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The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster I have not yet given much thought to writing out a piece here on the oil spill – this is, on one level, a complex issue that does not lend itself to quick-fire blog postings. This article over at the Melangerie blog (which I thoroughly recommend) is a great piece, very fair and perceptive, in my view.
One issue for us free marketeers is this: we like to talk about how pollution is, in some ways, a property rights issue. When a huge oil leak contaminates a sea and damages vast amounts of marine life and say, fishing industries, it is an interesting question on how exactly that issue gets resolved without some way of apportioning costs and compensation. Is a state needed to oversee this? Can it be fixed by entirely non-state means?. There are some free market environmentalists out there who might have some ideas. Rather than write more, I would be interested in comments.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I still think, as I wrote in an earlier posting here …
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2010/05/why_the_gulf_of.html
… that Obama faced an open goal with this, but it seems that he is busy squandering his chance.
The impression that I get is that Obama should now be prioritising the process of sorting out the oil spill mess, and should leave the process of deciding who or what is to blame for it until the problem facing everyone now is dealt with.
As it is, he seems both to be depending on BP to stop the problem getting worse and worse, and yet also wanting to beat them round the ears, now, for causing it. His attitude ought to be, on the justice, blame, front: yes I agree that’s important, but first things first. Let’s clean this up. Then, let’s worry about who to punish, for what, and how.
The other explanation that appeals to me is that although Obama believes in activist government, he is not himself very … active. His default setting seems to be a let’s-think-about-this let’s-not-be-hasty approach more suited to someone who believes in inactivist government. Funny really. He prefers being President to doing President, as I believe Rush Limbaugh has put it.
That doesn’t seem to fit his healthcare reform approach, though.
I will be interested to read what any American commenters say.
My observations…
The public, if it is listening, is finding a whole lot of new information due to the BP spill:
• Some 200 bls per year naturally ooze up from the floor of the Gulf (same off coast of CA near Santa Barbara)
• With this much oil coming out of one well it pretty much shoots “Peak Oil” in the ass
• And, that gov’t policies can cause a lot of damage: why are we drilling in dangerous placed (the deep water seas) rather than on shore?
• Big Oil produces a lot of wealth & taxes; 600,000 + US jobs
• Obama is now eating his seed corn.
Which leads me back to BHO’s Prime Directive: Never waste a crisis.
Except now everybody sees it, so now he’s exposed his own end game. Game over…
Why? Environmentalists that could help are not in the political pecking order. Barak is close to baksheesh.
There is no solid, cohesive “Left”, nor solid “Right” The
Right vs Left senario is cooked-up social engineering.
The “fronts” literally are nothing but a well-bought front
They are both mostly fictions.
To those seen as on the Right, Obama is an oponent
To those seen as on the Left, as a traitor (to them)
Pelosi’s encounter with “Code Pink” is only a small indication. The greatest threat to this misadministration is from the Left.
That was a Reid/Pelosi production. Cap’t Kickass didn’t have much to do with it other than lie about it and sign it.
The Obama administration versus BP looks to me a lot like the Iran Iraq war of the 1980s. One hopes they could both lose.
Remember ‘Beyond Petroleum’ they wanted everyone to think that they were something other than an oil company, they were going to save the planet from global warming, the loved windmills and the sun and polar bears and bunny rabbits. They were a perfect example of an Age of Blair multinational.
Aside from all the money their US executives gave to Obama and to the Democrats, how much did they give to Greenpeace and to other environmental orgs ?
As for the Obama administration they are reaping what they sowed. They wanted an energy policy that ignored oil and guess what, oil came back and slimed them.
I think that is something for the courts.
The natural free-market result of such disastrous failure is that BP faces enough real damages that it is really responsible for that they should be driven into bankruptcy, their assets sold off to pay the damages and those assets bought at cheaply by another company which can use them without getting itself into such a situation.
Creative destruction also means, if you screw up, you lose your shirt.
Let’s see, the taxes on motor vehicle fuel (diesel and gasoline), now adulterated with corn squeezins’, was to pay for the highway “infrastructure” that we can all be so proud of.
All those taxes on marine fuel (diesel and gas) are for paying off…what exactly? What are all those gub’mint mineral mining operational license and “lease” fees doing?
And I suppose Lloyd’s of London (amongst others) don’t offer “Oh Ca-RAPP!” policies for folks forced out of the environment to which they had become accustomed?
I guess all that ecology was WORTH risking for three caribou, 1/2 acre of frozen moss, and 200 arctic mice.
