The late Friday memorandum of the week was issued by the White House Press Office at 3 p.m. It orders the creation of an Ocean Policy Task Force charged with drafting a national policy toward the oceans, coasts and Great Lakes. Media coverage has been thin, and most has focused on how new the task force is: Obama launches a plan, said Reuters; Obama gives us the first oceans policy, said the AFP News Agency.
While both of those statements are technically true, neither the task force nor the policy are new ideas. Congress created the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy in 2000. President Bush created the Committee on Ocean Policy in 2004. Both the commission and the committee generated similar headlines. Both the commission and the committee still have Web sites. But in 2009, America still lacks an ocean policy.
President Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force will consist of representatives of the same agencies that made up Bush’s committee. The memorandum simply points at Bush’s executive order and says, those people. In that sense, the Task Force is anything but new.
The language of Obama’s memorandum directs the Task Force to draft a national policy, while Bush’s executive order directed the Committee to “provide advice on establishment or implementation of policies.” Even cowboys can make waffles. But a draft by itself doesn’t mean much. The oldest of these many bodies, the commission, also called for a draft.
Obama’s memorandum uses some words sure to inflame the rightist bloviators, beginning with “sustainability.” But hippie talk can’t win the revolution, as the 60s taught.
What’s really new in Obama’s policy is the deadline.
The task force has 90 days to draft the national policy. It has an additional 90 days to develop a spatial plan to divy up ocean waters for the competing (and sustainable) use of resources, such as wind energy. Then the task force will do what task forces are supposed to do: dissolve. So after nine years of foot dragging, 90 days of policy drafting.
Why the late Friday release? Obama’s strongest environmental initiatives have often been in some way de-emphasized.
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