Babbitt, Interior boss for 8 years, says EPA should handle offshore drilling

Bruce Babbitt, who was President Bill Clinton's only secretary of the interior, said yesterday that his old department is incapable of regulation offshore oil drilling and the task should logically go to the Environmental Protection Agency. Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona, spoke on "Platt's Energy Week," a talk show on WUSA-TV in Washington.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is breaking the Minerals Management Service into separate offices responsible for issuing offshore-drilling permits of offshore drilling, collecting revenue from the wells and enforcing safety regulations, but Babbitt, right, said, "I think Salazar is basically rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic."

Patrick Reis of Greenwire notes, "MMS is under fire for cozy relationships with industry and reports of sex, pornography viewing and drug use" during the previous administration, as well as streamlining reviews of offshore drilling, which continued until the Deepwater Horizon blowout. "Babbitt said the industry has 'essentially been self-regulating' for years, across both Democratic and Republican administrations but that the more serious problems did not take hold until President George W. Bush took office." Babbitt said, "The corruption that has crept into the agency is a relatively recent phenomenon coming out of the deregulatory ethic that crept up during the Bush administration."

Meanwhile, Reis reports, "A coalition of 101 environmental groups and scientists said today that Salazar has failed to reform that corruption and should be fired for it." In a letter to President Obama, the signers said "Salazar has either embraced or failed to reform many of the destructive policies of the previous administration" and has failed to ensure that his department's policy decisions are based on science. (Read more, subscription required)