The Redhunter

The short answer is; of course not. You don't ban air travel when a 747 crashes, and you don't drydock all ships when one sinks. There have been aircraft crashes and ships sunk that have cost hundreds or even thousands of lives, but no one would think to stop either.

Oil spills are different, not because of their nature but because of the politics. The left wants to end the use of oil so will and are seizing on this as "proof" that off-short drilling is unsafe and hazardous to the planet. Survey shttp://www.theredhunter.com/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=1573&blog_id=1&saved_changes=1ome of the liberal blogs and they are fairly chortling over the disaster.

Nevermind that just two months ago President Obama himself opened up more waters to off-shore drilling. Don't look for the left to lambaste him for that.

Here's the bottom line; we should continue and even expand off-shore drilling.

The fact is that we need the oil for our economy to function properly, we're not going to reduce it's use anytime soon no matter what we do, and buying it from countries whose rulers hate us isn't exactly helpful.

This editorial at Aol News provides some useful perspective:

In addition, the size and number of oil spills from offshore oil rigs have declined substantially over the past three decades. Prior to the Horizon's destruction, the last substantial spill from an offshore rig was in 1969. And very little oil spilled into the Gulf after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and none damaged shores or wildlife. Unfortunately, the safety systems that prevented massive spills after Katrina and Rita seem to have failed in the case of the Horizon.

By comparison, since 1991, oil tankers have still spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms and more than twice as much as pipelines.

Of all the sources of petroleum released into the ocean, including natural seeps of oil, offshore platforms put less oil into the ocean than any other. Since 1990, less than one-one thousandth of 1 percent of the oil produced in U.S. state or federal waters has spilled. Furthermore, when tankers leak, run aground or founder and sink, they tend to do so in port or near shore, resulting in more severe environmental damage.

And even if the oil spilled from the Horizon eventually equals the amount spilled by the infamous Exxon Valdez -- and it has so far leaked less than 14 percent of that -- it will still amount to multiple times less oil than spilled in any of the largest 35 spills from oil tankers since the 1970s.

In addition, while the damage and cleanup costs may eventually top billions of dollars, it will still equal only a small percentage of the royalties and taxes paid by offshore oil production to governments each year. It will equal an even smaller percentage of the overall net contribution the industry makes to the economy in terms of jobs and spending.

So yes, let's investigate the accident fully. If there was negligence, let's bring the full weight of the law to bear on those who are responsible. If we need additional regulations, let's put them into place.

But let's not use this as an excuse to rant against 'big oil."

Steve Hayward has it about right, and gives much food for thought , in a post over at NRO's The Corner today:

Judging from the triumphant tone of the e-mails I'm getting from indignant environmentalists about the oil spill in the Gulf, I'd have to say they are having the most fun since the ExxonValdez. After all, the greens were slowly losing ground to expanded domestic oil and gas production, and now they have a catastrophe to reinvigorate their philosophy of No. As many have observed, this spill is the Three Mile Island/Chernobyl of offshore drilling, and will likely set back further offshore drilling for decades, unless we find out there was some truly extraordinary human error, negligence, or unprecedented equipment failure. Even sabotage wouldn't get Big Offshore Oil off the hook; after the 1984 chemical catastrophe in Bhopal, India, was determined to have been an act of sabotage, the political hysteria over chemical plants was unabated.

What is clear is that the overall risk of environmental harm will likely increase from the reaction to this. Why? In the first place, it means we'll import more oil -- by tanker. Over at that other conservative magazine, I offer some thoughts on how the risk of oil spills from tankers is still much larger than the risk from offshore drilling:

If we were truly concerned about minimizing risks of oil spills in the ocean, we'd cut back on shipping oil by tanker. The amount of oil spilled in tanker accidents dwarfs the amount spilled from drilling rig accidents. (The long-term global trend of oil spills from all sources is down, despite the increase in both offshore drilling and oil shipped by tanker.) The Deepwater Horizon spill is on course to match or exceed the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. But the Exxon Valdez spill was only the 35th largest tanker-related spill over the last 40 years. Since the Exxon Valdez, there have been seven larger tanker spills; the ABT Summer disaster off the Angolan coast in 1991 spilled seven times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez, but received hardly any media coverage in the United States. And while it is too early to know how extensive will be the damage to Gulf Coast shoreline ecosystems, it is not too early to expect that many dire predictions will be proven wrong.

"This has been the pattern since the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. A hastily assembled White House panel of experts concluded that it might take 10 to 20 years to stop the still-seeping oil in the Santa Barbara Channel. It took only a few weeks. Another group of experts forecast that with the number of rigs operating in the channel, a similar blowout could be expected to occur on average once a decade. There hasn't been another one in the channel since. Dire predictions of the permanent loss of wildlife and damage to the channel's ecosystem became a daily refrain. But as Time magazine reported five months after the spill, 'dire predictions seem to have been overstated. .  .  . Now, four months later, the channel's ecology seems to have been restored to virtually its natural state.' A multi-volume study by the University of Southern California two years later concluded that 'damage to the biota was not widespread.'

"No energy source is risk-free or environmentally benign; just ask West Virginia coal miners, or check up on the avian mortality of wind power, or the potential disruption of desert ecosystems from proposed large solar power projects, or, indeed, the additional pollution of the Gulf coast from ethanol production. The greatest risk of all is the inability to weigh trade-offs."

Despite what environmentalists wish, this oil spill isn't going to make American quit consuming oil. In the aftermath of this spill, there will over the long term be increased demand for oil from Canadian tar sands (and ultimately from our own huge oil shale deposits out west), whose environmental footprint is much higher than the Gulf spill, and much of the additional oil we will now import will come from nations that are expanding their own offshore drilling to sell it to us. Think Angola is likely to inspect its offshore oil platforms as often as we will?

Let's just be adults in our reaction to this disaster, please.