Deep Sea Oil

The Gulf Coast debacle is only beginning. Mr Obama decided all coastal oil drilling is stopped. Only one oil company (out of the 2000 oil service companies in the United States) had the disaster. This is the first oil spill in US waters since the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, 31 years ago. The origin of the explosion which damaged and sank the Deepwater Horizion platform and started all this is still unknown.

Mr Obama shows he is completely out of his depth (again). Until now, he was willing to let British Petroleum handle their spill, since Mr Obama said they were more qualified than the US Government to handle the spill. How true. But now, every oil company is somehow less qualified than Mr Obama 's political cronies in gauging whether offshore drilling is practical.

But Mr Obama's hubris asserted itself again in a one-size-fits-all approach again. This promises to be a replay of the Health Care fiasco. We will all wind up with the same answer no matter our qualifications and exact character of the problem.

We need oil. Some people insist this is bad, but they offer no substitute. Mr Obama's substitute is to propose obscene carbon taxation (Cap and Trade), which he threatened to impose as taxation without congressional authorization. A scary side note is some "liberals" insist the problem is too many human beings. One gets the uneasy sense the Left is comfortable with the idea of death factories.

So what caused the blast which crippled and sank the platform? Although Transocean (the platforms actual owner) indicates they thought BP was making errors, this sort of lively dispute is characteristic of every major disaster. Given the nearness in time to the Times Square bombing, I would like to see the government eliminate the possibility that the Deepwater Horizion disaster was a result of foreign sabotage. (Inevitably, some Democrats will blame Mr Bush for the oil spill.)

I don't expect any answers soon. Lawyers will tie up clarity in the courts so they can demand huge paychecks. The environmental damage will be mostly healed by the time the lawyers let it go. Mr Obama's clumsy lack of clarity and poor imagination are with us for a while too. With the government restriction on new supply, the price of oil products will be up. Unfortunately, we all lose... again.