House of Eratosthenes

My devastating question that derails the entire thought process could be best-phrased as: So you make all the people who run BP into perfect wonderful decent people, either by attrition or by some kind of hocus-pocus. Then what? How well is that gulf protected? Not very much. Even if you’re going to insist wonderful people make wonderful decisions all the time, which lead to a wonderful outcome all the time — that’s problematic in obvious ways — what if the next chairman of BP is a dick?

BP’s mission is, and was, to make money. The mission of the auditors was to stop this from happening. The disaster is, therefore, an indictment against the auditing and oversight process. It isn’t reasonable to reach any other conclusion.

My solution is to — for JUST once — tell the hippies to fuck off, and bring the drilling onto dry land so that if something goes wrong, it can be controlled. Apart from fixing the problem where things are truly broken, it would be healthy to direct a response of “no” where it is not typically directed. But it would be an understatement to say I’m open to a better idea…
:
Auditors, in my experience, tend to be boolean people. That’s a fancy way of saying they’ve made up their mind ahead of time whether you’re going to fail your audit or not, and [as is the case with] all human endeavors, facts & evidence don’t figure into the process as much as we like to tell each other they do.

If BP has a bad safety record and/or has been doing illegal things that jeopardize the safety of its workers and/or that of the environment…

…why doesn’t our government’s regulatory agencies (EPA, etc) just identify what specific regulations were broken, identify the specific individuals in the company who were responsible for compliance with those regulations…

…and then hold them personally and/or the company itself responsible? You know, identify the specific wrongdoing, punish the wrongdoers. This isn’t rocket science.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out what this has to do with A) other oil companies B) other existing oil wells or C) new drilling – even deep water drilling – elsewhere in the Gulf or in the Atlantic.

Why does the entire US oil and gas industry have to be punished because one company screwed up? Why do thousands of oil company employees, applicants to those companies (not to mention shareholders) have to pay the price? It’s not fair and it’s not right.

It reminds me of the way the cafeteria monitors back in grade school, used to keep all the kids in the cafeteria for the entire lunch period (instead of letting us go outside for the remainder)…just because one kid among 200 of us threw a dinner roll.

Come to think of it, I’ve got the exact same questions about “gun control,” (especially at the state level) but I am getting off-topic.
- cylarz | 12/23/2010 @ 01:03
Oh, and now that I think about it, consumers are probably paying more at the gas pump because of artificial restrictions on the supply of oil. That makes me the maddest of all. There’s no fucking reason we should be paying $3.15 a gallon in A) the middle of winter and B) the middle of the deepest recession in generations.

I keep hearing that the rise in prices is either due to a declining US dollar, to investors betting that the price of crude is going to rise (due to this phantom economic recovery I’ve heard so much about) or some combination of both. Bull.
- cylarz | 12/23/2010 @ 01:06
The answer to both of your questions is: Government involvement.

Look what we have going on here. The oil industry, and the offshore drilling — neither one of these has been in a state you could fairly call “under-regulated.” They’re regulated to death, pretty much. We just spent this summer witnessing iron-clad proof that it doesn’t work.

But nothing is ever the government’s fault; it doesn’t do anything wrong. Not because government is a deity, but because it lacks an identity. To millions of Americans that is what the government’s purpose is. We’re supposed to turn all our money over to it, not because it deserves to have the loot, but because “money is the root of all evil” and government can’t do any evil.

So an oil company passes its audits by buying Chivas Regal for the auditors and renting some hookers…then they have an oopsie, with some of the equipment that was part of the audit that was done all fast-and-loose. The government has absolutely no responsibility, or very little, and the entire mishap is blamed on the company. Notice nobody is calling for the government to be fined — BP should be fined, and the money should be put in trust of the government…and then, as you note, the drilling should all be shut down, not just by BP but by all other oil companies. Government screws up and the result is that government should come out of the situation with more influence than it had before. That is also, by the way, what is happening with your gas costing 3.60/gal during the winter solstice; governments and boards of non-producing busybodies make rules about oil prices, every time the situation brings about results people don’t like, the bureaucrats and busybodies accumulate more influence than they had before.