I suppose all those making a living off the ocean COULD have reverted to sail power, but that might have cut down on the shrimp cocktail supply for a certain hotel in Virginia, or embassy cocktail parties in the sovereign state of Washington D.C.
Those are CFL bulbs in the solar/wind/biomass powered private Congressional subway system…right?
Now, if French consultants were recycling atomic waste at Yucca Mountain, then the 10% of Nevada
that Mr. Reid holds dominion over might feel better about the amount of their damned (intended) potable water that is denied to agriculture, that the air-conditioned tourist/gambling/convention/entertainment/prostitution industries (union, all the way baby) might thrive, then the projected demand for home “battery chargers”, and the I.B.E.W. jobs that will CERTAINLY be legislated as a requirement to touch them, could show some signs of assimilation to the “electric” personal/mass/freight transportation lie.
Or not.
If every page of every copy and “revision” of the Ried/Pelosi “wellness” legislation were strewn across the waters, would they act as wicks to burn off the crude, like a million points of light, or
simply remain an obstacle to actual progress?
If every “promised”, imagined, Dollar the U.S.Treasury was now printing were strewn across the waters…etc., etc., …Trillion points of light…
Obama’s problem about the oil spill is exactly what he has been putting forward as his excuse for not doing anything – that government cannot solve this problem, at least not after it becomes a problem. But his whole appeal and his criticism of Bush have been based on the assertion that government has the answer for every problem. It was always that those in power were too stupid or corrupt to act. He is being exposed as powerless and incompetent, the worst possible situation for a big government advocate. Tony Hayward should say, with reflective vulgarity, “Kick my ass? Obama can kiss my ass!” And exactly what would Obozo do then?
From the information that has been made public, it looks very likely that the eventual enquiry will conclude the spill was entirely avoidable. BP was trying to save time & money by cutting corners on drilling practices that have been standard for two generations or more.
Should BP pay compensation to everyone and his brother’s dog? Absolutely! Should BP CEO Tony Hayward spend the next few decades in jail, contemplating the lives of the 11 men he callously let die? Of course! And if this drives BP into bankruptcy (or to be taken over by the Chinese), so much the better. The more BP and its executives suffer now, the longer it will be before any other oil company executive puts short term cost savings ahead of common sense.
Do we need a government to jail Hayward? Yes. Do we need a government to enforce the full costs of restitution on BP? Yes. The anarcho-libertarian position, that there is no role for government, is intellectually incoherent.
Having said that, the ideal punishment for Hayward would be to spend his jail time in a cell with Barrack Hussein Obama, who has totally failed to do anything effective in the aftermath of the spill.
Going to a Democrat fundraiser while the memorial service for the men who died was being held. Failing to organize the resources to intercept the oil spill at sea — he had weeks to deal with that slow-moving disaster. Delaying permits for the Louisiana governor who wanted to build sand berms to protect sensitive areas. Obama has failed! He should be made to pay.
Alice, in anarcho-libertarian world BP woldn’t be drilling in the Gulf, but rather in Alaska.
Alice – How long have you been in the oil industry and in which area of this immensely complex, multi-degreed industry is your degree?
Alisa – check. Plus Alberta.
Please tell me that the Alice, above, is not Alice in Texas?!
Or have the Austinites succeeded in brainwashing her?
This isn’t primarily a reflection on anybody’s presidency in particular, but it’s perfectly illustrative of the horrors of intrusive and bloated government.
From BP’s point of view, they spend a lot of money lobbying DC, and even a barely competent administration, confronted with this crisis would have been expected to have jumped on board pretty quickly, run around making themselves look good while demonizing BP just enough to satisfy the anti-corporatists. Hand-wringing, evasive reporting, closed-door hearings etc could be reliably expected to result in a hand-slap and a structured settlement to pay over a number of years, with BP secure in the expectation that they could claw a chunk of it back via business development tax credits. All in all, far cheaper than – gasp – actually paying catastrophic insurance premuims with Lloyds at the level that they ought to be carrying.
In their heart of hearts, the board of BP can comfort themselves that the deal they cut with successive administrations was in the best interests of the shareholders, because their only real responsibility is to run the business to make a profit for the shareholders.
So to summarize, the reason why BP will hang for this – Washington’s quote behind closed doors to Hayward – will be “You fucked up … you trusted us!”, possibly backing that up with a demand for more Danegeld.
