… Or about any other aspect of the BP oiltastrophy, from the eleven men who died to the thousands whose lives are wrecked.
I haven’t written about it because all I’ve got is a rant and a howl. The administration has bungled the response. If you’re inclined to defend Obama, you might first pay a visit to Erniebufflo’s post detailing the how, when, when, and who of said bungling. I agree with every conclusion she draws, including making BP pay in financial and criminal terms, and passing a comprehensive energy/climate bill that would start weaning us off our oil addiction.
So yeah, there’s nothing to laugh at. And yet, sometimes humor and satire offer the fiercest critiques. You might, for instance, find it enlightening to see what happens when BP spills coffee:
(Go here if you aren’t yet feeling nervous about your coffee. Via Lindsey Beyerstein at Big Think.)
If you’re musically inclined, the Raging Grannies might be more your thing.
(Go here if you can’t see the Grannies. Via Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.)
I want to be a Raging Granny when I grow up. Srsly.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
There are so many things wrong with what has happened I can’t even see straight.
So I won’t comment on that, but I can’t *wait* to see you as a Raging Granny. Since I can’t sing, maybe you can get me in as a mugwump.
How about if you play the ribbed fish? It worked for me in my mugwump days.
(Not that I’m such a great singer either. I’m just fine … within the octave where I feel really comfy! Otherwise, not so much.)
NOTHING FUNNY AT ALL!!
Nothing funny at all, but I think that the problem is not BP so much as it’s us. We want a host of contradictory things: abundant *cheap* energy that’s somewhat clean (although our gross use of coal suggests that we don’t care too much about clean energy) that comes from nice OECD countries. And then BP comes along to try and satisfy our insane demands by drilling in 5,000 feet of water — which is a tremendous technological feat — and we act all shocked and horrified that an accident occured.
No one at BP wanted this to happen. Eleven of the people who were in the best position to prevent this accident clearly failed to foresee the problem and are dead due to that lack of clairvoyance. This is a horrific tragedy, but it’s not a crime.
I strongly disagree that the administration has bungled its response. BP should have called the shots on clean-up initially. It is BP’s responsibility, and to the extent that they can execute on a clean-up plan, they should be allowed to do it because they know more about the well, about the crude, about the logistics than the Coast Guard or a bunch of MMS bureaucrats in Washington.
Then, if BP fails to execute, the government should take a stronger position, which is what we’re seeing now. When that should happen or what a failure to execute looks like are obviously open to question, but I think the approach taken by both BP and the administration so far has been fundamentally sound, even if the results have fallen far short of the ideal outcome. I think that BP and the administration are doing about as well as anyone could do with this disaster, and I have yet to see a Monday morning quarterback who could have handled this any better.
I also completely fail to see how we, collectively, can (1) decide cheap energy is the priority and (2) allow our government to sell leases for drilling in the deep water Gulf and accept the considerable profit from those leases and then when a terrible accident happens, claim that this is all BP’s fault and we bear no responsibility. That’s a total cop-out.
You are absolutely right that we are driving the demand for cheap energy. But I’d also add that our whole regulatory and tax systems have hindered the shift toward cleaner energy. I’m thinking, for instance, of how CAFE standards have accommodated the market for SUVs. How regulatory bodies have seen fit to allow mountain-top removal coal mining. Or for that matter, how regulations allow deep-sea drilling without mandating that a preemptive relief well be drilled.
I agree that for the dead men and their families, this is a tragedy. They could not have been expected to predict the explosion.
The shortfall is that the leadership at BP – and I’d wager, at all their competitors – did not have a plan in place for coping with such an accident. Nor did the government require them to do so. The lack of regulation is more blameworthy, because as you point out, there’s pressure for cheap energy, and pressure to maximize profits. Under those dual pressures, it’s not rational for a corporation to take a wiser but more costly course.
