Industry Doesn’t Step Up

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/opinion/12wed1.html?ref=opinion

Who is to blame for last month’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? The other guy. At least that’s what three oil executives, predictably and cynically, told a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

The Obama administration and Congress are going to have to press a lot harder to figure out what went wrong and what must be changed — including how the industry needs to be regulated — to ensure this never happens again.

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We will not know what went wrong this time until the Interior Department and Congress finish their investigations. What we do know is that the country deserves a far more transparent, far less self-serving response from BP and its subcontractors.

We are also waiting to hear Mr. Salazar’s plans for building a robust and impartial regulatory system, one able to ride herd on a large and lucrative industry that cannot be trusted to police itself.