Environmental laws are not to blame for Deepwater

[tongodeon]

I try to be fair. Earlier this week when my officemate told me that Sarah Palin blamed environmentalists for the oil spill. "A fact is not automatically incorrect just because Sarah Palin has said it", as they explained on "Left, Right, and Center" today, and I thought her idea kinda made sense. If environmental laws prevent drilling in shallow

Comments

[mister_borogove]

Or think of it this way - if, a year ago, the BabyDrillers had gotten their way and drilling was allowed anywhere, would BP have closed Deepwater Horizon before this accident? No, BP would open a bunch of other wells in addition to the ones they already have, each of which would also do a guaranteed minimum amount of environmental damage plus a nonzero chance of massive accidental damage.

[mcfnord]

i have not followed closely, but i heard that the u.s. is the only nation that does not require some additional safety feature that would have prevented this. (sorry so vague.) if true, that means the absence of environmental strictures are to blame.

[loic]

I'm just disappointed that people aren't just embracing this. This is the price of having a fossil fuel economy. It isn't (or shouldn't be) a surprise to anyone. If we don't like it then we should stop driving cars and turn off our lights and computers. Oil spills have been happening for as long as oil drilling.

[tongodeon]

This is the price of having a fossil fuel economy.

This *isn't* the price of the fossil fuel economy. That's the problem. The cost of the damage and clean-up is not reflected as a price difference between the fossil fuel sellers who screw up and the ones who don't.

[loic]

We're in a minimally regulated free market where the oil companies have some combination of liability insurance and massive profits. So we're already paying for the financial cost of these spills at the pump. There are a whole lot of costs that don't get expressed in commodity prices.

[mmcirvin]

Plane crashes have been happening as long as aviation and are part of the price of having air travel, but we don't regard them as unpreventable or refuse to point fingers when they happen.

[jsbowden]

"A fact is not automatically incorrect just because Sarah Palin has said it"

No, but assuming it's wrong is a damn fine place to start.

[hugh_mannity]

With almost 4,000 wells in that area, why isn't there a disaster plan in place to deal with the catastrophic failure of a well?

Even if 1/2 a percent of the wells threw a major spill that would be around 190 spills. A 99.5% safety record is pretty outstanding in any industry.

It would have been nice if the government had made contribution to a fund to provide cleanup material and personnel a condition of getting a drilling licence. A cleanup fee of $10K per well per year would be a negligible cost to the oil companies and could have funded a pretty good cleanup effort.

[mister_borogove]

$10K is too low. These installations apparently cost $100s of millions to build; $100K a year would be a small small fraction of their cost. Would $400 mil a year be enough to fund cleanup?

[hugh_mannity]

Given that major spills happen less than once a year, I figured $40M/year would probably do it.

The point I was trying to make was that for an amount of money that the average oil company can take out of petty cash, they could fund a shit-hot disaster cleanup corporation. And the good PR they'd get for being on top of things and not fouling the beaches and killing everything in the ocean would be worth more than they'd pay individually.

Hell -- they could probably write it off against their taxes. Oh. wait. they don't really pay any taxes now do they? /snark.

Take $100K per well per year and you can fund an insurance plan for rig workers killed or injured on the job too. And probably still have change.

[mister_borogove]

Take $100K per well per year and you can fund an insurance plan for rig workers killed or injured on the job too.

Socialist.