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

[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.

[loic]

No, but when a plane crashes and kills 200 people I don't act surprised or blame the president. Shit happens. We know it happens. Let's try to stop it happening but let's stop pretending we didn't (or shouldn't have) expected it.