Um, as far as I know, oil and gas drilling on the Pacific Coast is banned between Mexico and Canada.

"Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border."

So says The New York Times from March 31, 2010.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/scien ... nergy.html

http://store.discovery.com/detail.php?p=105213

18, hour long episodes...

Redundancy sometimes fails.
We live in an imperfect world.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industrie ... ling_N.htm

I drive by a refinery in El Segundo that says those rigs are active.

EDIT: you're citing an article about new drilling Stuuuuuuu, the rigs that are out there already are producing right now.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

But you're presenting examples of drilling in California with a whole different risk level than the type of deep water drilling that was happening on the Horizon rig. The type of drilling they do there, and the type that the oil companies want to expand is much more dangerous. We're seeing that right now. Your USA Today article there says "is it worth the risk?" Ask People who live on the Gulf Coast that in a few months.

I'm making a broad defense because you're making a broad condemnation.

The fact is, the last major US based rig disaster was off of Santa Barbara (40 years ago) so I think it's relevant.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

i blame the environmentalist wackos who have nothing better to do than bitch about how we should care for the environment

nonsense, its man first then the environment, our happiness comes before everything

we need to drill for oil in the us, and say fuck you to the enviroment

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PSA: I am an overly sarcastic person. If you take me at my word, then i will most likely anger and offend you.

pat has certainly piqued my interest.... how massive are these caverns? its weird to think about something existing where there is no light and nothing to see it.

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Still I can't believe you're so quick to blow this accident off. It just sounds like you're so desparate to defend expanding drilling that you're looking for ways to downplay the differences and the magnitude of this situation. But then you probably think I'm so desparate to stop drilling that I'm overreacting to a tiny little "accident".

This is either sarcasm or we've found out where ferret has been.

haha, its 100% sarcasm

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PSA: I am an overly sarcastic person. If you take me at my word, then i will most likely anger and offend you.

Well played.

Where do you see me blowing anything off?

Because I stop short of demanding a halt to all off shore oil production I'm blowing it off?

It's a major friggin disaster, 11 people died, it's going to take months maybe years to clean it up.

It's happened....past tense.
Coming up with an emotional reaction to it isn't going to change any of that.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

im not against off shore drilling. im against being so reliant on fossil fuels, and someone not stepping up and accelerating our separation from them.

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Yeah but without an emotional reaction, how can anyone change the future?

I'm 100% confident lessons will be learned, new regulations will be imposed and engineering standards will improve from this accident.

I'm ok with that outcome.
Some want the outcome to be more "change" than that, whether logically justified or not.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

i feel deep well and shallow well are two completely different things. i don't like either, but i can promise everyone can tell which is safer.

and months or years? dude- decades. they are still finding oil and shit from exxon.

I have read no industry or government data on the subject.
This is the first deep water rig I can recall having a problem while there are dozens of examples of shallow water rigs blowing out.

My point was, it's done.
It's happened.
Wishing the death or closure of an industry isn't going to change that.
Shut down all off-shore activities and the gulf is still fucked.

I just happen to believe this was an accident. Do you think the engineers or executives involved are jumping for joy that people died and they're out millions of dollars an hour for the foreseeable future?

There's a cognitive dissonance to argue that this is because of corporate greed and that's what I'm hearing argued here.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

you don't think carelessness is more prone to accidents? if you feel that they probably weren't rushing to dig and start making profit from that well, that's one thing, but to think that businesses don't do that is quite another.

and no one insinuated that the people involved are happy- whether they are upset about the money they're losing, the accident itself, or the probably retributions of the ecosystem. gas companies hire a lot of good environmentalist researchers, be it wildlifers, marine biologists, geochemists, etc.

and i have wanted deep sea rigging stopped since i had initially heard about it. i haven't decided against it in the last 2 weeks. i would appreciate it if misconstrued items weren't formed into my opinions.

Of course it's bad business to fuck up. But major corporations do it all the time. They usually get away with it. According to Amy Goodman and Democracy Now, BP has one of the worst safety records in the oil industry in recent history. They probably just look at accidents as a business expense they can usually handle with their insurance policies and huge profits. The only "accident" here is that this time BP was fucking with shit they didn't really understand, and the accident was way harder to pay for.

I'm interested in what you think might happen if one of these caverns collapses, Pat. Or how you think it *will* collapse. If the contents are under pressure and the contents are removed with no replacement, I can understand your fear of collapse. But they're being backfilled with saltwater, which, unless some crazy atmospheric anomaly occurs, is the same thing applying pressure from the outside. Oil is more dense than water but that just means that more water goes into the cavern.

I'm all ears to a lesson if I'm mistaken, but I think the fear of collapse is illogical.

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