Michael Brune: BP Oil Disaster Was Not an Accident, It Was a Crime
| April 20, 2015

April 20, 2010 should be, to borrow a phrase from Franklin Roosevelt, “a date that will live in infamy.” Today is the anniversary of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history: the explosion of Deepwater Horizon and subsequent oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t like to call it a spill, because spills are accidents. What happened that day was not an accident; it was a crime.



(Snip)

...Five years on, though, what lessons have been learned? Don’t trust oil companies to act responsibly? That seems to be the main takeaway for the Obama administration. Last week it announced tighter regulations for offshore oil rigs that it claims should help prevent oil-well blowouts. Those tighter regulations are directly based on what happened in the Gulf in 2010. Does that mean future disasters don’t happen? Of course not.

Yet the administration has also announced that it will allow oil and gas drilling off the coast of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia for the first time since the 1980s, as well as three areas for leasing in Alaska, including the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea, where the administration estimates that there is a 75 percent chance of one or more spills. Astounding. Back east, the administration was getting ready to announce oil and gas leases for the Atlantic coast five years ago, along with the usual platitudes about “drilling responsibly” and “minimizing risk.” Then Deepwater Horizon happened.

The bottom line is that we don’t need the oil that can be found off our Atlantic Coast, no matter what those state governors might tell you. And even if you manage to reduce the risks, and even if no oil company ever again acts with gross negligence for the sake of profits (a bet I wouldn’t recommend taking), the consequences of drilling in sensitive marine environments are just too great.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/04/20/michael-brune-bp-oil-disaster/