some of the oil in the space between the seabed floor and the surface. And this idea of plumes or clouds, we need to do more examination of what actually happens in this environment. That I don't think the industry- Well also, we think there's been a trade-off between our capacity to scoop the oil up and the dispersant, there were different strategies which on a smaller scale might have made sense. The question is when you get to this scale would we have been better off not to disperse? I don't know the answer to that, that's the kind of thing that out of this we should learn and get clarity on strategy for these kind of things. I mean I think the idea of the dispersant was that you increase the surface area of the oil and it helps speed up the natural breakdown that bacteria do in the water. The danger is that it has the dispersant somehow made the oil heavier and also if you're trying to skim or burn oil it's better to actually have it in a concentrated place. I mean I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now we treat oil spills with coagulants to keep it in a tight space that we've come up with a better way to scoop up. So I mean I think this whole issue of the dispersant is gonna be the source of a lot of debate as time goes on and of course it helps the company because it's less visible. So from an image point of view it looks a little better. Fewer dead birds but maybe more dead turkeys. It goes back to the issue of containment being kind of stuck in the 1980s. So if you think about a snow blower on your driveway so it works really well when there's two inches of snow it doesn't work so well when there's a sheen or the equivalent of just a small thing. And so the skimmers which is a technology that we've used before but on sheens aren't particularly effective especially when there's waves in high wind. Have you seen anything that would suggest that there's been a breach in the well? In other words all of the oil is not just coming out of this well head but coming out of the floor of the ocean in other places. So there's natural seeps that occur everywhere, right? And oil and gas all the time come through the seeps in the ground. I think some people have mistaken, I don't know exactly the answer to this but some people have mistaken these little plumes that show up on the seabed floor. The explanation so far has been that when the remotely operated vehicles move they kick up dust. And that what you're actually seeing is the dust in the back. But again this is a mile deep so not clear how this is working. I think we'll have some questions from the audience and we'd like to entertain those. While we're waiting for those let me just go through a couple of other questions. And I think we've touched on this but let's talk about it some more Dr. Schlesinger. How is this going to affect the U.S. oil supply through this year and next year? Are consumers going to see changes in prices at the pump because of this? They're not likely to see changes in the price at the pump because we will be importing more oil and I suspect that the Saudis will loosen up or the OPEC will loosen up. It will of course affect our ability to produce crude the longer that the moratorium lasts the greater will be the reduction of future supply and the greater will be our level of imports and the greater will be our out payments and the balance of payments. The assumption that the Secretary's been underlined here it's unbelievably missed in this country by so many people is how much we are part of this international global oil market. And so one of the reasons is that at the moment with recession around the world the pressures on the world oil market are not great and the prices have been coming down and we're lucky these events and that way come together in terms of price and so we're not going to pay the price but it just there shifts where oil is coming from who's producing it, who's making the money out of it and over time that market will tighten back up we assume with that. But it's this notion of we so casually talk about it as if it's the American oil and it is an international pool of oil and it makes it very difficult for public policy and it makes it very difficult to do. And anyway, I won't preach more. If we had to have an oil spill it was optimally timed. Oh that's right, that's right. It's important to distinguish those. If that happened three years, two years ago when the oil prices were way up whoa, this thing would have been. The 33 wells that have been suspended were exploratory wells. So the amount of production they were going to deliver between now and the end of the year is kind of minimal. So you just push that forward. I think the real concern is that the sixth instance the next year if the commission rules or makes a determination January and then that results in the promulgation of new regulations and this really looks more like a year that you see rigs deploying from the Gulf going elsewhere and then you actually lose production in the United States and just what Jim was talking about you supplanted with inputs. Tony Hayward actually put a number on it in a conference call recently that the BP alone would be down about 50,000 barrels I think in 2011 and maybe 70,000 in 2012. 