by Diane V. McLoughlin
May 27, 2010: RULES: Tighten the rules for proposed new wells, along with wells with preexisting permits yet to be drilled.
SCIENTIFIC REVIEW: All of them, wells to be drilled that already had permits before this mess - and wells already in place - need to be reviewed for safety, best-industry practices and next-generation features.
RISK-BENEFIT REVIEW: A complete overhaul of risk-benefit analysis must be independently undertaken. By now it should be crystal-clear that far greater respect needs to be factored in on risk. If the costs of a fail would be too great, as is so obviously the case with deep-ocean oil drilling? No green light.
VALUE REVIEW: Some things can't be fixed. Some things, by any practical measure, stay broken. That is not acknowledged in current business-industry-government models.
ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT: Compensation? The unmitigated gall to propose that there is a price on the priceless - could only come from the same sterile place where one sees no difference between a barren fish farm and a living sea.
NATIONAL EMERGENCY CLEAN-UP: The oil already spilled into the Gulf is a national emergency. All those fishermen sitting idle because the fishing grounds have been shut down could be hired in the clean-up effort in some way, surely to God. Don't force them to have to sit on their hands while their world is destroyed as millions of gallons of oil gradually drift in - if it isn't stopped before it gets there. This should be part and parcel of BP's costs. They should equip them and pay them.
BE PREPARED: The incompetent, cynical way that this disaster has been handled is an outrage. There was no plan. Each effort to shut down this gusher took a week or more when each should have been able to be swiftly attempted one after the other - if BP had done its homework.
YOU SUCK: Saudi Arabia apparently had a gusher in their waters. They had supertankers suction the oil out of the water - by how much? I heard by 85%. Why was this not done? Why isn't this being done?
CHEMICAL DEPENDENCY: Was dumping almost a million gallons of chemicals in the Gulf waters better for BP's bottom line than doing it right?
Where are the skimmers, the absorbent booms, the boats equipped to suction the oil out of the Louisiana marshlands?
I am as hopping mad as James Carville. Spit nickels and they'd embed in concrete mad. My hat's off to him. There would be no way I could get in front of cameras to describe what he has seen and heard without invective turning the air blue - in the Gulf's fish spawning grounds, the bird nesting places for millions of the worlds' birds, he heard NOTHING! - nothing but the silence of the dead.
Tea Partiers think that government is the problem. Government isn't the problem. Bad governance, government corrupted by moneyed interests - that's the problem; pushing and pushing and pushing our luck as if we had the power of God over tumbling dice. We don't. Things go wrong. If we don't get that fact straight once and for all, we are doomed.
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comment #333, on, 'BP Resumes Work to Plug Oil Leak After Facing Setback'; Clifford Krauss and John M. Broder; May 27, 2010; NYT
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