I hope to elaborate later — I’m wrapping up two weeks on the road promoting Power Grab — but it seems to me the issue with the recent oil-platform explosion and subsequent leak issue is BP, not offshore drilling.
Offshore drilling has a very good track record in the past few decades — and especially recently; BP has a terrible one. The Deepwater Horizon incident is consistent with only one of those track records.
Like Enron — and indeed, in close cooperation with Enron on the “global warming” rent-seeking — BP got distracted from its core businesses and spent its energies getting into solar ventures and carbon-trading schemes, and otherwise losing the plot of an energy company. The absurd re-branding to “Beyond Petroleum” (really? your balance sheet doesn’t quite agree) speaks volumes.
They thereby also lost focus on these operations and implicitly told their best people that the future did not lie there.
And for a decade we have seen BP facilities blowing up — with human and environmental consequences — all over the place.
The newsiness of this spill is testimony to its aberrant nature. The issue today isn’t offshore drilling so much as it is the company that, in violation of all laws of probability, continues to be involved in a preponderance of its various industries’ high-profile workplace tragedies.