Sometime in the next 24 hours, BP officials hope, the busted oil well in the Gulf of Mexico can be permanently sealed. That would mean an end to the disaster caused by a rig explosion that has left as much as 5 million barrels of oil gushing into the gulf for more than 100 days.
On Friday, the House approved new legislation to regulate offshore drilling that would also help coordinate Gulf restoration. It also removed the much-talked-about $75 million liability cap, though BP's ultimate liability in this spill probably won't be hammered out for years.
As everyone knows, the explosion came right after President Obama announced plans to expand offshore drilling to new areas, a plan that is likely on pause. The bill also modified a six-month offshore drilling moratorium the administration sought, a move challenged in court (a hearing is scheduled later this month, but the government lost the first round).
But, as Jeff Spross wrote two weeks ago, a skeletal legislative package specifically addressing the disaster was all that remained of climate legislation that died in the Senate. That more complete legislation would have, in its best form, put a price on carbon to encourage innovation in the renewable-energy field and reduce greenhouse gases, or, at its least ambitious, could have encouraged us to reduce the amount of energy we use. To put offshore drilling and the spill in perspective, New Scientist reported Friday that the energy used to produce the amount of food we waste in the United States every year is more than what we would get if we opened up all of the offshore reserves. We use 21 million barrels of oils a day, and would use up whatever is in the Gulf in a matter of hours. There are many, easy places to curb our energy use; we just don't have the right incentives. Stopping the Gulf leak after it happened was nearly insurmountably difficult, but stopping it before it starts next time could actually be fairly simple.
-- Monica Potts