70,000, 75,000 barrels a day. I think one thing we just- So it's just pretty substantial for what happens. It's hard for us to figure out we've been talking about what government does to industry here and it certainly can do things. But what we don't know is this industry decisions that result from this. This is a new high risk proposition and you can imagine what's going to go on in board rooms and in decisions about where to invest their money and who to bank on and who to contract with to do the work for them and whether they trust witch drillers and all that kind of stuff. That's gonna be scrutinized in industry more and more. Now I don't that again, I don't think it's gonna fundamentally reshape the oil market but it may mean that there is a greater risk less risk taking and therefore we'll begin to see the production- It's also going to rebound on the degree that industry is willing to bid. That's right. And thus the tax basis will be paying for a good chunk of this. Do you think we're not gonna see any drilling in the Gulf for a long, long time or do you think, when do you think it will start back? Well I think you're gonna see drilling go forward in the shallow area period now. There was some scrambling going on as to whether what the rules are gonna be and that kind of stuff but that's gonna go forward I think in the deep well and I think we'll be back to deep wells I just don't know how quickly. What do you think they did? I think we'll get back there. And I think the administration has been careful not to promise too much in the way of a moratorium. I mean Salazar has described it as a pause not a halt. So I think that they're leaving themselves open the path open to get back to it relatively soon. Yeah but not before election day. Not before election day. There'll be no drilling before election day. I don't think so. Just a coincidence though I think that's a six month time period of correspondence. So on the issue of the deep water exploration I think that's actually right but I do think that they're gonna look for ways to try to ease up on the restrictions so that we don't see this massive redeployment because once that's gone, once these rigs go overseas it'll be a year before they come back. What? I'd like the panel's just thoughts on how BP has handled this. I mean obviously they're getting hammered. And do you think they've been unfairly treated Steve? Well yes and no. I mean it's hard to come off well when you've had a disaster like this. Some things I think have been unfair and some things, some things not. I mean I think from the documents and testimony we've seen so far there definitely seems to be a lot of fault on the part of BP and the BP operators and you've gotta wonder how in a big organization like BP which has already had a history of safety problems that is somewhat old, how a chief executive can make sure those things don't happen again and wonder whether or not Tony Hayward did enough. On the other hand some part of you has to feel a little bit for Tony Hayward. He's had just turned in a great quarter. He's got his mind on a lot of other things. He's having breakfast in London one day and the phone rings and that's pretty much the end of his career as he knew it. But in the context of the catastrophe and the gulf that seems like a small thing and people here are very angry and I think that's understandable. And those high compensation packages account for this kind of risk. They say your career may be over but you can get back to another life. I would say on the positive side he came here. He's been here nonstop. They haven't said no about spending anything with the exception of one thing which they didn't even quite say no to in the end. On the other hand he's made some very ill-considered remarks and the day of testimony in Congress I thought was catastrophic. For him to sit there and say he has no opinion at all about all the documentation and testimony that comes come out I think was stretched a lot of people's credulium and got a lot of congressmen upset and then he goes home and goes on the yacht which on the one hand obviously he must have felt like he needs to get away from everything but the image is very bad. So he does bear some responsibility. Well I mean there's no question that there are public relations. It's just been a total disaster. Well I think it could have actually been worse believe it or not. I thought it could have been worse. It could have rained you know. Are you asking whether this was a shakedown? Yeah right. Well the fact is that it was an indiscreet comet by congressman Barton. Texans do that by the way. That the reality is that you can be indiscreet but it can be at least partially true. Arm twisting might have been a more appropriate term. I doubt that the BP board sat around and said we are very eager to borrow $10 billion from the banks and sell $10 billion worth of bonds and to cut the dividends and it required considerable pressure from the administration. You can call it a shakedown. You can call it arm twisting but it was certainly not a voluntary action on that part. But this is not a typical accident right? I mean this is way beyond BP and what it affects in the Gulf, what it affects in the industry, what it affects in terms of the international oil companies. An increasing amount as Steve said of their international production now because they don't get access to conventional stuff on shore in a lot of places is to go in the technically difficult places in the sub salt and the