I dunno, the eventual clean-up bills are going to be huge and will get larger everyday the well is allowed to spill, I’d think the financial incentive for BP would be pretty clearly to get it under-control as quickly as possible, regardless of the costs of the methods used. The cost of the relief well is supposedly something like 100 million, which is probably considerably less then the cleanup will be, and if a faster method worked, BP could presuambly stop drilling the relief well and end up spending considerably less then the full 100 million.
Glancing at wikipedia, the relief well drilling started at on May 2nd, a little more then a week after the spill started, and before several other faster methods of fighting the spill were attempted. I have little trouble believing that the week lag was simply the amount of time it takes to get together the ships, planning and information necessary for drilling, even if you rush it.
It seems that BP would be doing every thing within their power to stop the leak with or without government intervention. They must be losing a ton of money due to this leak and the lawsuits will be numerous.
That being said, it seems that neither BP nor the government was too concerned with safety before the spill. Although I am conservative I feel that government oversight of safety is a must. Looks like the MMA dropped the ball on inspections
I used to be a hardcore libertarian and the problem with it is that same as with hardcore Socialism, it is too academic and any attempt to make it consistent with the vagaries of the real world makes some of the true believers shudder with the thought that thier utpoian vision might need to be muddied up with reality.
it reminds me of a jok about a Rational Expectations economist (one who views rational homo economicus decision making as the holy rule of law) and another economist are walking down the street when the regular economist spots a $20 bill on the ground, “Hey, there’s a twenty dollar bill lying on the ground!” RE Economist, “No there isn’t.”
Oh, that’s nice. Do you “have time” to explain what your post had to do with RP’s opinion on cleaning up the spill? You know, the topic of this thread?
actually i regret making the insult, and i apologize. it does not contribute to this discussion.
i originally commented on the title of this thread, ‘Conservatives/Libertarians: How has the Gulf spill affected your views?’. my opinion on the subject was called a ‘gratutitous swipe’, followed by a non-sequitor about obama. my overall opinion of the spill is that it was a clearly foreseeable problem. i think 3rd graders could have designed a safer system, and i mean that literally (and i know what literally means). i have seen many political ideologies contributing to this problem, and none of them offering much of a solution. i will state: politically, government corruption was a major factor in creating the circumstances for this catastophe. i think political ideologies of all kinds are a major contributing factor in creating government corruption.
If you have a better plan, why don’t you call Obama or BP or both?
Sometimes shit happens. Sometimes the immediate fix doesn’t work. Sometimes you have to keep plugging at it until you do fix it.
Remember the first Gulf War and how Saddam set fire to the oilfields? That was a huge spill, polluting the Gulf. Yet it got put out eventually, and the ecosystem recovered. But it didn’t happen overnight.
Sometimes shit happens, sure, but this wasn’t an act of God, this was due to BPs negligence and cutting corners. What also grates is BPs attempts to downplay the disaster by claiming that only 5,000 barrels a day was coming out of the geyser when the estimate is more in the tens of thousands. Or when the EO of BP in an interview says the oil volcano is but a blip ini the overall amount of water on the planet, or when BP decides to get into petty blame game with TransOcean and Halliburton. They may be doing everything they can, but they sure as hell didn’t do everything they could to make sure it didn’t happen. And one of their attempts to “fix” the problem is to try and downplay it or the fact that they are continually missing deadlines by weeks in getting something done.
The boot should be on BP’s throats, who gives a shit if it hurts their feelings or somehow offends Rand Paul. Shit happens is not an excuse, clean the mess up, own up to your responsibility, pay the damages and don’t whine when folks think you are assholes for dumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in the ocean.
The OP assumes that we are currently living in libertaria. There are currently laws on the books regulating how and where drilling can occur. There are agencies that police oil companies and examine all of the practices to ensure that nothing like this happens. These regulations and agencies failed just like the corps of engineer’s levees failed before them. Yet, very few people are calling for the disbanding of government regulations concerning oil drilling platforms. BP is on pace to lose hundreds of millions of dollars and have its executives testify before angry congressmen. I think the former fate is more motivational than the latter.
There’s a difference between the cleanup and damages, I’d be close to certain they will have to pay the entirety of the former, which itself will run into the billions and ought to provide a plenty strong incentive to get the thing under control as quickly as possible.
