The BP oil spill was all anyone talked about for 3 months out of this year.
And yet, we sit here a few months later, and we barely notice any residual effects from it.
There are a few lessons here.
- BP drills offshore because that’s where we want it to drill. The oil companies don’t think the mainland fields are empty – they’re just too hard to get permission to drill into.
- BP drills in deep water because it can. It learned to do this because we’ve made it difficult for oil companies to use what they know about drilling on shore, or in shallow water.
- If we really wanted a blowout fixed quickly, we would have made it easier to get to. Putting it 40 miles offshore, and 5,000 under the water was not a smart thing to do if we were worried about the occasional spill. That’s where we put things if we don’t want to look at them day-to-day. It should be clear to everyone that we favored the chance of major physical pollution over the commonplace visual kind.
- We clean everything by diluting it with water. Perhaps a gulf is not the stupidest place to have a spill – it certainly seems to have been effectively cleaned up by nature.
- Did you watch the oil coming out of the seafloor under pressure? Did you recognize that for it to do that, that it must be under much higher pressure than the huge amounts of water pressure at those depths? How does that “fire hose” make you feel about peak oil?
- BP ponied up clean up money pretty quickly. Did you notice how quick the government has been about giving part of that money back now that it appears that the damage wasn’t that great? Me neither.
- If the administration’s response to the spill was so critical, and so well executed, why didn’t we hear about all the Congressional districts along the gulf coast that flipped to the Democrats?