real deep depths in the deep water. And if they lose that, their ability to do that just concentrates production in a smaller group. This is not good for national security policy as well. Well, I'm not quite as sympathetic as Jim is to the voluntary nature of this. American citizens are demanding performance of their government and performance of their corporations and they're not very pleased with either at the moment. And so it may turn out that BP finds this actually is to their advantage not whether to have this set up as an independent thing. By the way, so far they've been paying everything. Every claim that has come forth has gotten their money. Now the fear was that that would not continue. People may discover they don't get as easy a payment when they have to produce documents that either government or this third party will require. So it's not like it's a perfect system. But I do think it may limit some of the liability over time for BP by having this system set up. But the point is, the trouble is we're having great difficulty figuring out in this world society how to keep people accountable whether it's in government and big government or whether it's in big corporations. And so the notion that we're into this negotiation that we ought to be going by this nice clean view. Well, that's the private sector and this is the public sector. That just doesn't get it anymore. We haven't figured out the rules of the game as to where the pressures ought to be kind of thing. And so the average citizen is not, I think, going to be very sympathetic to that libertarian philosophy in this instance. They like it in lots of other instances, but not in this instance. If public opinion demands a shakedown, you don't call it a shakedown, right? Well, that's right. But also, excuse me, the apology? I'm sorry. I mean, not if I've lost my business in the Gulf, not if I've lost everything in my life that I've worked for in the Gulf. And this is how Washington treats things. Excuse me. Well, I mean, generally speaking in this country, when you break something and it impacts on immunity, it's your responsibility to fix this here. And it is here. And it is here. The problem is that the legal system, as we see, take a long time, and we just reached the conclusion of the Valdez case 20 years out. And so a lot of people didn't want to wait that long. You can sympathize with that in a way. But obviously, we still don't know where responsibility lies. So that's the dilemma, right? You want to get money flowing. On the other hand, you don't quite know all the details yet. Well, on the other hand, if the US government unilaterally closes down drilling in the Gulf, you don't demand that BP pay lost income for people in the Gulf. And that was an overstatement. I think people recognize that as an overreach. There's also state governors that came in and said that BP should compensate the states for income tax revenue they lost because people didn't have jobs. So you have to get to what's a legitimate claim. Well, what is the answer to that? Because if you do have this moratorium, there's going to be an enormous number of people that are going to be put out of work, and not just people working in the oil industry, but restaurants, I mean, oil wealth service companies. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And that's where I think that the administration is going to have to find a middle road to walk on this. There's going to have to be a certain set of standards on the safety side that you can demonstrate that what risk is acceptable. And I think it starts in the shallow water, right? June 27th, there's a notification that went out that you have to comply with certain regulations. And I think increasingly you'll find that you'll use those rigs and work over wells or development wells to kind of keep the people employed until you can make a determination. I think the biggest problem is having set up this presidential commission, it's going to be hard to justify going back in the deep water when you don't have a containment policy before the commission rules. So by definition, you're looking at January, February, at the earliest and probably something later. And I think that's the concern. What's not clear to me is you said when the commission rules. Well, when the commission makes recommendations. The administration must keep its authority to itself and make sure it does not lock itself in, even though the original rhetoric might have to the notion that somehow it's governed by whatever the commission decides and when they decide it. They have to be willing and gutsy enough and smart enough to say, we're ready to make a decision when we think it's appropriate and not just be taking away if it's good to have a commission for some purposes. I don't want to insult your former career, but politicians are not noted for their courage. No, I've noticed that. Let me ask you about this congressional hearing where you had the other oil companies that were called up there before that congressional committee. And they went over the plans that they had in case it was an accident. And it seemed like everybody was working off the same piece of paper. And clearly, I mean, from what you found out at that congressional hearing, it was absurd. It was about walruses and things like that. It was people's names there that you were supposed to get in touch with, that it died years ago. Is the industry and its plans, is it bad, as it seemed at that hearing? Or was this just a congressional hearing that was looking for headbond? It's 40 years since we had a similar spell. 