So, I’m all for BP shareholders taking the fall for the this catastrophe – bring it on and hang ’em high. I want every other multinational that participates in rent-seeking deals with politicians to learn good and well that they’re better off trusting to an insurance contract and that influence in Washington is only as good as influence in any other banana republic, because the people at the moment are the same, they won’t stay bought.
I do have some pity for the man on the Clapham (or Cleveland) Omnibus who will be hurt by the shares in a firm they were led to believe was a profitable and safe investment, but then I probably already feel sorry for them because they’re probably a European or American whose government has screwed them over in a bunch of other ways for most of their lives anyway.
There are plenty of participants in many industries where an engineering screwup can have catastrophic repercussions – it was really just a game of Russian roulette, and BP was in the wrong seat at the wrong time. We have no way of knowing whether the safety precautions taken by BP are better/worse/the same as any other company that (incorrectly) believes that $1 spent on lobbying is money better spent on $1 on safety, insurance or training.
Personally, I don’t think it matters how safe or otherwise BP’s drilling operation was on the Deepwater Horizon. They’d done exactly what they’ve been taught they needed to do to operate that rig, and they’d been rewarded for doing so after inspections last year. They had played the game to Washington’s official and unofficial rules.
However we are now *literally* seeing an Animal House political culture with the chutzpah to say “You fucked up … you trusted us! Hey, make the best of it!”. We owe them some gratitude for revealing so blatantly what needs to be changed.
Alice is right, with one exception, we don’t need the government involved. No reason a system of free courts wouldn’t have worked at least as well as the current state system.
Alisa and Verity are also right.
Drill baby, drill, and make sure the driller takes responsibility for for cockups. A sane system would see all these companies holding an effective level of insurance, and if that made it all too expensive, well, that’s called free market price signals.
Bod wrote: “We have no way of knowing whether the safety precautions taken by BP are better/worse/the same as any other company …”
Au contraire – we do have a way of knowing that BP’s drilling practices are worse than other companies. It is that wellhead 5,000 ft under the Gulf, bubbling oil. Thousands of subsea wells have been drilled safely. Was BP just unlucky?
Check the Congressional testimony. BP started to pump the dense drilling mud off the rig before they had safely abandoned the well. That’s equivalent to taking away the safety net while the acrobats are still on the high wire. But it would have saved BP a few hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars — if they had got away with it.
Regressive/progressives hate big companies, so they are cool with whacking BP. Transgressives think that big organizations and their executives have to be responsible for their actions, so that is a second group in favor of whacking BP — along with whacking the grossly incompetent Obama Administration. Anarcho-libertarians? For them, this is just another theoretical discussion, remote from the 11 bereaved families and the uncounted disrupted lives.
Alisa wrote: “Alice, in anarcho-libertarian world BP woldn’t be drilling in the Gulf, but rather in Alaska.”
Alisa, with deepest respect, BP is one of the largest operators in Alaska — where they reportedly have a profoundly unimpressive safety record. Gas pipelines blowing up. Oil pipelines leaking onto the tundra.
The accusation against BP in Alaska is that it has cut corners and delayed maintenance for years, putting short term gains ahead of their own long term best interests.
Might there be a pattern in BP’s behavior? Should BP’s CEO be held responsible for that pattern?
We don’t really know what happened except that a primary system failed and its backup did, too. I call that bad luck. And maybe one or the other failed because of a maintenance screwup, but even if that’s the case you can’t blame that on some overarching company policy; at worst it’s a failure of on-site management.
Perhaps Tony Hayward has to take the fall for this; it did happen on his watch, and sometimes the captain has to fall on his sword. But to my knowledge there is absolutely no evidence of criminal negligence on his part. To assert, at this stage, that he should spend “the next few decades in jail” is, quite frankly, assinine.
No company seeks to have accidents, let alone disasters of this magnitude. But all human enterprises are inherently fallible. Accidents happen, and even if some deficiency in maintenance (procedures or implementation) was the proximate cause of the equipment failure it was still an accident. BP will pay for the economic damages, and it might just be forced into bankruptcy as a result. So be it. But as far as we know there is nothing criminal about it, and to state otherwise is to betray a fundamental lack of understanding of what “criminality” means in western legal systems.
Well, it does, but you need to know what you’re talking about first. 🙂 Blogging wise, I’ve done quite well out of this oil spill, although this probably won’t offset the damage done to both the US oil industry and the environment of the Gulf of Mexico.
Right Alice, but if BP is really that incompetent safety-wise (of which I am not sure until I check with Tim’s blog), in anarcho-libertarian world they would not be drilling anywhere, because both Anwar and the Gulf would be private properties, and also because a company that incompetent would never get to be as big as BP has gotten to be.
