Former President of the United State Barack Obama criticized Americans for liking ‘cheap gas and big cars’ more than they like ‘the environment’ in his latest book, even in the face of a catastrophic event like that of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
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Mr. Obama made the statement in a section in his memoir titled, “A Promised Land,” which was released earlier in November, and sold a record high above any other book from a former White House resident.
Flipping through to page 570, Obama spoke on a press conference he gave more than a month after the oil spill which is currently regarded as one of the largest in the history of United States, saying his comments then didn’t reflect his true frustration over the incident.
Obama wrote of the event, “Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps.”
The former president had wanted to say that government regulatory agencies weren’t fully ready to address an environmental accident because American voters for decades had “bought into the idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters to do whatever the hell they wanted to do.”
Obama, however, slammed Americans for not being ready to shoulder the bill for technology to, “quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet.”
The 44th president of the United States then advised that the only way to prevent a future occurrence like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill “was to stop drilling entirely.”
He wrote in the book, “But that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face”.
The April 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, unfortunately, killed 11 people and injured 17 people. It’s also on record that for close to three months, more than 200 million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, polluting 16,000 miles of coastline in the southern US and killing about 8,000 animals.
The incident attracted comments from high-profile Americans like Attorney General Loretta Lynch who described it as “the worst environmental disaster in American history.”