40 years. And what we've seen is a growth of complacency and the carelessness, particularly on the part of BP. Yeah. I think two things happened. I would distinguish the two hearings. So the hearings with the walruses. If I was a company at this point, I would be upset that whoever I subcontracted out to write my environmental impact statement wrote the same statement for all the other companies. And that became boilerplate, clearly. And got paid five times. Right. The American way. In terms of the walruses, though, you can spend time on that or you can spend time on solutions. And I would distinguish that between the Waxman hearing. We are, I think, Congressman Waxman always does his homework. He had a 14-page letter, and what he distinguished with the other companies was in this type of well, with this type of pressure, in these type of horizons, this is standard industry practice. And this is what BP chose to do. And you saw Rex Tillerson and Watson from Chevron and Shell all say, confronted with similar situations, we would have done X. And then I go back to Steve's point. So then when they asked Hayward, well, so why did BP make the decisions you made? Here's the answer after 60 days. So there had to be an eternal BP investigation, is I wasn't on the platform. People want better accountability. I understand the liability concerns. I understand the attorneys. But people want more straight talk on how this happened. Yeah, I mean, I think where the whole industry is at its weakest is that obviously no one had a way of containing a spill anywhere near the magnitude that they had all claimed to have been able to contain. And otherwise, we'd have seen it out there. And this is something that can be addressed. I mean, there's no reason why the industry has to be first fabricating the kind of containment pipes or undersea manifolds or all the other stuff that they've been forging in plans on the coast and waiting two weeks or more for these things to get done. All that stuff could be sitting there in a couple of different locations across the Gulf. And it wouldn't even cost that much money. They could share these things. And I think you're going to see something like that will come out of one of these panels. And I think that's going to be one of the changes. I think there is a tougher endemic problem as humans. And that is simply that if you notice what we've just been through, we have been through on Wall Street where we miscalculated the risk, very smart people, some of them even highly motivating money by miscalculating that risk, but others were not. And the same with government regulators. We've seen the same thing here as where we get in the mindset. We saw this on the electricity crisis in California. We've seen this happen again and again when the mindset is collective. I mean, all but some outlier, and they become famous and rich for two days out of their books. But except for those people everybody buys into, you know what? We haven't had a spill for 40 years. We have this incredibly sophisticated technology and it is for doing this. And so this case is very unlikely to happen. And you get complacent. Should we? Of course not. But the truth is that we do things huge now in big ways. And frankly, this is the issue about climate changes. We're changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. We're changing the chemistry of the ocean because we're doing things huge. How big a risk is that? Well, you can get a debate here about that. But the question is, we're having trouble as a people figuring out when do we do this? Because the truth is, if you want that oil, we're going to take some risks. Let's stop the phone and drive all the cars and fly all the planes and do all the stuff that we love to have and all the plastic we like to do, which we're overloading with plastic now. And we can all turn around and say, oh, we hate these oil companies. We hate everybody in the business. We want to stop them all. Well, you know, that's childish. Questions from out there? Yes, right here. For anybody, does any of this change the trajectory of US energy policy or so-called policy? Does it make a difference anywhere down the line? It's a very good question. I would like to answer. Well, I mean, I think clearly the administration is going to try to make that come true. That's going to be the positive side of this incredibly negative experience, to try to mobilize people to say, if this should be a wake-up call, that's the line that the president keeps using. Personally, though, I mean, we'll have to see Congress hasn't distinguished itself by moving quickly toward a climate or energy bill. And I'm not sure if this is really going to help. In fact, in some ways, it could make it harder, because one of the chips that was being used to help bring some more votes onto a climate bill was expansion of offshore drilling. So whether they can get Republican votes without that, or whether they're politically able to keep democratic votes if they move ahead with that, I think is unclear and maybe, in some ways, harder. I didn't even notice there was a trajectory. Anybody else want to take a shot at that? I think it