V
irginia Gov. Bob McDonnell gave a somewhat disingenuous response when confronted with the facts that the massive oil rigs explosion and spill in the Gulf of Mexico make his plans for Virginia’s emergence as “the Energy Capital of the East Coast” highly questionable.
The governor said essentially that one doesn’t stop all airline flights because of one crash.
Other than the obvious lameness of that response, there are some things that McDonnell, his confederates in the oil and gas lobby and even President Barack Obama might need to think over.
Essentially, the point is this: technology and “leave it to the private sector” simply don’t always work in the world of complicated engineering and cut-to-the-bones private sector management styles that are really far more concerned with the bottom line and p/e ratios than with saving the environment no matter how many millions of dollars they pay to slick ad firms and image projectors to paint themselves green.
At the core are some very real contradictions between the approaches of people like McDonnell and reality. You can’t rely on for-profit companies, privatizations, law to non-existent government regulation, the wonders of high technology and so on to keep workers safe and biosystems clean.
Even so, a number of myths have been spun that raise serious and troubling questions about the quest for offshore drilling near Virginia’s coasts.
Myth One: High technology will save us. Not exactly. McDonnell may say that rigs used offshore Virginia will have such advanced engineering systems that a blow-out or up and spill are highly unlikely. It turns out that Deepwater Horizon, the operator of the rig that blew up and caused the Gulf spill did not have a seismic-based device that would automatically shut off oil flows at the ocean-floor level. Brazil and Norway, both big offshore operators have them and Norway has required them since 1993. Such a device might have prevented the gigantic Gulf spill.
Myth Two: For-profit companies always operate for the public good. Let’s take a peek at British Petroleum or BP which owned the platform that had the blast and leak. BP is no stranger to tragedy. Its complicity in a blast at a Texas City, Texas refinery that killed 15 workers in 2005 has been called into question. After the disaster, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency, accused BP of cutting the costs of safety and maintenance for increased profits.
Myth Three: You always know who works for you. McDonnell loves privatizing and farming out public functions to for-profit companies. He even pushed two unsuccessful bills in this General Assembly session that would have given big money benefits to private contractors who do state road work while also cutting schools, health, the arts, and so on. But when you farm out all of those jobs, do you really know who is working for you? The BP rig was a contractor and sub-contractor jobs. And in the Texas City case, after the explosion, BP boss John Browne flew to Texas City where he met reporters and said he’d be investigating. He was disarmed by a reporter who noted that all of the dead were contract workers. In the end, BP did compensate their families.
Myth Four: If a company says it is green, believe it: BP wanted to turn itself around in 2005 and go against the ExxonMobil behemoth. As part of this goal, it spent millions with media firms, ad mavens and graphics artists who redid the BP logo in a sunburst scheme with the slogan “Beyond Petroleum (BP, get it?)” At the same time, to cut costs, BP was firing thousands of its experienced engineers and replacing them with hired hand contractors.
So, McDonnell and Obama should ask themselves, “What’s it going to be for Virginia?” Obama says there will be no new offshore drilling until a thorough study is made of Deepwater Horizon. That’s cold comfort.
As for McDonnell, he might want to knock off the idiotic “plane crash” excuse and consider that Big Oil with its Big Money would not be the only industry along Virginia’s coast that he’s sworn to protect. Consider the fishing, tourism and commercial shipping sectors, not to mention the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard which use offshore Virginia waters and pump in billions to the state’s economy. That’s right here, right now. Not sometime off in 2020.
Peter Galuszka
PS: All of my cites, curiously, come from the Wall Street Journal, which is editorially in tune with McDonnnell.