Damages they may get out of (though I doubt it). They’re covered by a federal fund but a) it appears their ability to draw on the fund will be more or less eliminated by pending legislation and b) even if that legislation fails, the oil industry will still have to pay to replenish the fund, so BP will still end up covering a decent chunk of it.
FWIW, Exxon Valdez paid the entirity of the clean-up and non-punative damages on their spill. They managed to get the punitive damages reduced by the SCOTUS, but it remains to be seen if BP acted negligently, so we don’t know if they’ll have to pay any punative damages to have reduced (though I’d certainly bet they’ll be found negligent in some respect or another).
I honestly don’t have a horse in this race; I just asked the question. I’m not an engineer, and I’m more of a bystander where questions of statism are raised on the SDMB. That said, the problem before us (private company causes huge mess that they may well be unable to deal with) does raise the question of whether the private sector or the government is generally more capable of dealing with large problems. **Quartz **does seem to think that BP is still the party to be dealing with the Gulf spill, and that it will eventually get the problem solved. The pressure the US gov’t puts on BP to get this done is another issue, albeit an interesting one from a libertarian perspetive as evidenced by the above quotes from Rand Paul.
To be fair, it’s considerably better than what the government would be doing. What does the government know about oil production and remediation? If they were running the show they’d be hiring an oil company to solve the problem, thus bringing it full circle.
Do you seriously think that BP is doing everything they can do further destroy their reputation rather than everything they can to attempt to salvage what’s left of it?
The only thing that “went wrong” here from a corporate ethics perspective is the possibility that BP bypassed or ignored safety equipment that could have prevented this. If that in fact did happen it is something that needs to be addressed. If everything was properly in place and functioning and this was a genuine accident with subsequent disaster than it seems unfair to blame BP for anything other than not knowing how to fix something that is unprecedented.
This here is the crux of the problem, the presumption that while BP may be doing everything in theri power to salvage their reuptation, that that in of itself will lead to appropriate responses and results. But the evidence is quite the opposite, . BP is continually missing deadlines, and BP hass not proven it is capable of stopping it. It has been a month and clearly at some point we get to say “You guys aren’t cutting it”. BP has consistently lied and tried to downplay the exgent of the gusher of oil, good intentions are not going to stop the gusher.
The question should be how long does BP get the presumption of good faith and competence in this?
My anger is not with Libertarian or free markets or anything like that. I in fact have understand and support quite well the philosophical concepts behind it. But there are those who practice a very lazy type of libertarianism which is “Governement bad, Free Market good” EVERY TIME. That is their answer, that is why Rand Paul can think it is “unamerican” to hold BP accountable. It is lazy and unrealistic and unproductive. I am not accusing any one here of that lazy vantage point, but it exists in spades out there.
i think they (BP executives) are doing everything they can to maximize the value of BP. that’s their job. that might include destroying a bad reputation by blaming others for their bad acts. but as i will describe below, they weren’t doing their job when they risked this catastrophe.
please note my earlier comments about 3rd graders. i don’t see how it was possible for BP to have considered this as anything but a likely result of their actions. BP had the superior knowledge concerning a blow out like this. i don’t know the source of the ‘blow-out preventer’, but it could not have been considered reliable by any honest engineer, and BP could not have any reason to believe their company was covered for losses in the cases of its failure. why was there no manually actuated shut off valve below the ocean floor? why was there no secondary hole in place to perform ‘junk shot’ operations in the case of a major failure? why was there no containment structure over the well head? i understand BP shareholders are bringing lawsuits against the executives, i don’t blame them, and think they will succeed. this is an obvious case of mismanagement. if i may paraphrase a basic rule of business (and also traditional conservative philosophy), ‘don’t do anything you can’t undo’.
Too well in comparison to what? BP is making an incredibly difficult task look incredibly difficult. Unless the government has Aquaman stashed somewhere it would face the exact same challenges, with less expertise and fewer incentives to go quickly.
Until you have some sort of evidence of malevolence or intentional malfeasance. See, if you had something akin to the don’t care reaction of Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster I’d be right there beside you. But what I see instead is a company doing their level best to try to stop something that nobody has seen before while simultaneously trying to salvage what’s left of their reputation.
I will say that I am amused at how everybody’s an expert when a disaster happens. Suddenly everybody’s a structural engineer or an oil driller. They just KNOW that BP is stalling on this because the best way to protect a company is to destroy it completely. It makes total sense to me.