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First, I addressed a specific claim you made in your post. Hence, why I quoted your post and bolded the specific claim I was addressing. I honestly have no idea why you feel the need to amplify your position in response to my post, but since you have I will play along.

At best, this is a mischaracterization of the authors argument.

Said blogger is highlighting the irony of a policy banning/restricting offshore drilling, ostensibly to reduce the risk of damaging the environment, which would in fact increase the risk of catastrophic damage to the environment by shifting oil supply to (according to his data) more accident prone oil tankers.

Actually, it just the kind of discussion that should take place when forming a policy response to the Gulf oil spill.

Cool story.

and in the meantime...

this is still happening..

pictures just make it worse when you realize we're nowhere near stopping this.

Mainly because you made a semantics argument out of one sentence of my post. I guess you took issue with the word "barely." ... Either way, a slight reduction in off shore drilling may lead to a tiny increase in tanker flow. ... Not a big increase in risk, as the author is attempting to rationalize.

According to his data, indeed... I would contend that shipping the oil here is safer than actually digging into the sea bed for the stuff at dozens upon dozens of different locations close to our own shores.

There are a lot of discussions that need to take place, including the topic you just surface dismissed below. A tiny increase in tanker flow from abroad really isn't one of them. The risk will be there, no matter where it comes from. Glad we agree.

I know... One that people like yourself can't seem to acknowledge, let alone debunk.

and in the meantime...

this is still happening..

Does anyone have any links explaining how this happened? Is this an older well which we wont have access to for a period of time or is it a new well that failed to come online. How much oil have we lost in the grand scheme of things?

In terms of the grand scheme of things essentially nothing. The well is leaking around 200,000 gallons a day. To put that in perspective the US consumes something on the order of 823 million gallons (19.6 million bbls/day) each an every day.

It is not a semantic argument. You asserted that barely any oil is harvested form domestic offshore production. I countered with data showing we get fully a tenth of our oil from domestic offshore sources, which simply put is an enormous amount of oil.



The difference is he has these things called facts instead of you know, asserting your opinion.
To wit:

The Deepwater Horizon spill is on course to match or exceed the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. But the Exxon Valdez spill was only the 35th largest tanker-related spill over the last 40 years. Since the Exxon Valdez, there have been seven larger tanker spills; the ABT Summer disaster off the Angolan coast in 1991 spilled seven times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez



Your non sequitur aside:

It would be foolish to increase the risk of environmental catastrophes in the name of decreasing the risk of environmental catastrophes. In poker we call this results oriented thinking. This would hold regardless of the amount in increase in tanker traffic, let alone the reality that it would be a significant increase.

At least one worker who was on the oil rig at the time of the explosion on April 20, and who handled company records for BP, said the rig had been drilling deeper than 22,000 feet, even though the company’s federal permit allowed it to go only 18,000 to 20,000 feet deep, the lawyers said.

BP strongly denied the claim that it was drilling deeper than was allowed.

“The allegation surrounding the permitted depth is factually incorrect,” said Andrew Gowers, a BP spokesman. Mr. Gowers said that the rig was permitted to drill to 20,211 feet and that it drilled to 18,360 feet.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/us/04spill.html

We will have to wait to find out who is lying. I'm not 100% convinced; anyone can obv make allegations just as anyone can deny allegations. When you look at the whole picture objectively and consider incentive of each party involved, I'd say that it's more likely that BP is lying but time will tell. I wouldn't be so quick to debunk these allegations if you are truly interested in knowing what actually happened.

Is this getting any play?

working 4 out of 5 times seems like good enough odds to set off a nuclear bomb.

( The NPR report I listened to last night said the 5th time I didn't seal off the leak completely so they had to set off a conventional bomb for it to work)

Here's an idea: start with the conventional bomb first.

Yes, without regulation, suddenly companies would never do anything unethical or dangerous. And isn't that the biggest pony of all?

wheres the fun in that?

Remember any company's fiduciary risk/reward/liability equation will always perfectly align with any internal decision-maker's personal risk/reward/liability equation. And of course both of those clearly will always perfectly align with the amount of risk actually posed to the public and/or the environment. No need for any extra safeguards from the public's side.

most drilling companies do not incorporate oil spills into their business plans, ducy?

I would be absolutely stunned if BP did in fact drill deeper than permitted. Doing so would likely leave the the company open to nearly unlimited liability in the event of an incident. There are simply too many parties involved and too much liability for any sane person to even contemplate doing something as egregious as blowing past a permitted depth.

No, please tell.

I would note Transocean carries a 700 million dollar environmental liability insurance policy.

There would be no end to the political hay that could be made if they actually had overstepped a permit here. And finding out the actual details of the permit should be quite trivial for those who are in the position to make the most hay (and those with a huge incentive to make that hay), namely, US senators.

It's still possible they actually violated the permit, but I'd say it's very unlikely at this point.

From what I was reading today, as long as Transocean wasn't negligent, they won't be liable for any of the costs as its standard practice in the industry to have the contracts put all the costs of a spill clean up on the company leasing the rig.

Why would you say its very unlikely?

Because this would be one of the first things that anti-drilling senators would use for political theater i.e." evil oil companies were cheating on their permit i.e. not listening to the all knowing benevolent senators like us and look what happened. They didn't press the button every 108 minutes like we said and they blew up. This is just further evidence that oil companies will cheat on the environment whenever they can. Trust us to reign them in "

It isn't impossible that they did do it, but we already have gotten the litany of failures from that oil rig and violating their drilling depth permit would be pretty easy to find out and high on the list.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9YYbrZ4whY

Is the political hay to feed the free ponies?