The Lesson of BP: Too Much Greed? Too Little Guts?

We'll be living for decades, or longer, with the consequences of the
BP disaster. That much seems clear. So the question now is, how -- how
will we proceed after Deepwater Horizon? What lessons will we take in
and use?

Randy Kennedy, in the New York Times' Week in Review suggests
one possibility. He likens BP's reckless pursuit of oil to the obsession
that brought down Captain Ahab in his pursuit of Moby-Dick. The lesson
we still haven't learned, Kennedy implies, is a moral one: the dangers
lurking not only in oil hunters' greed and in the hubris of believing we
can control nature, but in our own self-indulgence as well.

Kennedy closes with the admonition from Columbia University's Melville
expert Andrew Delbanco -- that the BP horror is in part of our own
making because, "we want our comforts but we don't want to know too much
about...what makes them possible." In the same issue, Thomas Friedman
seconds the point in his it's-our-fault column "This Time is Different."

While greed, hubris and denial have contributed to the worst single
environmental catastrophe in our history, to suggest they are "causes"
gets us nowhere. A character diagnosis is the evasion, the real denial,
we can't afford.

For one, it leads to despair -- since few of us can imagine the end
of human greed, hubris, or our tendency to deny what's uncomfortable.

Worse, the diagnosis diverts us from the first essential step in
avoiding continuing global ecocide: that we accept what we now know
about our nature and work with that. We know, for example, that
concentrated power and lack of transparency bring out the very worst in
us. Yet we've fallen for an economic and political doctrine with rules
certain to speed both.

Nowhere is that concentration more evident than in the fossil fuel
industries, where, in 2004, just five companies
controlled two thirds of gasoline sales. Their economic might
dwarfs that of most countries. Such concentrated economic power infuses
and distorts political decision making in its interests.

So we've ended up creating the systemic danger FDR warned us against:
"the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger
than their [the people's] democratic state itself." That "in its
essence, is fascism," he told Congress in 1938. Such concentrated power
is at the root of what has greased not only massive public subsidies for
Big Oil -- pushing aside safer, renewable energies -- but also BP's
ability to stack up egregious safety violations with impunity.

Corporate lobbyists for companies like BP have become so powerful,
that in 2009, for every single legislator elected to look out for our
common interests, two dozen, mostly corporate, lobbyists spent $3.5
billion working Congress for their private interests. That sum has
doubled in less than a decade.

We humans can't change our nature but we can change the rules
that bring out the worst in our nature.

So rather than focusing on "greed or hubris" as a cause of this
disaster, let's tackle the systemic problem that lets these traits
triumph: rules that encourage concentrated power - such as those
tolerating monopoly power and corporate secrecy -- and its sway over
public choices.

Let our takeaway from the BP nightmare be that we as a people get
serious about removing the power of private wealth in our nation's
governance: enacting, for example, the Fair Elections Now Acts, pending
in both houses of Congress that would usher in voluntary public
financing of congressional elections.

Only as we move to democratic accountability do we have a fighting
chance to enact commonsense rules to keep power dispersed, mandate
transparency, and align our need for energy resources and basic fairness
with nature's unbendable rules. This, not redesigning our nature, is
the road to preventing another Deepwater Horizon.

If I'm right, maybe I need to become more nuanced in my objections to
a focus on character; for there is part of our moral makeup that sure
needs fortification: courage. To move toward democracy by and for the
people, and against established interests, takes guts.

Yes, we've been told that the "meek shall inherit the earth," but
I've become convinced that if that turns out to be true, it will be a
scorched earth. The only human beings who will be able to inherit a
flourishing earth are the courageous. So let's bulk up our civil courage
and go for real democracy.