Wednesday, June 23, 2010

What do YOU do when you get in trouble?

When you're a kid, and you get caught doing something, and you get in trouble, what do you do? You straighten up and fly right. We don't need a six-month ban on offshore drilling, and that's exactly what the white house wants (even when Louisiana itself does not want it!). Who's going to pay all the workers for the six months they're out of work? I saw it said, "This is already an environmental disaster, let's not make it an economic disaster, too."

My point is twofold:

  1. When one child (or group of children) in a neighborhood does something bad, you don't ground the entire neighborhood for half a year.
  2. In the wake of BP's disaster, don't you think that offshore drilling will be handled with excruciating vigilance by the people doing it so they're "not the next one"?
There's really no need for this insane ban on drilling. Yes, we need to investigate, and yes, there are likely lessons to be learned. However, shutting down an entire economy - at the whims of one individual (the President) - is not the correct answer. When a tanker turns over on the interstate and dumps oil or gas or some poisonous substance all over, we don't shut down the entire interstate system, or stop all tanker-related shipping. We may shut down that one section of road during the cleanup (similar to the ban on fishing: that is something directly affected), but not every tanker truck and every interstate in the surrounding area. That would be silly.
Enhanced by Zemanta