stops start. I mean, when I look at Secretary Slesinger, so in the 70s, we knew all these things, right? That the current system was unsustainable, decontrolled oil, decontrolled gas, moved with clean air, clean water, cafe standards. We even developed, in the Carter administration, the Sinfuels Corporation, which has been much decried. But the idea was to build up a backstop technology for the day when you needed it. And we came in with tax cuts in the early 80s. Congress decided that the conventional prices were low enough. We did away from it. And 30 years later, we're kind of back in the soup. So I mean, I think that the transformation is underway. I think we're going to move towards efficiency and lower carbon alternatives. This should also be a call to us that we need to keep the conventional system robust, because it supplies 80% of our needs. And it's going to be here for decades. And that's where I think maybe the administration hasn't been honest. So the president's starting to say that it's going to be there for decades. But it took a while for the Secretary of Energy, for example, to acknowledge that we need oil and gas and nuclear. Next question. Right here. Yes, ma'am. Part of my concern is what we have ignored. In the case of a financial disaster, I mean, we ignored a certain number of economists who were up there saying, I think Sheila Bear was speaking out. And we could look at Australia when it happened. We continue to let these be drilled despite the record of egregious criminal violations. We ignored a lot of the evidence. And it troubles me with Obama that he seems to have this mindset where those who cause the disaster should be the ones who have the solutions for it. Some of the recommendations after Exxon Valdez were not implemented. That put locals in responsibility for coming up with solutions that they would have been able to put forward because of their knowledge of the area. And the locals finally testified before Congress a couple of weeks ago and said, 52 days, they saw no skimmers. Some of the booms that were out there weren't being cleaned off. They could have used a lot of the fishermen and converted their boats and sent them out. And the dispersants are extremely troublesome because Europe bans those chemicals. All right. What do you want? And I just wanted to ask one last to ask someone to address our risk assessment paradigm. Seem very flawed. Well, that's what I was trying to get at is the difficulty we have, whether it's government, industry, or more collective in the population coming to a good assessment of risk and what to do. I mean, we all agree that there's been this enormous neglect by government and by this industry in terms of the cleanup things. And we should be demanding that. The question is, is how rapidly could we get off oil, which I assume you would like for us to do. I'm guessing that's a part of your advocacy. And I would like to. And I wish it's a whale. And I wish we didn't have carbon in it. And I think we will move in that trajectory. But anybody who thinks that in a decade we're going to be off this stuff must be making some other kind of decision. And by the way, if we're going to do this, well, excuse me, I'm going to get off on nuclear next. But it's not a trade-off between oil and nuclear unless you get the electric transportation. But it is, if you start talking about the carbon problem, pardon me, I didn't report more issues. Another question? Well, there's a failure. Go ahead. Let Dr. Sluster. There has been a failure to crack down on BP. We had the accident, the refinery, down in Texas. We had the accidents up in Alaska. We should have cracked down earlier. We did impose a substantial fine, but it was inadequate to reshape the BP culture. Well, also, you're talking about different parts of the business, and nobody was actually looking for that as a totality. They were looking at their section of the business, refinery, or where the accidents were. And they should have been looking at it. Human error can be mitigated, if not prevented, in organizations with the right kind of culture, governance, vigilance, and the like. Apparently, we didn't have that with BP. To quote Akali, what we need is less of low-out preventors and more of screw-up preventors. But how can you change organizations, and in particular, what is the government role without really intervening in the very structure and function of our businesses? Well, it seems to me you're always going to have bad actors somehow. You're not going to change the culture or guarantee the culture of every company out there. And that's what the role of government is supposed to be, is to be able to make sure that people adhere to standards that they might not do otherwise. And that's why I think this is such an incredible story, which is that you've really had multiple failures. You've had failures at corporate level, at human level, at regulatory level, and in our whole kind of collective understanding of the trade-offs involved in what we do. So I mean, it's a very deep and broad story. But I would say that that's why you have government. But in the nuclear industry, in the nuclear industry, they also have this collective effort called INPO that was set up by the industry. It actually works closely with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the official government thing. And one of the things