Alice, I think there may be plenty of excellent reasons wht BP should be on the hook for this, and if their safety record elsewhere is as awful as you say, then there’s even greater justification in hanging them high.
I haven’t come to this conclusion from a progressive, transgressive or from an anarcho-libertarian point of view, but purely from one of natural justice. They were operating a facility pursuant to making a profit (which is what public companies are meant to do), and they deployed inadequate safety precautions (even though they had backup safety systems in place). Is this massive failure another data point is a damning history of industrial accidents, that is atypical for the industry? I can’t really say. But I think we’re in agreement that BP bears at a great deal of responsibility, and it’s paying the price every time its share price declines.
I doubt you’ll find many companies as large as BP who go out of their way to be criminally negligent as policy, and equally, I doubt very much that Hayward personally directed the team on the Horizon to shut down the well early. To the extent that he is guilty, he may be culpable for demanding that staff ‘aggressively control costs while maintaining appropriate safety levels in accordance with company policy’.
Companies are legal entities in their own right, and there’s a practical limit to the culpability of even it’s executive management when it comes to these kinds of tragedies. Some people claim that being potential sacrificial lambs is the justification for their high salaries (I’ve banged on in the past that this is the function of risk managers at finance firms).
So, when the clearup’s done etc, we get to determine whether BP is guilty of systemic flaunting of safety. And you know what? If they survive the current market reaction as a firm, they will be largely exonerated from guilt, aside from a slap in the wallet and they’ll get to wear a massive hairshirt for a while.
Why? I think I made that clear in the prior posting.
On this issue, I would especially recommend Kevin Carson’s In a Truly Free Market, BP Would be Toast.
Roderick Long, who lives in Allabama, and so is somewhat effected by this (though Auburn is inland), has a round-up of libertarian articles on this issue.
Laird wrote: “We don’t really know what happened except that a primary system failed and its backup did, too. I call that bad luck.”
Laird, you may not know what happened. But if you spent the time to read the large amount of information that has been released into the public domain through the Congressional hearings, you could probably get a reasonable understanding.
Two systems failing might be “bad luck”. From BP’s own statements, seven (as in 7) systems failed, resulting in the blowout. That’s not bad luck, that’s a pattern of willfully risky behavior.
Throw in the Texas City refinery fire (another 15 dead) and the hundreds of violations on the North Slope of Alaska, and that’s a company-wide pattern of willfully risky behavior. The simplest explanation is that BP, under the intense pressure to maximize profits by cutting costs, pushed the envelope on safety — and pushed too hard.
Still, maybe BP CEO Tony Hayward will get lucky and have Laird on the jury, with a very refined sense of what constitutes criminal behavior.
Alisa’s point is a good one. BP did not get this big by being incompetent. But competence in decades past is no guarantee of present performance.
Alice, my point about BP’s competency (or lack of it) was pertaining to the anarcho-libertarian scenario – but yes, you do have a point as well:-)
BP fucked up, and BP should pay up. BP was well able to afford to do this, until the Manchurian Candidate started acting like a pissy little bitch, halving the company’s value almost single handed. This airhead, who has never run so much as a corner shop in his life, seems unaware that destroying the very company you are relying on to clear up the mess is not a good policy. But then the nasty British were horrid to his dear old grandpa who was a member of the peace loving Mau Mau, so that’s all right.
Remind me why Americans voted for this no-mark?
Alice, every system has a certain probabilty of failure. Even if you pile redundancy upon redundancy, there is a certain quantifiable probability that all will fail at the same time. (Remember Apollo 13?) That’s elementary probability, and it’s why we call it “risk”, not “certainty”.
For massive, highly complex structures operating in a hostile environment, offshore oil rigs have a remarkably good safety record. Oil companies (and probably BP, although I don’t know that for certain) have been drilling in the Gulf for over 60 years, many of those in very deep water, and this is the first major spill in all that time. That’s a record to be proud of, and I think it’s unfair of you (and others) to jump on BP when the laws of probability caught up with them. It could have been any of those companies.
