Obama vows to make oil firms pay for clean up

President Barack Obama today criticised the “ridiculous spectacle” of oil industry officials pointing fingers of blame at each other for the catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

He warned the accident could bring devastation to the region and pledged to end a “cosy relationship” between the oil industry and federal regulators that he said had existed for years.

As Mr Obama spoke in the White House Rose Garden, under-sea robots in the Gulf tried to thread a small tube into the jagged pipe that is spewing oil into the water. The blown-out well has pumped out more than four million gallons (15 million litres) of crude.

BP engineers were trying to move the six-inch (15-centimetre) tube into the leaking 21-inch (53-centimetre) pipe, known as a riser. The smaller tube was to be surrounded by a stopper to keep oil from leaking into the sea.

BP said it hoped to know later if the tube succeeded in taking the oil to a tanker at the surface.

Mr Obama said he shared the “anger and frustration” felt by many Americans, and he acknowledged there were differing estimates over how much oil was leaking.

“We know there’s a level of uncertainty” but he said the administration’s response has “always been geared toward the possibility of a catastrophic event”.

The Gulf spill is not only a potential environmental and economic catastrophe. It also is a major political challenge for Mr Obama to demonstrate that his administration is doing everything it can to deal with the disaster.

An AP-GfK poll this week found that the spill has not damaged Mr Obama nor dimmed the public’s desire for offshore energy drilling.

Mr Obama attacked BP and other companies responsible for the spill for pointing fingers at each other instead of accepting responsibility for the environmental and economic catastrophe in the Gulf.

But he said responsibility rests with the federal government too, saying oil drilling permits had been granted without appropriate environmental reviews.

“That cannot and will not happen any more,” he said. He announced a new examination of environmental reviews that happen before oil and gas development goes forward.

With millions of gallons of oil fouling the fragile Gulf ecosystem after the drilling rig exploded on April 20 and later sank, Mr Obama said: “It’s pretty clear that the system failed and it failed badly.”

There’s “enough blame to go around and all parties should be willing to accept it”, the president said.

He said he would not be satisfied until the leak was stopped, the spill was cleaned up and all claims were paid.

Obama accused BP and others involved in operating the rig and drilling the well of putting on a “ridiculous spectacle” of finger-pointing during congressional hearings this week.