Some thoughts:
One of the reasons Big Government is so helpless in the face of an actual crisis is that it never learns anything, because it evades blame and consequence for its failures. The politicians who brought you the subprime crisis are richer and more powerful than ever before. The Gulf oil crisis may well end the same way, if the Democrats use a lame-duck session of Congress, plus resources from their new minions at BP, to shove cap-and-trade legislation down America’s throat. Like ObamaCare, such a bill can inflict serious wounds to American liberty during the two years it will take to replace a President determined to veto repeal attempts.
Indulging the urge of politicians to increase their power and wealth produces a government that spends all its time feeding, instead of doing the things it’s supposed to be doing. It is blinded by hunger, and uninterested in duties that yield no direct political reward. The lavishly funded agency in charge of regulating offshore drilling scarcely bothered to inspect the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. It’s painfully obvious that the Administration didn’t notice the Gulf crisis until it became a political problem. Our vast government apparatus was completely unaware of a large supply of containment boom until Jake Tapper, an ABC reporter, told them about it.
This is what comes from a government that tries to do too many things that aren’t its business, and neglecting the ones that are.
It’s unavoidable as long as we allow government to grow. Angle wants to eliminate the departments of energy and education; that position get’s her labeled a cuckoo. We need to change that perception.
BPs liability can be handled in the courts without any political demagoguery.
Politicians are rewarded for bad behavior. They don’t pay a price. It doesn’t matter who gets elected, they just sit out the cycle in a plum government job somewhere until it’s their turn.
A corrupt program may cost the taxpayers billions, but they skim off the top so it doesn’t matter to them. Look at all the funds going to Acorn (regardless of what they call themselves now.) Congress voting to cut off funds made hardly a ripple.
The rot goes deeper than elections. It’s been institutionalized to the point it doesn’t matter who holds office. We need about 60 Joe McCarthys to fix the problem.
“…such a bill can inflict serious wounds to American liberty during the two years it will take to replace a President determined to veto repeal attempts.”
ONLY if those American people sit by and allow it. I’m seeing too many “little people”, “fly over people”, Democrats and Republicans who are seconds away from TAKING back the government. I’ll guarantee you there are people in Louisiana “shooting mad” right now. Pass Cap & Trade, kill more jobs, raise gas to $5 or $6 a gallon, it’ll spread. So, If and only if, they sit by, and I’m not believing that people will sit by.
And IF The Messiah spends two years stone walling a Republican run Congress, he’ll have a tough time not getting stone walled back. They won’t pass a payment for a parking ticket, much less a budget or money to run Obamacare, much less Cap & Trade. They’ll wait him out and reverse it all under a Republican POTUS.
Actually, gas taxes need to be raised to fund an expansion into alternative energies. You probably noticed the recent manifesto endorsed by several Fortune 500 CEOs/former CEOs asking the government to fund alternative energy R&D. The money will have to come from somewhere. Gasoline taxes will most likely be one of the sources of funding.
There will, in addition to this, be a large push by the watermelons to forbid deep sea drilling expansion. Plus another push to heavily increase oversight on the oil sector. This will only exacerbate the already existing oil related issues so it must be fought.
I am actually in favor of gas taxes to fund alternative energy deployment. If this is not done it will just postpone the issue again until the next oil crisis. I do not, however, believe in global warming. CO2 is not a pollutant.
BP is doing a rotten job of handling this crisis, thus the Government is stepping in. Had BP bothered repairing their BOP when they knew it was defective, the government wouldn’t be involved.
From what I hear, and I am no friend to reflexive anticorporatism, BP apparently are a bunch of fuckups and corner-cutters. Apparently people in the industry — their peers at Exxon and Chevron, for example — see them that way.
I should have guessed, honestly, when I saw all their “Look How Green We Are!” ads two years ago during the Olympics. I’m pretty convinced now that anyone who goes on at length about how green he is is covering up rank incompetence and crooked if not outright criminal intent. You know how they say “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel?” Nowadays “environmentalism” has mostly substituted for patriotism in that deplorable role.
Actually, gas taxes need to be raised to fund an expansion into alternative energies. You probably noticed the recent manifesto endorsed by several Fortune 500 CEOs/former CEOs asking the government to fund alternative energy R&D. The money will have to come from somewhere. Gasoline taxes will most likely be one of the sources of funding.
