re: #294 albusteve

Besides blaming an entire industry with an impeccable safety record for BP’s failure, the commission also ignores the failure of federal oversight or advance preparation for such a spill and recommends the creation of another entirely new federal agency to oversee all offshore oil and gas drilling.

The commission did not recommend a needed resumption of offshore drilling under safer rules. It just recommended more rules, costly studies and the hiring of outside “experts” to promulgate new regulations to stifle an already dying industry.

this is how you fix a death grip on industry…it’s not difficult at all for the feds to take control of large swaths of the economy…so one wonders, why are they doing this?

[Link: www.investors.com…]

Maybe because they don’t want another massive spill?

It’s easy to call the Deepwater Horizon incident just a BP thing and therefore write it off as if it can’t happen again, but that is inaccurate. Surrounding that incident was the usual array of oilfield services contractors, none of which had the sense to prevent the blowout. It wasn’t just BP.

Every now and then an incident occurs that makes (or should make) an entire industry reassess its practices. Or, if the industry is in denial and refuses to do so, cause that industry’s regulators to force it upon them. It happened in commercial aviation (for example) after Eastern put an L1011 into the Everglades. You could argue that Eastern (and the other airlines) had plenty of incentive to avoid crashes without the FAA and NTSB meddling in their business. But the FAA/NTSB did meddle after that crash, and their meddling no doubt has prevented lots of other crashes.

Likewise here. The rest of the industry has gone into “that was just BP, WE would never do that” mode. But they use the same support contractors, they buy the same hardware, they hire from the same labor pool. People who work for BP one day work for Exxon the next. You have to address the industry, unless you just don’t give a shit whether this will happen again.

That isn’t a government power grab. That is the government doing what we put it in place to do: protect us, our economy, our beaches, and all the rest from risks that we as citizens cannot manage ourselves.