Obama vows to make 'reckless' BP pay

President Barack Obama vowed to make BP pay for the "recklessness" that led to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Obama has summoned BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg to the White House for talks, with BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward also expected to attend.

The meeting comes a day after Obama's debut Oval Office address, in which he sought to reassure Americans he was in control of the unfolding ecological disaster and pledged to hold BP accountable.

Obama said he would order Svanberg to accept the creation of an independently-controlled escrow account to compensate "the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company's recklessness".

In reaction, BP said: "We share the President's goal of shutting off the well as quickly as possible, cleaning up the oil and mitigating the impact on people and environment of the Gulf Coast." Obama also used his 18-minute address to urge a new mission to wean America off fossil fuels, but he offered no clear indication of how a new energy policy could be advanced through a reluctant Congress.

His speech, delivered from the Oval Office, which is normally reserved for the most somber moments in national life, followed a three-state tour of the disaster zone and sought to stifle growing criticism of his leadership over the crisis.

Pointing his finger for emphasis and seeking to project authority and decisiveness, Obama tried to brace Americans for the long-term impact of the spill. "The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years," he warned.

And he said the disaster showed the need for new energy policy based on renewable sources of power.

"We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now." The House of Representatives has already passed an energy reform bill, but the legislation faces stiff opposition in the Senate following the collapse of a bipartisan effort to pilot it through the chamber before mid-term elections in November.

Republicans showed no signs of changing course on the issue, with John Boehner, the senior Republican in the House of Representatives, rebutting Obama's call even before it was delivered.

"President Obama should not exploit this crisis to impose a job-killing national energy tax on struggling families and small businesses," he said. Analysts said it was too early to judge whether the address could boost perceptions of Obama's crisis handling skills as the momentum of America's worst environmental disaster threatens to damage his presidency.

"Whether it mobilises everybody's support to say, 'yes, everything is being done that should be done', I think we will have to wait and see," said David Pumphrey, an expert from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Obama could offer little but promises of long-term engagement to frustrated and angry Americans, as BP's latest containment effort captured just a fraction of the crude that has been spilling into the ocean for eight weeks. On Tuesday, a new assessment from US experts said between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per day was now believed to be spewing out of the ruptured well.

If the upper estimate is true it would mean almost the same amount of crude – more than 10 million gallons – that spilled from the Exxon Valdez tanker off the coast of Alaska in 1989 is gushing into the Gulf every four days. (AFP)

$20bn escrow

BP agreed to US President Obama's demand to place about $20 billion in escrow to pay claims resulting from the oil spill, the New York Times reported yesterday. (Reuters)

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