Do you feel our government (America) allowed BP to drill without safety precautions to get campaign donations?

I think that the climate at the time the permit was granted was pro-business.

Cheney and Bush are both oil men, and members of their staff are joining BP as we speak.

@dealrrr What do you mean give you capitalism or give you death? Do you honestly think that if there had been no government over sight it wouldn’t have happened? Don’t you think it’s possible that it could have somehow been even worse, OR could have happened more often without oversight. I have to agree that the committee that was to oversee it, MMS or whatever it was, failed miserably, but not ALL government oversight committees fail like that.
The majority of the blame has to fall on the capitalist BP corporation, with the rest on BP.

BP is defiantly at fault all the way here, and the way the board has reacted and statements they have produced they defiantly deserve some sort of trial…this sort of environmental disaster demands those at the top to be held accountable

However the US cannot be guilt free after all US Union Carbide killed 15,000 people in India when its poorly maintained factory blew up spreading a poison cloud over the township.

Were running out of oil and risky drilling like this is only going to grow only measures need to be put in place to prevent this happening again!

Maybe a national overseeing body, the cost of creating this would far outweigh the costs of repair. Could be funded by a tax/membership of the oil companies?

@Tobotron There WAS a government oversight comittee that was supposed to keep an eye on things, and they failed miserably. From this Q

See MMS

No venture is completely 100% risk free… especially 1 mile down at the bottom of the ocean. This won’t be the last oil spill… I don’t care how many safety procedures are tacked on.

And even if the government oversight did allow the rig to shortcut certain procedures, it’s still completely BP’s (and Halliburton’s and Deepwater Horizon’s) responsibility to ensure the work proceeds correctly. Of course they should foot the bill for fast-as-possible cleanup plus fines and restitution as well.

However, the politicization and sensationalism we’re seeing doesn’t help anybody and I think that kind of “pollution” should be curbed as well.

I second that @robmandu

The inherent problem with commodity economics is usually political incestuousness. The thing about natural resources is the government for the most part has a stake in them. Whoever it assigns the rights to, say, drill offshore to will become very rich. That person will already probably be connected, but if not will be made rich enough to become connected.

Some commodities you can’t live without. It’s pretty unlikely timber, which the U.S. government has massive reserves of, will ever be replaced entirely.

I’m not sure whether we can feasibly live in an oil-free world anytime soon, but much of our dependence can certainly be mitigated. The problem with oil might be that the dependence runs far deeper than anyone imagines. There are a lot of stakeholders with an interest in keeping the status quo. They include oil companies themselves, obviously, but also auto makers. Look past them, and who benefits from automobiles? Well, suburban developers in nearly every more-than-sparsely-populated county in the United States. Trucking interests clearly benefit from the subsidies afforded to them by auto-centric society – if not for high taxes on railroads and subsidized highways, truckers would never be able to compete in many sectors.

And then of course, terrorists benefit. This is especially true of Saudi-backed terrorists in the Islamic world and western-based terrorists such as the Republikan Party.

It certainly seems that there was a conflict of interest in having the same group inspect rigs as collected revenue.

World leaders and economists need to get themselves together in an unprecedented and visionary summit, in an effort to reduce global oil consumption by 20% Particularly USA by far the greatest consumer per-capita. Less oil consumption means less pollution, less non biodegradable produce and most importantly less war. End of story.

* Discreetly points @mammal towards China and India, each of which have many, many more people than the United States, more and more of which are finding themselves with the financial means to buy cars. *
You’re welcome.

@Nullo: I think China just surpassed the U.S. as a bigger polluter last year.

I don’t think so