And let’s put the blame where it really belongs: on the government and environmental extremists who have forced oil companies to drill under a mile of water because they’re denied the opportunity to drill in safer areas. Do you have any idea what the pressures are under a mile of water? You can’t send divers that deep, only submarines and remotes. Do you think they want to drill there, instead of where it’s easier and cheaper (and far safer)? BP is the one that got caught without a chair when the music stopped, but they’re not responsible for the conditions of the (rigged) game.
i find libertarianism an interesting thing, however, it has some logic holes in it.
the question (paraphrased) currently being : what does the 900 lb gorilla pay in costs for clean up?
the answer : when no other 900 lb entity exists to confront it; anything it wants.
it’s not like the average person can hire the a-team to ensure appropriate reparations. while a case could be made that the leveraged application of pressure via media and wallets, the fungible nature of the product means that beyond a bp sign on the garage you have little opportunity to monetarily punish the company.
the use of the courts would suggest the inclusion of the state and its’ apparatus to your benefit. the opposing 900 lb gorilla.
Gland: as pointed out above, under minarchic conditions, gorillas rarely, if ever, get to reach 900lb.
It’s not necessary to ‘punish’ BP by not buying their product – because as you say, the fungible nature of both crude and refined gasoline means that boycotting BP gas stations doesn’t impact BP very much.
The first stages of BP’s ‘punishment’ are already in place. Its stock price has cratered in expectation of a ruinous lawsuit. That means that your pension fund, high-net worth individuals, colleges, index managers, hedge funds etc etc are doing your work for you.
Of course, this will make BP less capable of bearing the costs of clearup, but that’s the nature of the beast. The resulting legal costs and judgment may be sufficient to push BP over a cliff into bankruptcy, at which point the equity shareholders will be punished further, since the value of their investments will be pretty much wiped out.
I’m not sure that anyone up to this point in this thread has said that there shouldn’t be financial and legal repercussions for BP resulting from from this spill – indeed, what I’ve seen is pretty clear support for BP having their day in court and being held responsible for their behavior.This is not incompatible with libertarian principles.
The issue of who cleans up is not that easy. It’s my undersdtanding that all oil companies are mandated to pay a fee to finance a federally-run program to cover cleanup of oil spills – so where’s the assistance that BP paid that money for? All I see is threats and inaction by the underwriters, and it looks to me like someone’s reneging on a deal. If you look at the federally-run program, what protections do BP get as a result of paying that protection money?
What about US federal interference and Louisiana’s governor requesting permission from Washington and the EPA to construct sand berms? What about the rebuffed Dutch offer of assistance that Washington waved off as being inadequate? If these had been permitted, could the resulting situation have been mitigated somewhat?
And the ‘average person’ in the US does have an ‘A-Team’. The problem is that this ‘A-Team’ are not dispassionate dispensers of justice and retribution, but a large (much bigger than 900lbs) creature, that is hugely compromised – and to expect it to be able to act justly is foolish in the extreme, but it’s the only representative the ‘average person’ has.
And to embellish Alisa’s point, in a minarchist context, not only are there no 900lb commercial gorillas, there are no 900lb governmental ones either.
So the answer is create some even bigger gorillas, lets call them “statezillas”… what could possibly go wrong with that? And then who makes the statezillas stop doing bad things? Oh I know, we make statezilla’s power available to everyone and call it “Democraticstatzilla”… so it gets REALLY big… what could possibly go wrong with that?
Just imagine if there were no powerful states in the 20th century, those wicked companies might have killed millions of people, unlike those nice benevolent states… oh hang on…
If starting from scratch I believe in total liability – i.e. if the costs of the clean up (and so on) bankrupt BP then too bad (the pensioners whose pension funds partly depend upon it will have to live on less money).
However, there was a legal cap on liability – and to get rid of that cap is to change the law retroactively.
There is not much of the U.S. Constitution left, but if governments can just change the law with retroactive effect then anyone who does business in the United States is insane (of course there are lots of other reasons why doing business in the United States is a bad idea).
Of course deep water drilling (expensive and dangerious) is only done because government regulations impose a de fact ban on shallow water drilling, and on drilling on land in large parts of Alaska, and on development of oil shale in the Mountain States (the geology is no less difficult in Alberta – but Alberta is not in the United States, and American regulations make even Canadian law look sane).
As for Barack Obama – in best “never let a crises go to waste” mode, he took advantage of the oil mess to ban off shore work by all other companies.
At first he lied and pretended that this was due to technical advise – but the independent techs came out and said they had given Barack no such advice (he was just putting people out of work – because he wanted to put them out of work, no surprise there for people who understand his objective of destroying as much productive NON GOVERNMENT enterprise as he can).
When the protests started to come (not via the msm of course – which still has not reported that Barack was lying about the “technical advice” to close down the operations of all other companies), the President has a reply – BP (or BRITISH…. as he always calls it, people who have read, rather than just put on their shelf, his first book “Tales from my Father” know how much Barack Obama hates Britain – the evil capitalist enemy of the noble Mau Mau in Kenya) should pay the wages of the people in all the other companies.
