The Obama administration on Monday issued a new moratorium on deepwater offshore oil drilling until November 30 [2010] to ensure oil companies implement stricter safety measures following the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"More than 80 days into the BP oil spill, a pause on deepwater drilling is essential and appropriate to protect communities, coasts, and wildlife from the risks that deepwater drilling currently pose," said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in a statement. "I am basing my decision on evidence that grows every day of the industry's inability in the deepwater to contain a catastrophic blowout, respond to an oil spill, and to operate safely."
The announcement came just days after an appeals court upheld a federal judge's ruling that voided an earlier six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling that the government issued in May.
The new moratorium was cheered by environmentalists and panned by the oil industry and many Gulf Coast elected officials, who are worried about losing more jobs and deepening the economic crisis.
U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, said the moratorium could lead to the loss of 120,000 jobs in her state and a "second economic disaster that has the potential to become greater than the first."
A leading champion for the oil industry, Landrieu said offshore drilling is safe and argued that 42,000 other wells have been drilled in U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico without serious incident.
"Obviously more effective regulations and greater transparency are a must, but this Deepwater Horizon incident is an exception and it should be treated as such," Landrieu told the presidential commission that is investigating the BP oil spill. "I urge this commission to take immediate and swift action to immediately lift the moratorium."
The commission declined.
"Before we can recommend lifting the moratorium, one would have to have a conviction that the kinds of concerns it intended to address have been met," said Bill Reilly, the Republican co-chair of the commission established by President Obama. "It doesn't seem to me that we're in that position."
Essentially, the oil industry and its political friends are asking the U.S. government and the American people to trust them to operate safely and do the right thing. But given BP's lousy safety record and laughable oil spill response plan for the Gulf region, and the almost identical response plans filed by the other major oil companies that operate in the Gulf, that's a tough sale to make.
Imposing a moratorium that provides the time needed for the presidential commission to complete its investigation, and for oil companies to review and tighten their safety processes, is a reasonable and measured response to a very unreasonable and unmeasured environmental and economic disaster.
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Comments
What is staggering is that any U.S. court should overturn a suspension of new drilling under these circumstances.
With 42000 wells already in place in the area, it is entirely reasonable to compel compliance with stringent safety measures.
B.P.’s performance has been lamentable and those responsible should be criminally liable for the decisions they took.
The British Government should similarly force drilling companies in the North Sea to act safely at all times regardless of cost. They need independent persons (paid for by themselves), overlooking their operations to ensure safe policies being adopted.
The old adage that ’save the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves’ doesn’t seem to apply here where BP has taken short cuts to save money.
42,000 oil rigs working in the Gulf and 1 has a problem. We don’t shut down all air traffic for six months following a crash, why should we shut down drilling following this mishap? The risk remains only 1 in 42,000.
The economic disaster a moratorium would cause will be 16x more expensive for the area whch derives $16 from the petro industry for ever $1 derived from fishing/shrimping. Considering the dependence of our economy in general on oil, the enviro- damage this spilled has caused is smaller than the econo-damage drastic changes in energy policy would cause.
All engineering problems must involve evaluation of risk vs benefit vs cost. Do we need better safety measures, at huge cost, in place to guard against rare accidents like this?
Luckily, so far, this spill has caused very little enviro- damage. I wish Chicago’s beaches were as clean as those seen in the news from the Gulf.
guidoLaMoto: Do you actually read what you type? Apparently Not… Maybe you would like to tell the 11 families that lost someone that profit margins are more important than human life and that it would cost too much to put proper safety measures in place.