It's unclear how President Barack Obama will fulfill his promise to repair decades of damage to Gulf Coast ecosystem. Obama Gulf vow will be tough to keep

In his Oval Office speech on the BP oil disaster, President Barack Obama declared he would reverse the devastation caused by crude oil on the area's shoreline, but pledged his administration would also address “decades of environmental degradation” and “multiple economic disasters” that have ruined the fragile Gulf Coast.

“Beyond compensating the people of the Gulf in the short term, it’s also clear we need a long-term plan to restore the unique beauty and bounty of this region,” said the president, in a speech that initially inspired hope among viewers and listeners throughout Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida.


With those words, however, Obama also promised to rejuvenate the Gulf Coast ecosystem — a Herculean task that experts say could take decades, cost tens of billions of dollars and ultimately fail to satisfy conflicting demands in the region.

On Monday, Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy and former Governor of Mississippi, begins a visit to the Gulf Coast, 13 days after he was announced as the head of the Gulf Coast Restoration Plan. According to his office, Mabus will travel throughout the Gulf Coast through Friday to begin his assessment of the area and meet with state and local officials.

He will also face the challenge of applying the President's hopeful rhetoric to a complex reality. While the commitment from Obama seems evident, the funding, strategy, and plan itself seem unclear.

BP will pay for efforts to undo the oil spill damage but the company is one of many actors—including the federal government, according to some environmentalists—responsible for the decades of Gulf Coast deterioration that Obama promised to reverse. Each of the Gulf Coast states have different ideas on how to restore the coastal ecosystem. And they must balance environmental interests against a wide variety of economic ones, including the seafood, commercial shipping, tourism and oil and gas industries.

According to Gulf Coast environmental experts, any effective recovery plan would become the largest environmental restoration project in the nation’s history, far surpassing the $12 billion cost to repair Florida's Everglades. Mabus still has to address the big, multi-billion-dollar question: who will pay?

“The administration is trying to extract money from BP,” explained Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian from Rice University. “BP is saying, ‘Nuh-uh — time out. Your wetlands were damaged prior to the oil spill.’ ”

Another complication Mabus will face is where to draw the line: Who wins, and who loses? What portion of the 1,680 miles of American coastline in the Gulf of Mexico will the government define as eligible for restoration?

Certainly, Louisiana qualifies, as a state that lost 217 square miles of land on the two days of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina combined, with another football field of marshland lost every 38 minutes. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has indicated that help cannot come fast enough. She has proposed a new governing authority for the Mississippi River Delta and Louisiana coast, hoping to overhaul existing federal agencies and bypass many of the bureaucratic hurdles to restoration.

The coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico is home to half of the United States’ coastal wetlands, and to a wealth of resources, wildlife, and natural habitats. But its coastline is carved with pipelines, and the Mississippi River, which empties into the Gulf, is "over-channelled": altered from its natural course to facilitate shipping.

At the same time, the Gulf provides 1.2 billion pounds of fresh seafood and produces 30 percent of the nation's domestic crude oil production. Any efforts to reverse the complex, long-term ecological problems along the coastline -- including vanishing wetlands and habitats -- must balance nature against jobs and billons of dollars in annual revenue.

Given that challenge, experts like Stan Senner, Director of Conservation Science at the Ocean Conservancy, said Obama might not realize the scope of the commitment he made.

Senner, who was Alaska's top environmental restoration and cleanup officer after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, said that fixing the oil-damaged ecology around Prince William Sound was incredibly difficult, even with a much smaller, limited oil spill and only one state involved in the cleanup. Although the President vowed to create a cleanup plan “designed by states, local communities, tribes, fishermen, businesses, conservationists, and other Gulf residents,” Senner said he feels left in the dark.

“I think the initial concern is simply a lack of information about what the government really is intending to do. What does this look like?” asked Senner. “Mr. Mabus has been named somehow in charge of this Gulf Coast Restoration Plan. I really don’t know what that means and how organizations like mine, much less the public, are supposed to be engaged in that process.”

For an effective cleanup, Senner said, the government must create an integrated, effective, efficient and well-funded plan, one that would address the complexities of both ecology and industry in the Gulf Coast, without “just divvying up the pot and saying, ‘Okay Alabama, you get this, Louisiana, you get this, Mississippi, you get this.’ ”

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, however, was concerned from the minute he heard “plan” in the President's Oval Office address. Citing the 2004 creation of the Gulf of Mexico Alliance, a partnership between the Gulf Coast states meant to “enhance the ecological and economic health of the Gulf of Mexico," Barbour said he and other local leaders already have a blueprint for restoring the ecosystem.

“We don’t need Washington to tell us what our recovery plan ought to be. I thank Secretary Mabus and I hope he will be an advocate for what the Gulf States decide,” Barbour told POLITICO in an interview. “But the most important thing is that the plan be developed by the people in the Gulf States, not dictated down by Washington… and when I say the states ought to direct this, I say it literally.”

While Barbour wants to restore the ecological health of the area, he said he is skeptical of any projects that involve rerouting the Mississippi. While many experts say rerouting the river is the key to undoing decades of damage and wetlands erosion, Barbour said that it would strain commercial shipping industry. In the meantime, the U.S. must continue to protect, and maximize, the interests of the oil and gas industries, he said, calling Obama’s deepwater drilling moratorium a “horrible policy.”

In Florida, meanwhile, many feel that they are the most victimized by the BP oil spill.

“A lot of folks talk about how Louisiana and Mississippi are innocent victims,” said Jim Beever, Principal Planner at the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council. “But remember, those areas have made partnerships with oil drilling. Florida has not. Florida is against offshore oil drilling."

Beever and his team have worked for years to identify the dollar amount needed to restore the Southwest coast of Florida—mangroves, marshes, habitats, and estuaries—and determined the final figure of $15.4 billion. He said he expects the administration to address Southwest Florida as part of the Gulf Coast Recovery Plan, even though oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster has not yet reached its shores.

In Lousiana an aide to Landrieu, who specializes in coastal wetlands restoration, said that a proper plan for the state would cost $50 billion spread out over thirty years. He added that the government should begin the recovery immediately, emphasizing that while the National Resource Damage Assessment—a Department of the Interior program that evaluates impact after oil spills—may take months to determine the effect of the BP disaster, long-term coastal restoration is a separate issue.

“When you have starts and stops and unreliable funding, the very thing you’re trying to preserve is washing away,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, who added that Louisiana has already received approval for several environmental projects that still await funding. “That process of authorizing projects and waiting for the government to appropriate money is not going to work, and when you combine that with the competing interests of multiple agencies it grinds it to a halt.”

Keith Ouchley, Louisiana State Director of the Nature Conservancy, has also drafted recommendations, which he hopes will be incorporated into the federal plan, since Mabus's ground assessment is late in coming.

"We’re being proactive in this and we are going to reach out ourselves and see if we can't provide some feedback,” he said. The recommendations include creation of a Gulf of Mexico Restoration Trust Fund, built from a per-barrel tax on oil.

Brinkley said Obama needs to be more clear about all that this recovery will entail, explaining that there cannot be a middle ground to restoration, as in past years.

“We as a country have only two options,” he said. “We can either say, ‘It’s a wasteland down there. Forget this way of life. It’s an oil and gas field and let’s use it as an industrial zone,’ ” Brinkley said. “Or, we can say, ‘Save the wetlands.’ ”