The Gulf Oil Catastrophe just keeps getting worse.
I heard on NPR on the way home today, that instead of a terrible 5,000 barrels a day leaking into the Gulf, the reality may be more like 70,000 a day, meaning an Exxon Valdez ever four days or so.
This is bad the way the Haitian earthquake was bad. There's the environmental and economic damage up front, and it's immense. Hard to take it's measure, in fact. The fishing, the tourism, the wetlands, and that's just in the United States. Mexico also has a few thousand miles of shoreline in peril, a fact which I haven't heard mentioned in a single news account so far. Oh, and the Caribbean is basically part of the Gulf, so I wonder how long until tar balls, dead turtles and oil sheen are coming to...Haiti. Like they haven't got enough shit to deal with.
Then there's how pissed off I get at the corporate assheads trying to cover testicles that deserve a good speedbagging. TransOcean files a suit to limit its total liability to $27 million, when I'm sure there are individual parties with real damages that exceed that. BP claims it will pay all 'legitimate' claims, but something tells me 'legitimate' means whatever they can pay and still be an oil company. Dude, you may have just destroyed the ecosystem of a whole region of the planet for a generation, I want to dowse you in some of that oil and set you on fire. You don't have the money to pay all legitimate claims because there isn't that much money in the world.
Then there's the Three Mile Island factor. Three Mile Island was a non-event, really. Yes, it was a 'nuclear accident,' but it didn't kill anything except approval for any more nuclear power plants.
If BP was as careful about the potential threats of offshore drilling as Metropolitan Edison was about nukes, this whole affair would have made news for about thirty seconds.
Three Mile Island wasn't the entire reason the United States pussied out on nuclear (or nukular) power; there was Chernobyl, not really a fair comparison. It's apples to onions. The main selling point of capitalism is while it can be stupid, it can never be as stupid as socialism. That's not my opinion, that's a repeatedly documented fact.
Or can it? It's not going to take 10,000 years for this to work itself out, the way some places in the Ukraine will, but this is the Chernobyl of offshore drilling, and brought to you courtesy of the semi-free market.
An accident that killed nobody and injured less than that can shut down a whole energy source for a generation. What do we do with an oil spill that could do real harm to hundreds of millions of people because a few guys decided to roll those dice?
Me, I say your markets should be free but also realistic. Which is to say, without a bailout, if you create a liability that makes your assets seem a down payment, you're done. We heard a lot about 'moral hazard' in the financial biz with TARP and it's sequels, but I see the same problem here. The legitimate claims against the major players in this catastrophe could easily outstrip their total assets. And if it came to that and either the courts ruled that they didn't have to pay the full amount or if Uncle Sam bails them out because they're 'too big to fail,' what will that do for future corporate responsibility?
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