Even granting the excesses of the current EPA, I guess I'm too much in favor of clean air and clean water to debate the supposed merits of a bill as egregiously stupid as this one.
With liability well established for any new environmental problems, there is a serious economic motive to not create any troubles. Better technology, more knowledgeable personnel, better monitoring techniques, safety programs, and instrumentation actually reduce accidents.
The Deepwater Horizon (Macundo well) blowout was an accident. Without going into second guessing why it happened or what could have prevented it, neither BP, the Drilling company, nor any of the people connected with the project wanted to see that sort (or any sort) of disaster. No one on the rig (especially the eleven who died) or with the drilling company would advocate fouling the environment thus, and it is questionable whether bureaucratic supervision would have prevented the incident.
What bureaucratic action DID do was shut down large, purpose built skimmer vessels that would remove 99% of the oil from the seawater they skimmed and discharge that 1% back with the separated water. (Apparently that discharge rate was considered 'too high', so the 99% didn't get skimmed up). These were en route from around the world, and could have recovered a lot of the oil that was produced.
They stopped people from erecting booms across tidewater estuaries (the real heart of the coastal fisheries) to keep oil out.
They even shut down Kevin Costner's skimmers built at his expense because they were not officially approved. --Just to name a few of the impediments that the bureaucracy put in the way of mitigating the effects of the blowout.
(Yes Costner is a Hollywood type, but he put his money where his mouth was, and for that he gets my respect in this case).
No one had more incentive to get the well capped than BP--it was the very product they hoped to sell being produced in an uncontrolled fashion into the environment, and either burned or lost as an asset, and now become a liability. It doesn't get any uglier than that for a corporate bottom line, to have what should have brought in money become an expense that creates more expenses.
For oil companies to continue doing what they do, they have to maintain good relations with the locals, the State regulatory people, and basically do things right. In a world where the least inkling of mismanagement will go viral, where no sin escapes attention, that is more vital than ever as a core element of public relations in an already hostile media. SOme of the standards were devised by oil companies, and adopted by agencies (production location construction diagrams were adopted by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) which very closely resembled those Hess had used for years, for an example. Hess has always been picky about how things are done, at least in this neck of the woods, but they have been a major lease holder in this region since oil was discovered here, having merged with Amerada Petroleum back when, become Amerada Hess here, then just Hess. They are one of many companies I have worked for, and none have been capricious about the environment. I have been back to drilling locations from earlier in my career and had great difficulty finding them. The environmental safeguards used today are even better than they were then, and a reclaimed location is just that--reclaimed--indistinguishable from their surroundings.
Where I have a real problem with the EPA isn't in identifying and the remediation of existing problems, nor cleaning up the legacy of centuries of mineral and even oil exploration, and the milling and processing of mineral deposits before some of the side-effects were known, the problem is that instead of establishing a safe standard, the EPA has consistently come up with moving target standards which once complied with, are changed, requiring another round of expensive shutdowns and upgrades. This is an impossible business environment that will wipe out small operations immediately, and destroy larger ones over time. How clean is clean? How clean is clean enough?
The effect has been to export industry from here to shores where the standards are more predictable, where the industry is an economic boon, and where often the standards are far more lax.
When 'research' is agenda-driven with the purpose of proving this or that is the sole cause of problems, other things are ignored, perhaps including the real problem-causing agents or processes. It isn't just bad science, it vilifies some things and ignores others, much as with tobacco and lung cancer. Unfortunately, the EPA has become a political entity, not so much a scientific one, one which funnels money to environmental organizations via 'settlements' that come from the public coffers, funding the campaign that is hell bent on destroying industry. There is plenty to regulate without the jihad against CO
2, but the EPA of the Obama years was focused on two things: Killing off the Coal industry, and 'proving' that hydraulic fracturing was ruining everything from water to the air to causing earthquakes.
What a waste of time and resources.
I'm a conservationist. I believe we can utilize the resources the Good Lord gave us without destroying our environment, that we can ensure those resources stay available and healthy as we learn more, and not have to live like cave men to do so. I also believe that an even handed approach to possible environmental problems can better identify causative agents and those can be more effectively dealt with, if there is a need.
The EPA, in my estimation has become polluted with a philosophy akin to dirt worship, an almost psuedoreligious fervor that all that disturbs the Earth is evil, attempting to preserve a dynamic system in stasis. Nature just doesn't work that way.
