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Good BP permit will be good for region
Opinion | Rich Jackson | Gary Post-Tribune | October 21, 2009
Read the full article on the originating site
I’m not always invited to those board meetings, as I have some behavioral issues that mirror Tourette’s Syndrome. The only difference is that I can control my actions — I just chose not to.
We were having a lovely conversation until I spoke up.
“I have some questions about the BP permit,” I said.
He’d been holding a notebook but thrust it on to the table when I spoke. Then he pounded his index finger into the table.
That’s a good permit, he said. There’s nothing wrong with it and that will be borne out, he said.
His reaction, I’m told, was as aggressive as anyone has seen from him. It’s hard for me to tell, as I come from a taciturn people who populate the Wisconsin Northwoods and eat critters along the roadside. That is to say: I have no discernment of proper etiquette.
But his reaction followed a series of tough articles from the Post-Tribune’s Gitte Laasby who asked tough questions not just about the permit but the process that rushed through public comments so that BP could use pollution credits that would save money. Laasby’s stories received statewide attention, as would others about how the Indiana Department of Environmental Management systematically reduced enforcement until it’s no more than Ann Landers’ 40 lashes with a wet noodle.
Those stories might explain his reaction at the time.
But this week, the Environmental Protection Agency said the permit is bad. The federal agency, which doesn’t suffer from the politics IDEM does, said the state agency has to go back to work and, among other things, account for emissions from flares.
This column, though, isn’t about me being smarter than Mitch. Quite the opposite. He was smarter than I am now when he was an 18-year-old going to Princeton and canoodling with Ivy League women with names like Muffy, Buffy and Bunny. When I was that age, I was drinking beer in the woods and eating a bunny.
But unlike the governor, whom I found a kind and empathetic guy, I’m not married to a political ideology. I seek empirical truth.
And when I first heard about the lawsuits filed against the BP permit, I laughed. That’s a bunch of hoo-ha, I said. A pile of ca-ca. Only, I didn’t really use such nice words. Again, the issue with the behavioral problems.
Then I read the lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, and found the group’s legal stance wasn’t opinion-based but fact-based. The BP permit should have accounted for emissions from the company’s flares when it didn’t. The NRDC cited how California companies determine potential flare emissions through rather simple computer modeling.
BP said it couldn’t do that, but there it was. And a few months earlier, Mary Gade, then head of the EPA district in Chicago, helped mediate a similar issue in Illinois that helped keep jobs while reducing emissions.
I asked the governor if he could play the role of arbiter in this case, because the region needs the BP expansion along with the jobs and capital investment. But it also needs the clean air and the governor could be the guy to get it done.
The governor didn’t want to hear any of it.
That seemed a strange dichotomy to me because the day he came to visit us, a woman with some mental health issues had been kicked out of a nearby hotel and decided to move into the lobby of the Post-Tribune. While some medical crews worked to move her and her dog out of the lobby, we contacted Mitch to enter through another entrance. When we told him why, he showed genuine concern about her welfare, hoping she would be OK.
So here’s a guy who’s nicer than me — that’s not a high bar by the way — and who is smarter than me — again, really easy to do — but who couldn’t overcome that blindness that exists in the Republican Party right now: It’s either business development or the environment. But the two shall not mix.
No, we can have both so long as you’re open-minded. We can have a good permit like the EPA and environmentals seek, and we can have the capital investment and the jobs.
Or, as we say in the Northwoods, you can have your critter and eat it, too.
Tagged with: gary, indiana department of environmental management, bp whiting
