WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Wednesday that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has hardened his resolve to impose “a price” on carbon emissions to drive private investment away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy.
Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Obama said he supports more domestic offshore drilling “only if it’s used as a short-term solution while we transition to a clean-energy economy.”
He also said that he’d be personally involved in finding enough votes in Congress to pass legislation that limits carbon emissions and redirects the flow of private investment toward cleaner energy alternatives.
That should go hand in hand with encouraging energy-efficient products, reducing tax breaks for oil companies, tapping natural gas reserves and expanding nuclear power, he said.
“The time has come to aggressively accelerate that transition. But the only way the transition to clean energy will succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future, if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed,” Obama said. “And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.”
Obama didn’t talk about the pocketbook implications of carbon limits, as in higher costs for consumers.
He also didn’t say which carbon-limit measures he thinks Congress can pass, and which should be delayed — a level of specificity that some activists want to hear from him.
The president said the BP oil spill reinforces the “inherent” risks to drilling several miles under the Earth’s surface, “risks that are bound to increase the harder oil extraction becomes.”
Meanwhile, the Obama administration late Wednesday moved swiftly to plug a hole in its much touted six-month ban on new deep-water drilling when the Interior Department ordered oil companies to overhaul and resubmit dozens of exploration plans that had already been approved but were virtually identical to BP’s and that called major spills and environmental damage “unlikely.”
The action came after McClatchy Newspapers informed the White House and Interior officials that it had reviewed 31 deep-water exploration and development plans approved for the Gulf of Mexico under the Obama administration and found that all of them downplayed the threat of spills to marine life and fisheries.
Of those, 14 were approved since the April 20 explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
The administration had failed to include the plans in its moratorium.