that they are looking at in their regular audits of every power plant in this country is that question of safety culture in there. And they rate these things. And they bring the CEOs together after they've rated them. And by golly, the other CEOs, I wanted to use some colorful language here, explain to that CEO you don't keep your shop in order and we all go down. And so there are ways to do this. Now, whether you can get that same effective system of INPO in the deep water drilling, I don't know. But we certainly ought to look at it as a possible pattern. The Exxon people said that we train our people and they must follow the procedures. What is clear in the case of BP is that they fail to follow the accepted procedures. And there should be a substantial penalty. And I think the challenge on the industry right now is to go back and look at best practices. So governments can do standards and regulation, but if the industry doesn't come up with what the best approach is. And I do think we will see a marine spill, a collective marine spill capacity developed because it needs to be developed and updated. One of the major companies in a conference I was at recently said they transformed the safety culture within their company, but it took them almost a decade to make it really effective and to have confidence that it had bit. I don't know what the reality is. It took a decade for BP to transform its culture into an environmentally friendly green organization. I don't think it took a decade. The public relations people did that quickly. On that side. Are we concerned too much about keeping BP in business as the president himself said? And this would come in the way of making them do what they have been responsible for. I see that there is more concern about keeping them viable and keeping them in business. Well, I don't think there's any evidence that the administration is doing something. There are no kind of bailout, no kind of this kind of thing. I think they're being hard on them. I mean, in some ways, I think people ought to give this president more credit. He could have been up there lambasting, and that's what a lot of his friends on the left were telling him to do, that he should have just been ripping them to shreds every day. And he acknowledged, we've got a bill to pay here. We have work to be done, and they've got a responsibility to do it. And we want them to survive long enough to be able to do that. It's not like he's trying to bail them out, or his buddies, or anything of the sort. And I don't know why we can't take seriously. We will not allow today a president or another policy leader to actually have an intelligent statement on something. If they don't run to the right or they don't run to the left, we tear them to shreds all day long. And I personally am getting sick of it. I think we have to separate a motion, too. There was a public try to wait at BP stations, right? So most of the service stations are run by franchisees. They were probably amicable franchisees before this. They're small businesses. And you're right, we could have had the same thing as we had a run on Enron. So if people dumped the stock or walked away from BP on the financials, their ability to pay would have been adversely affected. Right here? And we're getting close to the end here. A huge find up in Brazil. And also, the number of deposits which lie on lines of dispute between countries is quite large. And I think that there's going to be a tremendous restraint upon the development of, A, one of the more productive areas of the world, not just in the US. That's what I was losing at the outset. It's so likely that they're so obvious, I guess, that CNN and the other American networks concentrate about 99% of their coverage in the Gulf and ignore the fact that the volume of oil, I mean, if you look at a map of the world and it shows you what the potential is for oil under water at various depths, it is staggering. I mean, the Gulf of oil is just a drop compared to what lies elsewhere. And how that will play out, both in terms of just the overall production, but also, I think you remember Frank, the State Department wouldn't let us release the study about the amount of oil in disputed areas. Because you can imagine, if you have a field which lies in a disputed area, the environmental arguments will be brought to the forefront very quickly in order to prevent the other side from producing. There's a piece in the G20 communique that's going to come out that talks about Norway, the UK, Brazil, Australia, maybe West Africa, and offshore China. So there's a lot of places, and whether or not we can have an international agreement or an assessment of how we might approach this differently, because it's not just the United States, you're right. That's why I think it's very hard for us to predict what's going to happen to oil drilling around the world. I think it will go forward. The question is, will it be constrained in quite a way because of other governments and not to mention the industry itself struggling with risk? As to the Gulf itself, Mexico, Venezuela, and now Cuba are going to be drilling in the Gulf. And I don't think that they're going to be much inhibited by any regulations that we adopt. Well, I think on that note, we have come to the end of another Schieffer School symposium. Thank you all for coming. We really appreciate it.