A new oil well drilling explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, this one in shallow water, is sending shock waves to Gulf experts. Here’s one account.
My reaction: Oh shit. If the observer, Bob Cavnar, is correct which he has been most of the time in the BP disaster, this one stands a much quicker chance of being capped.
Of continuing concern to me is the higher than normal 5% levels of methane in the crude mix being drilled in some oil deposits in the Gulf.
I take offense for those who view these oil well accidents as a political cause favoring or debunking our national energy policy.
My TMV colleague Logan Penza writes:
The Obama Administration and its supporters are happy to paste the oil industry with a “moratorium” supposedly in the interests of “safety” and are more than happy to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs in the process, even while elsewhere pretending to champion the idea of putting America back to work. But cutting off exploration and drilling, either in the short term or (as many suspect) for a much longer period of time, will only accelerate the real problem of trying to maintain adequate energy supplies. No amount of “green energy initiatives” (most of which only exist in political rhetoric anyway) are going to power millions of semi-trailer trucks and passenger cars nor are they going to put tens of thousands of newly-unemployed oil workers (and hundreds of thousands more on the Gulf Coast’s broader economy) back to work during the combination of the nationwide recession and the artificial depression in the oil industry imposed by the Obama Administration’s mandate.
I take a much narrower, almost myopic, approach. Frankly, I don’t give a damn what our nation energy policy is. It is driven by political and economic forces beyond my control.
What I do care about is safety for the drilling operators and every protection no matter what the cost to protect our environment.
These oil blowouts in the Gulf are sucking one natural resource — oil — at the expense of jobs, fish, birds, turtles and a fragile ecological system in the Gulf in which man has done everything in his power to destroy by unintended consequences from polluting the Mississippi River from farming operations to bulldozing the protective marshes for waterways and land developments.
Every decision man makes is predicated on what’s in it for me. Fine. But don’t destroy a natural environment that took an eternity to evolve for short-lived spoils.
To me, it is not a question of drill baby drill or moratoriums. The issue, in pragmatic terms, is applying some common sense for safety and protection of what nature gave us.
The bottom line is not the dollar; it’s killing the hand that feeds us from carelessness, not in terms of 2010, but whether it will survive into the year 3000.
Jerry Remmers worked 26 years in the newspaper business. His last 23 years was with the Evening Tribune in San Diego where assignments included reporter, assistant city editor, county and politics editor.