In his new memoir “A Promised Land,” former President Barack Obama did not hesitate to attack his fellow Americans for liking “cheap gas and big cars” more than “the environment.”
In an excerpt from the book that was obtained by Fox Business [1], Obama recalled a press conference he gave more than a month into the oil spill, which is now viewed as one of the largest ever in history. He wrote in his memoir that his comments during this presser did not adequately reflect the frustration that he felt in that moment.
“Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound,” Obama wrote. “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.”
Obama added that what he had really wanted to say was that government agencies were not prepared to handle an environmental disaster because many 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.”
Not stopping there, Obama scolded Americans for being unwilling to pay 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.”
Obama went on to say that the only way to stop something like this from happening again “was to stop drilling entirely.”
“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,” he wrote.
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April of 2010 killed 11 people and injured 17 others. Over the course of three months, 200 million gallons of crude oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, polluting 16,000 miles of coastline in the southern U.S. and killing 8,000 animals.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch described the oil spill as the “the worst environmental disaster in American history.”
While making the media rounds [2] promoting his new memoir, Obama spent much of his time bashing President Donald Trump and his administration.
This piece was written by Daniel M on December 1, 2020. It originally appeared in Objectivist.co [3] and is used by permission.
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