From the Washington Post article:
In addition to addressing the controversial moratorium, which several oil industry officials and Gulf Coast lawmakers have criticized for delivering an economic blow to the region, Bromwich laid out his vision for creating an assertive federal agency that will police offshore drilling across the country. He noted he has asked the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to lend him prosecutors and agents, respectively, and he is hiring from the private sector to staff an investigations and review unit of eight to 10 people that will explore allegations of wrongdoing within the agency and the drilling industry.
"We have a caseload already and we're working on it," he said. "We will conduct an aggressive investigation of oil and gas company and enforcement of regulations, which has not been a hallmark of this agency in the past."
Bromwich's agency -- the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement -- is also drafting new recusal rules for its employees to ensure an arm's length relationship between regulators and those they oversee, he said, adding there is both the perception and reality that "especially in the Gulf region, there's a limited pool from which we can draw from" in terms of regulators. "That's problematic, for a variety of reasons."
In one way this is a good thing, the new agency, or BOE as they like to call it is actually looking into enforcing the rules that exist. That is a good thing given the level of outright corruption and industry capture the former MMS was engaged in. However it proceeds from a faulty assumption. The Obama Administration is going back to the pre-spill idea that the technology for this kind of exploration is good enough that, when used properly, it is nearly completely safe.
The reality is we just do not know if that is the case. Deep water drilling is challenging in the extreme. Every aspect of the project is as difficult as it can get. They work at depths where the pressure and temperature change the response of materials. The need to work remotely makes everything slower and more open to mistakes. Then there is the fact that we don't have good technology to deal with a major accident like this one. Remember the cap which is now containing the oil had to be developed and built in response to the accident. There was no way to know in advance the specific problems of this blow out.
Even if there technology is actually sufficient to pursue this endeavor with relative safety, it is clear that the enforcement of safety regulations has been lax, probably to a criminal level. To assume that we can change this in a short period of time is a bad assumption. Four of the five largest companies in the world are Oil companies (the fifth is Wal-Mart). This gives them an enormous amount of influence, both in the United States and the world. It is this influence that was a major part of the reason that the rules were not enforced in the first place.
BOE is getting help from the FBI and the DOJ to investigate right now, but that is a temporary fix for what looks like a long term problem. Sooner or later (lets face it, it is going to be sooner) the FBI and DOJ are going to need their resources and will pull them from BOE. Without the man power to aggressively investigate and inspect the drilling operations we will be back to where we were before Deepwater Horizon and BP dumped 5 million gallons of toxic crude oil into the Gulf. There will be plenty of room for shenanigans out of sight of the inspectors and regulators.
I keep hearing about the jobs that are going to be lost. There is no doubt that LA and other Gulf States have a vested employment interest in having drilling going on. However this argument ignores the tens of thousands of jobs and businesses that have been wiped out or will be wiped out by a spill like this. It is the height of pennywise and pound foolish to argue we have to go back to rolling the dice on a disaster because the people who made the disaster might lose their jobs.
The Nov. 30 moratorium expiration date is really very modest. Even with the best will in the world we can't be ready in a technical or regulatory sense by that date to assure that we will not have another spill of this magnitude. By then we will not have the new rules in place, nor have fully investigated a fully corrupted agency and removed the corrupt individuals. To assume we can just start up again by this time is more like crossing our fingers than taking action on an issue of this magnitude.
The heart of this problem is the structure of the BOE, which like the MMS before it is just an agency created by Executive Order. It has no direct purse-strings that Congress can pull on, it has almost no oversight by anyone other than the Interior Secretary. Worse Congress has mandated procedures which make it very difficult for the agency to really look at the risks of a drilling plan. By law the agency only has 30 days to approve or disapprove of a drilling request. This clearly is not enough time to check the complex and critical details of something as complex as drilling one mile or more below the oceans surface.
What we need is a Congressional mandate for this agency. This will keep it from blowing in the political winds every time a new Administration with new priorities comes to power. It will allow for a closer look at an agency which has been in the pocket of the industry it was supposed to regulate for the last 30 years.
It may be that there is very little that can be done to prevent future deep water exploration. The perception that we will some how become less dependent on foreign oil if we develop these resources is a false one but it is embedded in the national psyche at this point and will be acted on. This being the case all we can do is argue, loudly and insistently that it be as safe as possible.
The first step to safety is not rushing. Under no circumstances should the moratorium be lifted early. If anything it should extended until both the technology and the regulatory enforcement is strong enough to be affective. To do anything else is to risk the perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars, millions of jobs and some unknown and unknowable number of lives if another disaster like this happens.
Safety is possible. It is possible to find all the failure modes and address them in such as way that they become nearly impossible. 6 Sigma is 3.4 defects per million opportunities. If we set that level of safety and enforce it drilling in deep water can probably be safe enough. The problem will be the push back from an industry that has basically regulated itself for three decades. For all that they will claim that safety is the number one priority, they will also be constantly and with wide open check books (thanks Citizens United) argue for going back the Wild West days when it was a lot cheaper to cut corners. If that happens it is only a question of when not if there will be another massive and destructive spill in our primary fishery, the Gulf of Mexico.
The floor is yours. |
