re: #8 freetoken

No amount of environmental disaster will stop drilling for ever. Slow it down? Yes. Pause for a moment? Yes.

But stop it for ever?

No.

Of course you can bang your head against a wall as long as you like to, but at some point you might understand that it hurts, and stop.

It is only a matter of time until the United Nations involve themselves. Since the consequences of the pollution do not only hurt the nation who was affected by the failure but many more, there is a public interest to stop it as soon as possible. Which makes this case a precedent to test the waters of national sovereignty - if the same thing were to happen to some other nation, what are the limits of international intervention? Should oilfields be subject to the same kind of preemptive monitoring as nuclear facilities, by upgrading the United Nations atomic agencys mandate into a fossile resources agency? How can the industry be convinced that transparency for international inspections is more important than the capability to pretend peak oil shadow budgets? How will governments be convinced not to hand out insurance breaks to them to procrastinate bankruptcies and leave the cost to the future? How will the contemporaries understand that the creation of a mere possibility to stop drilling by the stroke of a pen will make it more secure yet before it is being used?