I also agree that it was appropriate for BP to call the shots initially. But there’s more to the mess than just staunching the flow of oil. There’s a ton of clean-up work to be done that just requires people, and that’s one area where the feds could have done more earlier. Also, I think Obama has been slow to react, and his speech the other night didn’t reassure me that he’s going to push aggressively enough for development of other energy sources.
I think the oil industry is actually much more focused on safety than many people give them credit for — particularly now. Drilling in 5,000 feet of water is just an incredibly hard thing to do, and the potential for disaster is hard to evaluate when you’re inventing new technologies and thus you have no basis for estimating the denominator in your probability calculation.
As far as drilling a preemptive relief well — that’s fine if you’re willing to DOUBLE the cost of crude. Mandating preemptive relief wells may be a nice juicy bone to throw to Schlumberger and Halliburton and other oil field service companies, but the damage to the economy and the surge in demand for foreign oil from places like Angola that aren’t going to demand cost-prohibitive measures would end up doing much more harm than good in the end.
I hope that under Cass Sunstein, the Obama administration has already moved past that sort of “We’ll tell you how to do your job” regulation, which tends to cost a lot, stiffle innovation and produce a suboptimal results. Isn’t the trend more towards principles-based regulation where the end-game is regulated, and the government gets out of the very bad habit of mandating specifically how to achieve the desired result?
As far as profits are concerned, I suspect that the $20 billion BP has been asked to put in escrow would justify a lot of safety measures. Avoiding costly accidents is good business. Just like working safely is good business because safety requires that you take time to think about the project, plan the project and identify potential problems — all of which are practices likely to save not only lives but money in the end.
Still, given the level of anger at BP, maybe we will end up with regulation that cripples our economy and sends some of the best paying jobs in North America off to Angola and Nigeria. I really hope not though.
One other thought — development of other energy sources is important, as is conservation. However, I do not think that people are generally informed or realistic about the amount of energy that Americans use or where that energy comes from. Wind and biodiesel are great, and they have a role to play, but it’s a niche role and will likely always be a niche role.
If we’re really serious about helping the environment, a good start would be conversion of coal-fired power plants to natural gas. It’s not as sexy as wind or solar, but it would actually have a huge impact on carbon emissions and other pollution for a rational cost.
I was sorry to read brinkmanship’s ridiculous apologetics for BP’s criminal negligence in the Gulf. I note that in Canada, the drilling of fallback relief wells is required prior to opening up a new well in the Arctic. The notion that this is ‘too expensive’ to do is absurd; we are about to find out just exactly how catastrophically expensive it is to do things the cheap, corner-cutting BP way.
Thanks to a timid press and feeble government oversight (as well as complicity in obscuring the deadly events that are unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico), I don’t think people really grasp the potential enormity of what may be happening in the Gulf. This Mother Jones article (which relays an anonymous but very persuasive comment from The Oil Drum) explains why the failure of “Top Kill” indicates the well is compromised deep within the ocean floor. This may render the well ‘unpluggable’ if the relief wells fail to reach deeply enough before the well’s structural integrity fails.
I obviously can’t verify the article’s technical accuracy, other than to note that editors at both Mother Jones and The Oil Drum found it worthy enough to highlight. I also note that one of the commenters at Mother Jones who pooh-poohed the article said something along the lines of, “If the article were accurate, we’d be seeing oil seeping up through cracks in the ocean floor” … which makes this very disturbing indeed (also available here).
Once again, I can’t verify what conclusions can be drawn from the ocean floor videos. But I will say that every piece of news that has emerged during this disaster has tended to validate the worst case scenarios as being more likely and tended to invalidate the initial reports of a spill which was going to cause only a limited, manageable amount of damage.
Other articles that raise similar pessimistic conclusions:
Rep. Ed Markey
Relief wells may take till Christmas to become operational.
If they fail, well could spew for two years …
… while a European professor says that “two years” is itself an optimistic estimate.
Naomi Klein’s assessment (informative but marred somewhat in my view by some implied New Age notions)
OK, enough happy talk from me.
@ballgame: thank you for the links!