Perhaps it is because I am tired, but words fail me at this matter.
Lastly we have the Jones Act – back in the 1920’s an Act of Congress passes keeping nonAmerican owned ships from operating in American coastal waters.
A President has the power to wave the Act in an emergency (as Bush did during Katrina).
However, Barack Obama has not waved the Jones Act – which is why so few oil collection craft are operating to protect the coast line.
Of course this is not exactly a problem from Barack’s point of view (see above) . The worse the coast line is the more economic damage is done (so the more people will be dependent on government aid) and the more hatred in can stir up against “big oil”.
Actually I have little sympathy for BP – after all the BP people (top people) gave lots of money to Barack Obama’s campaign (so why should I care what he does to them?).
I hear the Chairman is off to see President Obama next week – the CEO of BP is (some claim) still waiting for his telephone call from President Obama.
The CEO has only been waiting a couple of months – and Barack has been busy (trying to create as much hatred of big business as he can).
It is perhaps wrong to be amused at the fate of businessmen who are very clever at making money, but are moronic at everything else – so stupid that they even thought they could buy the friendship of Barack Obama (life long Red – as they would have known if they had done five minutes research).
However, I am amused.
Laird wrote of the largely successful efforts of the oil industry in deep water: “That’s a record to be proud of, and I think it’s unfair of you (and others) to jump on BP when the laws of probability caught up with them.”
Laird, I guess we will have to disagree on BP’s culpabliity.
It is not the laws of probability when the cement job is under-designed in the first place. It is not the laws of probability when the placement of cement is not checked. It is not the laws of probability when dubious pressure tests are accepted as good. It is not the laws of probability when the mud is pumped off the rig before the well is safely abandoned — a procedure which interfered with the normal system for warning the drillers in plenty of time that a problem was developing several miles beneath them; it also removed the immediate means for dealing with the problem.
No, this was not “probability” catching up with BP. This was highly risky cost-cutting catching up with BP.
That’s my reading of the facts currently in evidence. This was no unpredictable meteor from outer space. This was an inevitable consequence of BP’s decision to depart from standard operating practices, which are themselves basically the sum of what the oil industry has learned from previous disasters.
But I agree with many of the commentators here that the Obama Administration comes out of this looking worse even than BP. And, unlike BP, the Obama Administration is bankrupt already.
@Alice 07:33
Spot on.
I think the final nail in BP’s court case coffin for the jury (if it gets that far…) will be the words attributed to Jimmy Harrell the OIM of Deepwater Horizon during an immediately post evacuation very shouty telephone call to some higher ups overheard by several members of the bridge crew of the Damon Bankston:
“you fucking idiots, I told you they’d blow the fucking thing up!”
Laird’s disagreement raises a fair point:
What criminal law was broken? Where can I look up this law? Do the known facts and circumstances add up to proof beyond a reasonable doubt of all essential elements of the alleged crime?
And Question One becomes yet more complicated:
WHOSE law was violated? To me, this case seems less-clear than the famed example of the Four Corners killing.
The Four Corners is a point in the SW US where four rectangular states all border at one corner. Let’s imagine that I, a Coloradan, shoot a Utahn. He staggers south and dies in Arizona.
In which state’s courts and under which state’s laws is this to be settled?
That’s why, legally, I think this is a mess. To say nothing of what Paul mentions about the Jones Act and the inter-agency dick-waving contest, in which the White House and the USCG are already blaming each other for the lack of a waiver. By impeding full clean-up efforts, is the government also partially liable? What happens to your case when your defendant’s co-defendant hides behind sovereign immunity?
Anyway, at heart I think this should just be a complex but straightforward exercise in tort law. Not that I expect it to be once various people (mostly with names rhyming with Tom Emmanuel) finish milking it for political benefit.
I haven’t been following things as closely as most people, but wasn’t there something in the news about the government being responsible for the maintenance and deployment of the floaty boom things which would supposedly contain this sort of thing, or am I succumbing to wishful thinking?
IF I am remembering rightly (and that is a big IF), it would just further demonstrate what most of you have already said, that employing one 900 lb gorilla to control another 900 lb gorilla ultimately just leads to 1800 lbs of wacky gorilla mayhem, only with twice as many teeth and prehensile thumbs with which to grab our bananas.
“What criminal law was broken?”
