Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is plenty mad about the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill.

Speaking at a KPMG Global Energy Conference in Houston, he criticized the administration’s approach to BP’s Macondo well blowout and subsequent oil-leak disaster as wrong on a number of fronts. He seized on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s comment that the administration’s job is to keep “its boot on BP’s neck”—a phrase repeated by presidential spokesperson Robert Gibbs. Gingrich said it was a “physiologically stupid” thing to say—to figuratively step on the person trying to fix the problem.

“It implies that the White House knows what it’s doing, and that somehow screaming at BP is going to work,” said Gingrich. “This is at a time when the Coast Guard admitted that it doesn’t have enough people in the Gulf; when five days after the blowout occurred, the head of the Coast Guard said they didn’t think it was a big problem.”

While he believes BP is primarily responsible for the disaster, the federal government is fundamentally mismanaging the clean-up effort, Gingrich maintained.

Comparing the situation to the Apollo 13 disaster in 1970, Gingrich pointed out that before NASA was burdened with bureaucratic layers, it fixed problems without interference from the federal government. On the flip side, he compared Obama’s failure to set up a command center for the oil leak to George W. Bush’s failure to tackle Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

“As soon as you have a problem of this scale, you bring in a command post large enough to handle all communications, and you establish a command post sophisticated enough to handle all the different decisions in virtually real time. They did that in 1992 with Hurricane Andrew, but did not do it with Katrina until it was such a total mess that they had no choice.”

The energy industry has made the mistake of remaining silent on the topic of the spill, according to Gingrich. It has accepted the role of “bad guys” and, in turn, has allowed a vacuum to develop where “the dumbest people in the country, many of whom hate oil, get to posture on television with no one to correct them.”

Gingrich also criticized calls to halt future oil and gas development in the Gulf following the leak, reminding audiences that after the 1956 airplane collision over the Grand Canyon, the government’s response wasn’t to halt air travel. Instead, it created the Federal Aviation Administration to better regulate airspace.

Rather, the federal government should attempt to prevent problems before they occur, not halt a service providing valuable goods to the country, he said.

“You have two phases, one of which we’ll only know after they solve the well problem. One, as you design the future, how do you minimize the likelihood that it ever recurs? The second is, when it does happen, what is the most advanced technology?”

He recommended the Coast Guard create the equivalent of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with a modest budget, and encourage the agency to each year find the best technology to protect the oceans and maximize the ability to cope with future problems.

Regarding energy conservation, Gingrich stressed that conservatism and environmentalism are not mutually exclusive. He pushed for radical changes to the current system, including replacing most of the Environmental Protection Agency—not just marginally reforming it.

“What you have there has now become a 40-year growth of people who are anti-business, anti-free enterprise and anti-economic behavior and in favor of a regulatory litigation regime.”

Gingrich suggested that companies be given incentives to seek out solutions to increase energy efficiency and reduce impacts on the environment. He added that organizations such as the Sierra Club and politicians who are elected on environmental platforms will naturally oppose this, because they have an investment in a litigation system that punishes businesses for their effect on the environment.

The economic realities of the past 30 years, combined with the opportunities offered by science and technology, will encourage agility, speed of adaptation and flexibility, none of which are bureaucratic characteristics, said Gingrich.

“I am for any type of sustainability that is economically maintainable. I’m against imposing additional costs for a purely political solution.”