5-25-10 by dugan
Here’s the "bingo" quote from a Tuesday Washington Post story by Karen Tumulty, explaining why the rest of the Big Oil companies are pretty much hiding in a hole as BP fails to stop its catastrophic spill with one Rube Goldberg device after another:
It is now apparent that BP did not have an effective plan for dealing
with a large spill, despite its assertion in a March 2009 exploration
plan submitted to the Minerals Management Service that it could handle
a "worst-case scenario" blowout that produced 300,000 gallons a day.
But it appears that no other company drilling in the deep waters of
the Gulf of Mexico had such a plan, either, or it would have been
brought in to stop the spill.
Chevron CEO John Watson is tiptoeing in, with a speech scheduled Thursday at the company’s annual meeting. The Houston Chronicle had a preview Tuesday, with Watson saying in an interview:
"It’s not an either or. We need to drill safely, and we need to produce the supplies that are needed," he said.
But to regain the confidence of the American people, he
acknowledged, "it may be that we need to raise the bar to be sure that
everyone is operating at the same high standards."
So is Watson saying Chevron has higher standards than BP, and this would never happen to Chevron? If that’s the case, why hasn’t he divulged his secret to BP? Watson also said he’d welcome more government oversight, forgetting to mention that the oil industry, like with the financial industry, spent decades fighting against government oversight or regulation with a phony "self-regulation" argument. Oil also reaped billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, the Los Angeles Times tells us, which made it lucrative to dig costly deep-water wells in the first place, even as BP lobbied away any need for a credible disaster plan.
Cartoon commentator Tom Tomorrow has the take of the day on how it all happened, courtesy of Salon (click on image to go there):
