How Many Oil Drilling Experts Are on The President's Investigative Panel?

None.

The panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is short on technical expertise but long on talking publicly about "America's addiction to oil." One member has blogged about it regularly.

Only one of the seven commissioners, the dean of Harvard's engineering and applied sciences school, has a prominent engineering background — but it's in optics and physics. Another is an environmental scientist with expertise in coastal areas and the after-effects of oil spills. Both are praised by other scientists.

The five other commissioners are experts in policy and management.

The president doesn't want to hear about the real difficulties in drilling in deep water, something that has been forced on the industry by environmental activists of the type that now populate this panel. Once again the theoreticians and academics who've never actually had to do anything but think will tell us how to fix a problem they've never faced.