by sirlamre » Sun May 30, 2010 11:17 pm
One thought here--
Let's set aside Dem and GOP Administrations here, and look at the US government, the oil production industry and the oil cleanup industry as a whole for the last 20-30 years or so -
I'm going to have to use some hypothetical figures, since real figures aren't readily available - but I think I
can get the gist of what I'm thinking across-
BP and the rest of the oil industry routinely creates and sends reports of oil spill risks to the government
Those reports are more or less public - available both to the government and all the companies that make oil spill cleanup equipment.
Both the government and companies that make oil spill management equipment use those reports to decide how much equipment to manuacture,
and to budget to purchase (for the Coast Guard, among others)
So when the oil industy comes along and says "Because of our carefully tested processes and procedures, and high levels of oversight, and high degrees of training and
multiply redundant disaster
recovery systems, we anticipate that the average oil spill will be around 1,000 barrels a day, and will release no more
than 15,000 barrels of oil before our sophisticated equipment successfully shuts off the leak."
At that point, with an abundance of caution, the US government agencies will try to establish a safety factor ---
they'll perhaps assume that they must have the ability to contain three times that amount -- up to 45,000 barrels of oil will leak.
So they determine how much equipment that would take -- how many of the floating barriers, how many ships and men to deploy, etc etc.
They go to Congress to get the funding ahead of time.
Congress votes to give them 2/3 of what they ask for, in the usual beancounter way - the agencies are asked to reduce expenditures
before any Congressional committee will allow the oilspill response budget item to enter the general budget bill.
So, after the amount is budgeted by Congress, and that becomes public, the companies
that MAKE the equipment and also those that privately operate it begin to decide how much equipment should be
manufactured and how many jobs should be created to operate it, how much training should be purchased for
people to do the job, etc.
They, too, decide to triple the amount of equipment, training time, manpower, etc
They, too, are told by THEIR beancounters that they must cut back on what's initially asked for in corporate budgets.
All of these processes take years - Government and manufacturer budgets are created for a given year based on oil company spill risk estimates
from the year before or perhaps years before.
None of the companies that make the equipment, companies that specialise in oil cleanup, the Coast Guard are going to go out and
manufacture/purchase equipment and job-create and ship-build for an oil spill going into the hundreds of thousands of barrels.
Not when for decades the oil industry has reported year after year about how good their equipment is, how safely they operate it,
how well trained their people are, how many fail safes they have, how carefully they check all those systems, and how much oversight they apply
to how well the men are doing their jobs
Why would ANY company build THIRTY TIMES the amount of equipment required for the estimated amounts of projected oil spillage.
Why would the taxpayers EVER support Congress voting to budget 30 times the amount of money and manpower for the Coast Guard
to help clean up oil spills that, by oil industry reports, aren't going to happen anyway?
It's really about simple supply and demand --- NO ONE is going to purchase more manpower, equipment, ships, or
anything else, if they are told they don't need to purchase that.
Essentially, the fundamental thing that's happened here is that
the oil industry has LIED to everyone around them:
- about what the real risks for an oil spill are
- about the real quality of their on-the-ground-effective safety standards
They've made claims on paper to the government that are VASTLY different from what's really going on out on these oil rigs and refineries
every day.
So is it any wonder that the US government and the Coast Guard cannot react well enough to be ready to contain this thing?
Not really.
Now -- if you think the government should in fact be prepared for far more than the industry tells them they should be---
factor that concept across hundreds of different industries -- healthcare, heavy manufacturing (chemicals, etc), railroad transport,
shipping, weather disaster preparedness.
What would our government have to spend if we expected them to respond with incredible effectiveness to not just ONE incident, but
be constantly funded-up, equipment-ready, men on standby for HUNDREDS of potential disasters every year?
And if we decided that our government should call "Liar" on every report turned in to it by all industries,
and the government should fully investigate all the details in every report, believing next-to-nothing they are told,
how many additional government workers would have to be hired to go and do all that investigating?
So tell me again why this is Obama's personal fault, or even the entire governments fault
that there isn't enough equipment on hand to cover the situation when an oil rig
has a failure FAR more massive than anything the oil industry would ever admit could happen?