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I’ll probably write about this more later, but for now I think I should at least admit I was wrong. The Deepwater Horizon disaster really does demonstrate that the technology isn’t fully ready for deepwater drilling. Yes, we know how to do it pretty well when everything goes right. But when things go wrong, the last couple weeks clearly show that we don’t know how to get them right again. I am still very much for domestic oil exploration, in part because, if we don’t drill more here, there will be more spills in the ocean (tankers are still more dangerous than rigs). But I can’t argue with the folks who want a moratorium on deep drilling until we have a serious accounting of what we know how to do and what we don’t.

Agreed. But it’s not just the pro-drilling crowd that missed this, but President Obama and his crack staff who presumably should have looked into this before approving an expansion of offshore drilling.