Didn’t the Feds get Al Capone on income tax violations? 🙂
Separate topic, but one of those 900 lb gorillas has been so active writing laws that now almost every one of us is violating some law or other every day, mostly unknowingly. Forget the Constitution — Obama already has. Just lock Obama & Hayward in the same cell and throw away the key.
I think randomly selecting a member of the BP Board of Directors to be stoned to appease Poseidon, God of the Sea and Exxonos, God of Oil Spills would make better television (and possibly more sense) than prosecuting Jack Hayward for tax fraud.
Unless an act violates some statute which prescribes a penalty for such violation, it’s not a crime in the US. I have this discussion a lot, usually with people who are firmly convinced that air is illegal if their annoying neighbor breathes it. I’m not normally a fan of the “Joe Blow pissed me off, so I’m going to use any BS charge as an excuse to arrest him” school of thought and I wouldn’t have expected to read it here either.
Not quite: BP chose to ignore the cap, the law change will apply only to future spills.
Obama is a disgrace to America … he sits and watches while the oil spill flows, and our stupid Jones Act which requires American union crews turns away tankers with skimmer booms.
USA law, specifically the 1990 OPA makes Obama responsible for containment and cleanup, not BP. The one who causes the mess will have to go to court, over the total damages.
No one in their right mind believes they have a better handle on the cause of the spill and how to plug the hole than BP does.
But containment and cleanup, that’s all Obama’s responsibility and he is doing a terrible job of it. 17 countrys offered help with tankers fitted with skimmer booms day 3, Obama turned then down because of the Jones Act. Which BTW Bush waived during Katrina.
This was massive federal government regulatory failure, the well as designed should never been allowed to be drilled. The waivers MMS gave BP should never have been given. To not have any catastrophic spill plan and material in place was criminal, and Obama’s MMS approved it all.
They MMS knew 6 weeks before the well blew up there was big trouble brewing with the well, when the casing ruptured and caved in, locking the drill bit. The WSJ details the whole sordid tale … And Obama’s MMS let BP continue as if nothing had gone wrong.
Massive regulatory failure, Obama is solely to blame for that. I hope there is a criminal trial, then it will all be made public.
Yes I live om The Gulf downstream from the oil slick …. In the FL Keys.
“Unless an act violates some statute which prescribes a penalty for such violation, it’s not a crime in the US.”
Sunfish, I enjoy your posts. You have such an interesting point of view, usually. But you can be such a literalist!
Let’s leave aside the dastardly performance of Obama and his minions, and look only at London-based BP. Let’s also assume that the facts eventually demonstrate beyond doubt that Tony Hayward drove his organization to cut costs to the point where driling practices became unsafe, resulting in deaths and disaster in a foreign (to Hayward) country.
Now, Hayward himself clearly bears the moral responsibility for the deaths & disaster. The “little people” in the US, who made the immediate decisions to cut corners on safety on this particular well resulting in the deaths of human beings, are clearly subject to US laws on criminal negligence, workplace safety, and such like.
But what of Hayward himself — the person who created the system which had such a tragic result? He is morally guilty, but would you argue he is legally innocent in a world which statists have filled with laws?
The cleanest approach would probably be to extradite Hayward to the US to face federal manslaughter charges (since the deaths occurred in federal waters). Hayward is probably also be subject to criminal liability under the Sarbanes-Oxley act passed after the Enron debacle, laying out the duties of company executives. Hayward could certainly get jail time under some of the innumerable environmental protection laws which US statists have so lovingly created.
Whether Britain would extradite Hayward to the US for environmental charges is an open question. On the one hand, Camerama is a great Greenie, and would not want to be seen sheltering an environmental criminal. On the other hand, the US does have States with the death penalty.
Then there is always the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands, which seems to want to prosecute US soldiers for acts in foreign lands. Maybe they would be prepared to try Hayward for crimes against humanity.
The point is – statists have filled the world with laws. Some days, it just sucks to be Tony Hayward.
bill-tb: well, now we know why there will be no criminal trial, Laird’s, Sunfish’ and Alice’s points regardless.
People claim BP may be bankrupt by cleanup costs. I don’t know how much oil they produce, but every million bbl per day produces $25 billion revenues per year. They can certainly pay cleanup, maybe not stockholders.
Most responses here are failing to respond to the issue raised by Jonathan. If anyone needs a reminder, the import was whether this can be resolved without state involvement. Most of the responses seem to take the opportunity to argue how clueless Obama is. That is legitimate expression for anyone so inclined, but it is not a response to what Jonathan raised. And I think it illustrates the problem with policy discussion today. Few new ideas and the familiar ranting. Not very useful for solving problems.
