The Deepwater Horizon incident is the worst drilling-related environmenal catastrophe since Santa Barbara in 1969, and it’s worth looking at what the two incidents have in common, as well as how they are different, since Santa Barbara may well have echoed the “hard cases make bad law” effect, by stalling drilling off of California’s coast for decades, and keeping outdated—and, let’s face it, ugly—oil platforms in place off of some of the Golden State’s prettiest beaches. The beaches of Carpiteria and Santa Barbara are, in fact, marred by the continual seepage of tar, and that tar would be greatly reduced if more drilling were taking place off of Santa Barbara, to reduce the petro-pressure. But the environmentalists up-coast want, at all costs, to keep their unsightly 1950s-era platforms, and deprive the rest of the state of much-needed revenue. What Santa Barbara really needs is platforms that are further out, and more efficient, and camouflaged more effectively. But environmentalists are unlikely to let that happen.
In much the same way, Deepwater Horizon looks to have a political impact that may run exactly opposite of what logic would suggest we do. This accident took place in deep water, as its name suggests, and mitigation was made very challenging because the well was so deep, and the platform was so far from shore. And yet, it is the easier, cheaper, safer drilling in shallow water that will be stalled by this accident.
The logical response to Deepwater Horizon would be to encourage more drilling in shallow water, where the rigs are reachable by land and the engineering is less challenging and costly—it’s also easier, cheaper and faster to clean up around these platforms if something should occur.
But of course that’s not the reaction we’re getting. Instead, Schwarzenegger has scrapped offshore drilling in the safer, shallower waters off of California, and the drilling off of Virginia has also been halted. It’s as if someone had been killed by falling off a ladder, trying to get at the apples on top of the tree, and in response we eschewed picking the low-hanging fruit and trying to muddle along without apples.
This is all driven by emotion: the “thinking,” if you can call it that, is that drilling is icky, and since icky drilling led to an accident, we are better off not drilling at all. (And if you don’t think it’s the ick factor, please consider the overlap between those who are scared of guns and those who are scared of petroleum development that they can see, or know about, or suspect might be going on. The difference being that they tend to avoid owning firearms, but have no compunction about filling up their tanks with fossil fuels a couple of times a week. The theory, I suppose, being that gasoline appears magically at the filling station, ready for our consumption—perhaps driven by the same benevolent forces that place meat at the butcher’s section at Ralph’s without any animals getting killed.)
And yet the same people who push for less drilling don’t seem to hold back on taking road trips, or on consuming foods that weren’t locally produced (or were locally produced—but with tractors, seeders and harvesters, and then brought to market in trucks).
The people on all three coasts—West, East, and along the Gulf—who oppose drilling are like the Surfrider Foundation, blindly opposing drilling without figuring out how drilling in shaller water will affect natural oil leakage (apparently tar is good for surfboards), or reduce the deep-water drilling that brought us the Horizons disaster.
It’s squeamishness driving public policy, and it’s got to stop.
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I just read that about oil leaking from the ocean floor. That means enviros who want to prevent drilling hate the Earth, and the fishes, and the flowers. The children, too.
Could part of it be by design? Push the drilling platforms out far enough and when, not if, an accident happens, it will make it all that much more disastrous? Thereby giving them that much fuel for their fire on “Clean environment”?