Alternative energies are alternative because they’re not economically viable. We can artificially lower the price with subsidizies (e.g. ethanol) but that still doesn’t make it a rational choice. Big corporations love government protection and subsidizies as a way to manipulate the market. They’ve got theirs and will use any means fair or foul to keep some upstart from displacing them.
I would like to see a trial of an election system where every ballot includes a box for “None of the Above,” and every non-vote by a registered voter counts in that box. If this choice wins, the election has to be re-run with new candidates until there is a clear winner.
It needn’t be real, but it would be very instructive to see the results.
We already have a system that is very good at making people with power exercise it very very carefully and conservatively, flat: the legal liability system. Ford makes very very safe cars because in principle if one cute little moppet is engulfed in flames and a jury of random citizens thinks it can be pinned on Ford in any conceivable way, Ford will pay and pay. So, they’re careful.
Just remove sovereign immunity from government officials and legislators. Problem solved. If a dumbass law is passed — say, a gun control law in Chicago –and some cute moppet is injured, or some enforcement action is spectactularly careless — a no knock raid kills an aged grandmother — then a jury of citizens gets to decide whether J. Random Lawmaker or City Councilman or Chief of Police needs to pay $1 million in damages.
BP is doing a rotten job of handling this crisis, thus the Government is stepping in.
Don’t worry jack, we understand the plot to this morality play. BP is the black hat, Obama is the white hat, and the collective healthcare of the people of the Gulf Coast is the hapless town citizens who couldn’t protect themselves from an ant infestation. I guess I thought Obama would step in sooner, but that either doesn’t build up enough drama for his legislation (ie, the crisis wasn’t yet big enough to use) or because it’d look too bad for the administration when they’re making the mistakes instead of BP.
Alternative energies are alternative because they’re not economically viable.
A favorite quote: “‘Alternative medicine’ which works just gets called ‘medicine’.”
This is what comes from a government that tries to do too many things that aren’t its business, and neglecting the ones that are.
I have to say I’m getting pretty skeptical of these high-level analyses of What Went Wrong in the Gulf.
There was an accident; the primary mitigation failed.
We can look into how often such mitigations are invoked, how often they fail, why they fail, and how to make them better. BP can do this, Shell / Exxon / Petrobras can do this, the government can do it, or for that matter, the National Academy of Engineering can do it. I don’t think it actually matter much who does it, or whether the government that gets involved is Communist or libertarian.
It seems to me that, if anything, there was a failure of imagination all around about the risks involved here. I’ve had a chance to look at the drilling application that BP submitted last year, and such applications are necessarily filled with boilerplate safety and environmental reviews. None of these sections of the applications address the contingencies we have had to face in this crisis. I don’t care if criminal prosecutions follow — from my perspective, the highest priority is to get the systems engineering right.
There have been over 1400 wellholes drilled in Mississippi Canyon alone. Was there anything uniquely special or dangerous about MC 252? I doubt it. There have been rumors that the blowout preventer (the primary mitigation to which I alluded above) on this hole was known to be defective or inoperative. If that is the case, the possibility that an inoperative blowout preventer would be used needs to be addressed.
But I’m skeptical that the accident makes the case that either (1) greedy corporations can’t be trusted to do anything dangerous, or (2) dullard bureaucrats can’t be trusted to interfere with private corporations. These seem to be the dueling narratives. If anything, (1) seems to be winning hearts and minds right now, but neither is germane to the engineering issues at hand.
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It appears BP threw away a culture of safety and engineering excellence under Tony Haywards rule. He wanted to increase profits, decrease assurance costs and increase on time results in drilling.
Much as when NASA threw away safety guidance to meet schedule pressure for Challenger, and columbia, BP became ruled by the clock.
This well was 7 weeks behind schedule at $500K per day and that was going to stop. There wasn’t anything that much more unusual about Mocando except an utter unwillingness to take time to fix engineering problems
and that is a management problem.
The big one is the use of BOPs by Industry actually indicates there is no Plan B in failure control. Plan A is to use the BOP, and when you actually start using those regularly then you find you have no Plan B.
Aircraft are designed to operate with dual redundancy as the normal protection on critical systems. 3 generators are the minimum equipment,
with usually 5 on board. (2 per engine plus the APU). when you find
yourself with just 2 generators, you declare a problem and return to base,
because if one of the generators dies, now you only have one left
despite having the emergency batteries.
BP had whittled away at the safety margins, and they have damaged the
tourism business and fishing business and property values for a few years.
Yet somehow this is Obama’s fault.