Tim Newman.
Good point – duely noted.
Owinok:
Governor Huckabee had an entire hour long show devoted to ideas for cleaning up the mess.
Hannity has also had on many such ideas.
Barack Obama is not interested – he has not even talked to the people in charge at BP (because he knows what “those sort” of people would say – being evil capitialits, although he was happy to take their money).
WHY has Barack Obama not been interested for two months?
WHY did he give a false account of even what the government experts told him (falsely claiming that they told him to close down the operations of all other companies – which he then proceeded to do).
If you read the “rantings” of myself and others more you would know why Obama acts like this.
You will also know that he will only change (as he has a bit recently) if he feels that his own position is in danger (via falling opinion poll stats). It is called “holding his feet to the fire” and it is the correct move.
He is not interested in “solving problems” he is interested in CREATING PROBLEMS (as an excuse to “fundementally transform America” – and the world).
As for J.Ps. question.
Can the problem be solved without state involvement?
The only way to “solve the problem” is to cut off the leak.
And the state had been little help in doing that – it can only be done by people with experience of the oil business in this environment. And B.P. will have to pay for this to be done – as they are.
As for cleaning up the mess – see above.
I suppose BP is legally responsible, however I understand the accident was the work of a US company, Transocean.
Amazingly good propaganda this has all been for the anti oil drilling in the US/West camp.
JohnB – Transocean is registered in the rather un-American state of Switzerland. But it does not matter where Transocean is registered — BP hired them, BP managed them, BP told them what to do (even over Transocean’s staff’s protests). BP is responsible. And BP is headquartered in some un-American place beginning with B.
Owinok snidely remarked: “Most responses here are failing to respond to the issue raised by Jonathan.”
And then Owinok went on to fail to respond to the issue raised by Jonathan. But maybe Owinok felt better about himself, so it was not a complete loss.
Owinok, since you seem to exemplify the worst tendencies of libertarians, could you explain why libertarians choose to spend their time in hypothetical parallel universes dancing with angels on the heads of non-existent pins? Is the real world beneath your intellectual gaze? (If so, send your resume to BP. That seems to be the kind of person they have been putting in charge of late).
Alice, I confess I am short on facts. You could well be right in both line of reasoning as well as facts.
However when I see something that is just so convenient for certain interests I think one needs to find out what exactly did happen. But also to realise that, like many if not most pivotal events in history, one possibly never will.
Therefore one has to try and stand back and look at events and see if one can detect a pattern without interpreting it according to one’s own preferences.
The leak must be stopped (till the new drilling can take over – which may be August) and the mess must be cleaned up.
People should just do it themselves – by whatever methods they need to.
If they need to use protective barriers from overseas (such as the ones the Dutch offered almost two months ago – there have also been many other offers) and if they need ships from other nations they should use the ones offered.
And they should also use all the good domestic American ideas and equipment as well.
People should stop trying to work via the government – they do not even reply to letters and telephone calls.
If the government says X is “illegal” then they should be told to get out of the way – if need be State Governors should order State police (or the State “National Guard”) to remove Federal employees who make silly threats and get in the way of the protection of the coast line.
However, in some cases this will not need to be done – after all WHERE IS THE HEAD OF FEMA?
Mr Brown was visible from day one during Katrina – getting called every name under the sun.
I do not even know who the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency now is – and I have not seen him doing anything.
J.P. asked a question.
“Can this be cleaned up without the Feds” – well they have not done much for two months (apart from make speeches – like Barack is doing in a few hours time).
Time to just clean stuff up – and send BP the bill.
No need for the Feds – they have had their chance and they have failed.
It may interest you to learn, Paul, that one Florida county has done just that. Good for them! Let’s see what the spineless Obama administration does about it.
It made me so happy to see that link Laird – hope more local governments will follow.
BTW, you always provide the best links and quotes, and I very often post them on Facebook, although unfortunately I cannot credit you there – hope you don’t mind.
Not at all, Alisa; I’m flattered. Anyway, I didn’t write it, just pointed it out. No credit is due me. (And I don’t have a Facebook account!)
Very good Laird.
BP have just announced that they are working towards an August deadline to stop the leak. Are you kidding me?
They have just set aside a 22Billion$$ compensation fund for those gulf residents whose incomes are affected.
Government grants for solar panels should be implemented to move the renewable energy initiative forward some more. In my opinion, it’s not gaining momentum fast enough.
I had heard there is going to be a $4billion compensation is that true.