BP spill has echoes of 9/11

President Barack Obama has said that he will harness anger over the Gulf Oil spill to push for comprehensive energy and climate change.

Interviewed by the influential Politico website, Obama said that the Gulf spill had "echoes of 9/11" in that it would reshape the US psyche and policy for years to come.

"In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11," Obama said. "I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come."

He also gave said he would use the full force of the presidency to try and push through fundamental reforms to US energy policy, pledging that the administration would "move forward in a bold way in a direction that finally gives us the kind of future-oriented… visionary energy policy that we so vitally need and has been absent for so long".

Obama told Politico that it was impossible to predict how the transition to a low carbon economy would evolve, but insisted that the Gulf Oil Spill marked the right time to begin increasing investment in new forms of energy.

"I have no idea what new energy sources are going to be available, what technologies might drive down the price of renewable energies," he said. "What we can predict is that the availability of fossil fuel is going to be diminishing; that it's going to get more expensive to recover; that there are going to be environmental costs that our children… our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren are going to have to bear."