Hoorah! We have an energy secretary getting his information from the press!
Rachel Maddow: Mr. Secretary, a couple weeks after the Deep Water Horizon sank - after the explosion and those eleven workers were killed - you said at that time that you thought it was not a mistake to have announced expanded offshore drilling. This far into it, with the well still out of control, do you still feel like that wasn’t a mistake?
Steven Chu: Well I’m not sure whether I said it was not a mistake. I think there has to be a moratorium on new drilling offshore until we find out what the issues are, what the dangers are, retrofit what needs to be retrofitted, and to proceed in a much safer way and so the president’s been quite clear on that.
Rachel Maddow: it would seem to me that the ability to prevent a blowout and to cap a blown well is a necessary precondition for saying that we know how to drill safely for oil. It seems like this disaster has proven that we clearly can’t prevent a blowout or cap a blown well at even five thousand feet. Even since the Deep Water sank we’ve had a handful of drilling applications excluded from environmental permitting that are for even deeper water. It just seems like we’ve now proven that it’s not safe to drill this deeply because we don’t know how to fix it when things go wrong at this depth. How could we ever approve this going forward unless there are some major technological advances?
Steven Chu: Well I don’t know the details of what was approved and what was not approved. I only know what I read in the papers. But let me just say that it is very important as we go forward to look at what things we can do to guarantee that it would be highly unlikely that this would ever happen again.
Rachel Maddow: Mr. Secretary, I would say I’m worried that you only know what you read in the papers about what’s being approved. One of the things that’s been frustrating is to hear the Obama administration announce that there’s been a moratorium on going forward with new approvals for offshore drilling and then to keep reading in the paper over and over again that actually even though that’s been announced publicly that the approvals have kept chugging along. Is there a situation here in which the right hand of the government doesn’t know what the left hand is doing? I’ve been worried about the relationship between the government and BP. I’m starting to worry about the internal relationship among government agencies in terms of actually knowing what we’re doing right now.
Steven Chu: Well again I can - I’ll only - I think you and I probably - in the New York Times this morning I read that there was an interpretation of what you mean by new permits and drilling - that’s what I read in the New York Times - and, personally, I think we should stop all new drilling whether it’s pre-approved or whatever until we get to the bottom of this and I think that will be done. And so, yes, the government is a big bureaucracy and I hope that’s been fixed.
(Source)
