Quote:
US Gulf oil drilling ban is destroying 'eco-system of businesses'
Oil industry is seeking an injunction against ban after BP spill
* Tim Webb New Orleans
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 June 2010 20.43 BST
The moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is destroying an entire "eco-system of businesses", lawyers from the oil industry seeking to overturn the ban told a court today.
The US government imposed the six-month moratorium in the wake of the oil disaster last month. But oil services companies say the ban is illegal and threatens to wreak further devastation on the local economy, resulting in tens of thousands of job losses.
Louisiana-based Hornbeck Offshore Services, backed by more than a dozen similar firms who work for companies like BP drilling in the Gulf, are seeking an injunction against the ban.
After today's hearing in a New Orleans federal court, independent lawyers said there was a good chance that the judge would rule in favour of the industry. Judge Martin Feldman, in Louisiana, said that he would make his ruling by Wednesday at the latest.
The case pits the oil industry – and state politicians anxious to protect local jobs – against the White House and environmentalists. Attorney Carl Rosenblum, representing the oil services companies, said the "US government failed to consider the human environment of the decision".
Since the ban was imposed on 28 May – more than a month after the Deepwater Horizon accident – all 33 drilling rigs operating in the Gulf have been idled. The rig owners have warned they will tow them elsewhere if the ban remains in place.
"Once these rigs move overseas and enter into long-term contracts, they not going to come back in six months and one day," he said. "That is the problem."
The rigs directly employ around 7,000 people. But, according to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, each offshore job supports three more onshore, meaning a further 21,000 jobs are at risk. Rosenblum added: "It's an eco-system of businesses which are being harmed even now by this moratorium."
He said the US government had broken the law by not consulting with local politicians about the ban. He compared it to the response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which resulted in the airline industry being shut down for three days. "Never before has the government with a stroke of a pen shut down on entire industry for six months," he said.
Deepwater drilling is vital to the regional oil industry, making up 80% of oil and 45% of gas produced in the Gulf.
After the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, causing the worst US environmental disaster in history, the US government ordered a safety review of deepwater drilling in the Gulf. The regulator, the Mineral Management Services (MMS), inspected 29 rigs and found that 27 of them complied with regulations; there were minor infractions on the other two. It recommended 22 measures to improve safety and the interior secretary Ken Salazar ordered a moratorium on drilling until the safety improvements could be implemented and investigations into the Deepwater Horizon accident had concluded.
But lawyers representing the oil services companies argued that the MMS's findings did not justify a blanket ban as it did not identify a systemic fault that could lead to a similar accident on other rigs.
The judge appeared to have some sympathy with this argument. He asked Guillermo Montero, the attorney representing the US justice department, why the government had not banned oil tankers from Alaska after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. Montero said the MMS system for granting permits to drill and carrying out safety inspections was inadequate. He noted that Transocean,the owner of the Deepwater Horizon, had a "stellar inspection record", which was better than the industry average.
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Gulf oil drilling ban is destroying 'eco-system of businesses' | Business | The Guardian
i find this rhetoric to be really interesting. on the one hand it indicates the obvious Problem that people whose basic position is fuck it drill anyway there's cash money to be made and popular opinion concerning the rickety-at-best "regulatory" situation be damned...capital is more important than them there fucking people anyway..
but it gets better
because you see corporate persons are now being discriminated against in the way that, say, arab-americans were after 911....
craven bidness i'd say. but hey, that's why you hire lawyers. they are specialists in the legal frame and much of navigating a legal frame is, in the end, rhetorical.
but i wonder what you make of the notion of an ecology of business..
i think it's an interesting move, discursively, to go here. this because i think there's a sense in which an economy is properly understood as a kind of ecology. this is way more accurate than thinking of an ecology in terms of markets or economics (think i'm just making this up? evolutionary psychology or most genetics-based forms of thinking evolution, or even the popular notions of biological evolution which crunch darwin and spenser into each other and rely upon the pervasive, thick cloud of stupid produced by the american educational system to not disentangle the two, and so write neoliberal economic horseshit into popular conceptions of bio-system development)....
do you think the term ecology applies to business?
how?
do you think it should apply?
why or why not?