I think I will start off this blog by commenting on something that is being discussed worldwide: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone seems to be screaming for the heads of BP on stakes. A lot of people are blaming Obama as if he personally swam down to the well and blew it up. This seems to me rather ridiculous.
Who really is responsible? We could blame Halliburton. After all, they are the ones that built the equipment that failed and the cementing around the well head, according to the LATimes and the Wall Street Journal, among others. As a result, they would seem to be the primary people at fault. Halliburton does not have the best reputation for honest business practices and have been accused of misappropriating and submitting phony charges to the tune of more than a a half billion dollars for their highly criticized work in Iraq. It seems to me they should be ponying up several billion to clean up the Gulf. And yet, the American people are not screaming for the heads of Cheney and the current CEO of Halliburton on pikes, or even asking them to consider paying anything.
But we can't just blame them. We should also blame Transocean Ltd. They are another American company that was actually in charge of operating the rig for BP. It was their people that were not following regulations and were not monitoring the the well like they were supposed to be doing. If they had followed regulations or were even paying attention, this could have been prevented. People's attention slips, accidents happen, that's human nature and not evil maliciousness, or even beyond normal work situations. Nevertheless, they are culpable for their mistakes. Yet I don't hear the American people screaming for them to go bankrupt to pay for the cleanup.
We could also blame the US government. It was the US regulators that turned their backs on their duty and let the oil companies get away with flagrantly disregarding the rules which led to this debacle. Robert Bea, an expert in system failures, recently gave an interview to Science News, in which he saidabout the government, "they're the parents in the family. Industry are the children. Here the children told the parents what to do." One could blame Obama, but those regulators were put in place by Bush and Cheney. Obama has some blame for not having them replaced, but there is only so much one can expect one person to handle. But we can't really just blame the Bush/Cheney administration. They were responsible for essentially removing the reins on the oil companies. But they didn't do it by themselves. The process was already well unerway during the Clinton years.
It should be noted that Presidents don't write laws. During all this time, the republican party controlled Congress. They hold a great deal of responsibility for this as well. Yet no one is screaming for them to pay up. The Democratic congress has had the opportunity to fix these problems, but they have been just as complicit by doing nothing.
People are also pretending like this is the only oil rig to have this problem. People only care now because it happened where Americans and Europeans like to go play tourist, because Americans are noticeably losing income, because oil and dead animals are washing up on American beaches. No one seems to know about or care about a leak in Australia that is just as bad. No one seems to care about the Nigerian spill which has been going on for much longer and is much worse. There have been dozens of major oil spills that have gone without complaint by the American public. Infoplease.com has a nice listing of major oil disasters since 1967. These are not all, just the major ones. And yet no one has been screaming about these spills. We still have people saying we shouldn't blow this one spill out of proportion, that we should continue drilling like everything is fine.
The Deepwater Horizon Gulf spill should never have happened. Not because one company screwed up, not because a regulator turned a blind eye to shady business practices, but because we as a nation turned our back on what was going on and let it happen. The evidence was out there for anyone to see. The oil companies have been playing fast and loose with the regulations for decades and we let them because we wanted cheap gas.
This is all of our faults. Time to pony up, the bill is coming due.
UPDATE: Seems the leaks in the Gulf are much more numerous than the public knew. Yahoo News reports that more than half of the 50,000 oil wells in the Gulf have been abandoned and there is no oversight to see if they were sealed correctly and if they are leaking. It turns out that yes indeed, a lot of them are leaking. But since no one is monitoring these wells, no one has any idea just how bad the problem is. All we know is that it's a lot worse than we have been told. So, do we just sit back and do nothing about it like usual, or do we do something about it?
No comments:
Post a Comment