Let’s take the current gulf oils spill and change a couple of variables and see what happens.
Case 1. The location of the spill remains constant, as does the weather and other conditions. The only thing that changes is the operator of the well. Rather than British Petroleum, it’s Petroleos de Venezuela. How does the U.S. government response change? How would it have been different if G. W. Bush were President? How would the popular reaction in the U.S. differ from what it is now?
Case 2. The owner/operator is still BP. But the blow out does not threaten the U.S. coast. It threatens the Venezuelan coast. What its the U.S. government reaction. The U.S. popular reaction?
Case 3. Same as case 2, but the owner operator is Esso. Any change in the reactions to case 2?
Democrats would blame Bush for everything and Republicans would want to attack Venezuela. Also, PDVSA would probably not be nearly as good in their response as BP has been causing the issue to be even worse.
It would be about 5% as big of a story as this one is. Nearly no common person on the street would know anything about it. It would still be a big deal amongst the people in the industry. Certain politicians would push for continuing to not allow offshore drilling around Florida, the east coast, and California.
Most people would probably wonder who the hell Esso is since most people refer to them as Exxon. They would move up the Democratic company hate list from probably #3 behind Goldman Sachs and Halliburton to number #1. It would probably be a much bigger story since so many more common people are familiar with Exxon.
This board would be going absolutely nuts if this happened on Bush’s watch. The focus would be on how Bush is an oil man, and how Big Oil is just making profits and doesn’t care about safety, etc etc. Heck, even if it was BP, Bush would still be getting the blame. It would be Katrina all over again.
In that case I doubt it would even reach most American’s radar…including the US governments…unless some environmental group started really playing it up and that got picked up by the MSM. In which case, I’m sure there would be a lot of official condemnation by the government while the story stayed in the spotlight.
Major outrage and mucho talkage about how Big Oil is just out for profits, blah blah blah…