It is a weak citizen that thinks this way. And therefore, government is given an incentive to weaken the citizenry it governs. This stuff is really pretty simple. It’s not complicated, it’s just sad. Sad that it works so reliably and so well.
- mkfreeberg | 12/23/2010 @ 06:37
The central point to this whole issue, which Daphne and others are missing, is that BP, while culpable for their part, should not be the focus in determining what went wrong.

That is the heart of it. If we had to distribute blame according to who contributed the most to not only the accident itself, but the incredibly unnecessary aftermath, it goes something like 20% BP, 50% Federal Government, 30% American people.

First, there is no good reason for BP to have to be drilling that far off shore, that deep, where the problems and risks of drilling aren’t just more, they are exponentially more. This is in light of the fact that we have tremendous amounts of oil we could be getting from under ANWR with minimal risk. This goes double for the oil sitting under the plains States in the central U.S. And NIMBY problems don’t apply, because we are talking about areas that you’d have to fly to or take all terrain vehicles to.

Second: The emergency response legislation was already on the books giving the Feds the power to respond quickly and decisively to contain and clean up the spill. It didn’t happen. As if the Obama Administration purposely wanted the spill to become an outrageous disaster, all kinds of equipment and help were turned away under the guise of union protection law, EPA mandates of “perfect or not at all” standards for cleanup. This is all a matter of public record now.

Third: The sheeple of the United States letting the Enviro-Whacko crowd and the socialist greenie bureaucrats and politicians enact or create by fiat, laws to make it ridiculously costly and difficult to build or modernize refineries or their capacity, and more importantly, build the kinds of state-of-the-art nuclear reactors like what France is using to drastically cut down on the amount of fossil fuel we need to generate electricity.

I agree with Mark for the most part. But what I actually see is another example of the leftists not letting another good crisis go to waste. Anything that bolsters in the mind of John Q. Public that corporations are bad, and government needs to protect us from corporations, even if that means full-blown fascism, bring it on. The people just keep falling for the same old “management-by-crisis” methods that keep consolidating and concentrating power in the hands of the self-anointed political class.

Blaming BP exclusively for the far reaching effects of the spill is like blaming a ten-year-old for causing a pile up on the freeway after his parents bought him a big, powerful Escalade and handed him the keys.
- Moshe Ben-David | 12/23/2010 @ 11:36
Morgan, after I posted last night, I was reading an article on the SacBee about rising gas prices. I believe it’s dated the 18th:

http://www.sacbee.com/2010/12/18/3266768/gas-prices-going-up-for-the-holidays.html

You can read my comments if you like. You’ll recognize them. I have not bothered to go back and read the responses to them, as I don’t care much what SacBee regular readers think, about what I have to say. (The same paper has apparently published about six more articles on the same subject since this one, and they all say the same thing.) I think my favorite result returned by my search of the paper’s website was an editorial beginning with, “Now that the anti-science Republicans have taken over the House….” Here we go again. The science is always “on their side” …except when it isn’t.

The oil industry, and the offshore drilling — neither one of these has been in a state you could fairly call “under-regulated.” They’re regulated to death, pretty much. We just spent this summer witnessing iron-clad proof that it doesn’t work.

Correct. But the Left will argue that it proves deepwater drilling isn’t safe, and while we’re at it, we shouldn’t be drilling for oil anyway. “Why, it’s a better idea to saddle the public with millions more in debt trying to build more mass-transit…and a bunch of solar and wind farms that, by the way, Democrats spend plenty of time and money opposing. Oh, and let’s tax away oil company profits and slap the industry with MORE regulation, so that US consumers can continue to send their money to corrupt, oppressive Gulf Arab oil states. And more hybrids! Switch grass biofuels ethanol blah blah blah.”
- cylarz | 12/23/2010 @ 11:48
Moshe Ben-David…are you Jewish? (If you don’t mind me asking.) Your name sounds very Old Testament-ish.
- cylarz | 12/23/2010 @ 23:36

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Daphne Blames BPWednesday, December 22nd, 2010

Daphne Blames BP
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010