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well first thing is that i'm mostly in information gathering mode in this thread. it's become interesting to me assembling various fragments from different sources and putting them together in an effort to see something of what's happening around the deepwater horizon.
the regulatory system came up as problematic quite early on--in the thread via a post from mit press that referenced the author of a book on a spill that took 20-odd years to be cleaned up in california--i had little idea of how central that would become and how many problems with regulation would be revealed through this accident. if regulation we are to call it, really. that seems to me a basic, basic problem---that there's way way too much reliance on corporate reporting and way too much emphasis on cheerleading the extraction of oil at the expense of oversight and/or protection of even access to the resources not to speak of the surrounding environment. this system hasn't even caught up with the language of stakeholders so isn't even set up to take into consideration the interests of adjacent activities/industries that are directly affected by things going south on a rig (think fishing. shrimp for example. big big bidness. potentially fucked in a big big way)...you'd think that there'd be comprehensive regulation/oversight of the gulf (for example) as a commons from which lots of types of capital is extracted...this wouldn't be in the interest of any particular sector/industry though the protection of the resource/commons would be in the interest of all...allowing private sector domination of--or in the case of oil evacuation of--regulatory oversight in the interest of the narrowest imaginable bidness objective (shareholder profits) is simply not acceptable.
that's what the deepwater horizon has made really really obvious.
i'm not particular advocating yanking the plug on all offshore drilling...the only real conclusion i've come to so far based on the information i've been assembling and reading is that the regulatory frameworks that shape the activities already underway are seriously flawed. but everyone knows that now. so that would have to be addressed. and there are twitching moves in that direction--whether they're damage control or substantive in a bigger sense is impossible to say at this point, yes?
it would also seem to me that the assumption that things on the 400-odd rigs off lousiana are correct or even safe is now a Problem as well.
and this is the place at which it seems to me to make little sense to simply say "keep drilling"....the **only** interest that seems served by that are the profits of oil corporations.
it's too simple to say: yank the plug. and its too simple to say: keep drilling.
past that, i'm still putting together a view of what the regulatory set-up was, who the actors in this are and what happened, much like anyone else. and i've spent way way too much of my life around folk who work(ed) for oil companies to indulge rapid reactions to this. so i can only say where my thinking is heading.
what's your take on the regulatory system? what should be done at that level?
obviously this is not a panacea (fix the oversight, make it real, introduce accountability, stop giving hand jobs to oil interests, that kind of thing or a restatement of it) but it's the aspect of this that seems to jump out when i read this information...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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