President Obama’s new plan to fix the Gulf oil spill is so crazy it just might work…
As BP’s high-priced industry experts flail, the president last week turned to a rag-tag band of big-think scientific renegades, and sent them on a mission to somehow MacGyver a way to stop up the leak — before it’s too late.OK, maybe that’s going a bit far. In fact, the news that Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, sent a team of leading physicists and engineers to the Gulf to work with BP offers further evidence of the administration’s essentially technocratic approach to governance, and its faith in knowledge-based expertise. That might seem like common sense, but it represents a shift from the Bushies’ belief in the problem-solving power of industry, and its willingness to let science take a backseat to the concerns of its religious base.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=126484