Oil catastrophe wasn't just an accident

(CNN) -- The blowout is stopped. The oil disaster that began with an explosion 100 days ago has not ended by any means. But we seem to be seeing a murky ending to the beginning of the crisis.

We have an enormous amount of floating oil, and Gulf waters polluted by oil and dispersant.

What now? As a naturalist, I'd say the wildlife effects remain hard to grasp

Of hemispheric importance are creatures that range widely but funnel through the Gulf to migrate or to breed.

How many of these creatures, and what proportion of their populations, were damaged or spared, no one can say. Every oiled carcass found may suggest 10 to 100 undetected deaths.

People, though, have taken deep and immediate hits. Closures have meant an end to fishing, cessation of a way of life and of the way thousands of people understand who they are.

The mere tainting of beaches has been enough to send beachgoers fleeing to other destinations, creating a real-estate implosion, hordes of refunded deposits, halted construction and thousands of service jobs lost.

Nationally, we're all connected by the loss to the nation's seafood supply and by taxpayer funded government expenses related to agencies such as the Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as lost attention on other issues, and added unemployment costs that won't be covered by BP.

We should be willing to learn some lessons.

One is that this catastrophe wasn't just an accident. It was the result of reckless corner-cutting by the oil company and scandalously compromised oversight by the government.

The compromised oversight included the Minerals Management Service failing to require a backup shutdown system required in much of the rest of the world, failing to require offshore drillers to file plans to deal with major oil spills and specifically allowing BP to drill without a detailed environmental analysis.

Another lesson: Preparedness is near zero. The only two things responders could quickly muster were booms that can't handle open water, and dispersants. But dispersants sink oil, defeating the idea behind booms, polluting much more water, making the oil more widely toxic to marine life and making it impossible to recover or clean up.

Obviously, reforms are needed. Rig regulations should now require that the best equipment and procedures are used. To eliminate guesswork and argument, these procedures must be specified and quantified.

If the driller detects a possible problem, the operation must be shut down; they must not retain the option of arguing about whether it's probably OK to keep going. A culture of safety and best practices must replace the culture of risk.

With all the contracting companies servicing thousands of rigs, you'd think the oil giants would have, say, two or three pieces of equipment in a warehouse somewhere capable of stopping and controlling a blowout at one of their wells -- and capturing the oil. This should be devised and required.

Larger lessons lurk. The mortgage bubble, banking collapse, taxpayer-funded bailouts and this blowout all stem from a three-decade assault on government effectiveness, the consequent deregulation Mardi Gras, and the unleashing of corporate greed and corporate "personhood." Corporate capture of government away from the public's interests is the basic poison. Campaign finance reform and publicly funded elections would be the antidote.

Lastly and probably most important, to honor the scale of this catastrophe, we need to create a historic moment that begins to give us some energy options and creates a graceful phase-in of greater reliance on the clean, eternal energy that actually runs our planet.

The nation that owns the future of energy will own the future. I want that nation of the future to be the United States of America.Read more at www.cnn.com