Just a Little Technical Expertise – Please?

So the President has chosen his select panel to discuss and determine the causes of the BP oil spill; the cause and reforms need to be addressed, studied, and corrected to ensure that this sort of incident is handled correctly in the future. In the past, presidents have chosen panels that sufficiently represented public issues as well as technical issues. In the 80’s there were a sufficient number of technical experts on the panel that reviewed the Challenger explosion, and in the 70’s there were a substantial number of experts with nuclear knowledge that investigated the Three Mile Island incident. Now it is President Obama’s Turn to appoint a panel to investigate the current Gulf Oil Crisis.

As this is dealing with a huge technical, engineering and environmental crisis, it would only be natural to expect a list filled with industry experts, deep-water engineering authorities, as well as environmental specialists. Well, getting one out of the three of these is doing pretty good for this White House. Let’s take a short look at this panel of seven and see what expertise they bring to the table.

Co-Chair William Reilly is first up; he comes to the committee a career bureaucrat serving in many governmental capacities in various Republican administrations such as President George H. W. Bush’s EPA Secretary. He has a law degree from Harvard and is currently on the board of directors of many companies and organizations including DuPont and ConocoPhillips. He has a pedigree and some name recognition, but it appears he has no real world technical expertise on this subject.

Co-Chair Bob Graham is a former congressman from Florida and governor of said state; not only is he a career politician, but he is the son of a career politician also. Like Mr. Reilly he has a law degree from Harvard and sits on the board of many organizations; however, Mr. Graham has also been appointed by congress to serve on the Federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. He must be extremely talented to serve on two such important committees at the same time. But alas, it appears that Mr. Graham has no real world expertise in the offshore oil industry either – Strike Two.

Frances Beinecke is a career environmentalist who has already made her position on this issue painfully obvious via her blogs as President of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). As a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and her blogs describing her distain for the “abuse” of energy by Americans, it is difficult to see how Ms. Beinecke can even enter into the discussion in an impartial manner needed to make a clear decision on a matter so delicate to the nation’s future. On the Bright side, she did get to room with Sigourney Weaver in college!

Donald Boesch is currently the head of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science. Unlike the first three members of this panel, Mr. Boesch was educated in a non-ivy league environment. A Tulane undergrad, Boesch got his PhD at William & Mary concentrating in Biological Oceanography. Dr. Boesch has chaired numerous committees and panels on Climate Change issues – a definite plus in the Obama Administration. If there is a score to be kept so far we would be at 1 bureaucrat, 1 politician, and 2 environmentalists (zero technical expertise, but who’s counting).

Terry Garcia is the fifth member of the panel and the third law school grad (from George Washington University this time – Sorry Ivy League). He is currently the Vice President for Mission Programs at the National Geographic Society. Prior to that, he served in the Clinton Administration as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and as a Deputy Administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Mr. Garcia gives the panel a second bureaucrat and third lawyer, but still no technical or engineering expert.

The sixth Member of the panel is Dr. Cherry Murray. She is the current Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, finally someone with some Engineering knowledge; however, upon a closer look we see that Dr. Cherry is a Physicist who is well known for her scientific accomplishments using light scattering. Now, I am sure Dr. Cherry’s work in light scattering is important and I will not belittle her work. What would be nice though is to know what light scattering has to do with offshore drilling. Dr. Cherry is also currently serving as the President of the American Physical Society and is the Chair of the Division of Engineering and Physical Science of the National Research Council. Just makes a person wonder where Dr. Cherry will find the time to meet all her obligations.

The last Member of the panel, and the individual who makes you wonder the most about her credentials on a panel investigating offshore drilling, is Frances Ulmer. Ulmer holds a law degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in a former Legislator and Lt. Governor of the state of Alaska. Currently she is the Chancellor of the University of Alaska-Anchorage and is considered an expert in the field of election reform. Chancellor Ulmer did serve on the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, so that must qualify her somehow to sit on a panel trying to figure out the cause and how to correct the causes of what may be the worst oil-related disaster in history.

These are the seven members of the panel chosen by the President to investigate the cause of and the reforms necessary to ensure that such an accident as the current Gulf Oil Crisis can be avoided in the future. Environmentalists, Lawyers, Bureaucrats, and career politicians; a perfect assembly to head a policy making group to create a propaganda driven global warming strategy, but hardly the group to identify and correct any issue involving a crisis of the sort that currently faces the country. But then again, what else could we expect?

Can’t Wait for the Results,
Bill