Thoughts on the $20 billion Shakedown...

In case you missed the last blog entry on this site, I am in favor of BP paying for the cleanup of the property that is owned by all and therefore owned by no one. This is the nature of common property - if one of the part owners/nonowners does something to ruin what the rest of us partly own/do not own then that party must bear the responsibility for the damage done to the rest of us. BP - as my brother pointed out via email - made a lot of bad decisions stemming in large part from poor management on the oil rig. BP, according to The Wall Street Journal relied on less expensive, and riskier technology to drill for oil in deeper waters. Whatever millions BP saved by going cheap and having bad management/crisis planning, it is now paying for - and then some. I am fine with that. If $20 billion is not enough, let it be $23 billion or $36 billion. Whatever. I, like you, want BP to fix the mess it helped create.

Now lets turn to another huge spill that threatens far more people than BP will ever hurt. This spill has caused trillions, yes, trillions of dollars in damages and will have a catastrophic impact on our children, grandchildren and their grandchildren.

This spill is the huge gusher of money that our federal government has blown through since...well, since FDR with an acceleration in the name of Bush Compassion/International Pre-emptive Conflict and Obama Socialism/Keynesian Fallacy Worshipping.

Tell me please - how do we sit here and cry for dead pelicans and turtles who are covered in BP oil, when our future human citizens are covered in debt? Why should I rejoice when BP's CEO is dragged before Congress for his tar and feathering when no one from Congress is dragged before us to explain the trillions wasted in concept wars, health care for all, endless welfare benefits, bailouts for Harvard MBAs who were too stupid to recall the phrase "boom and......bust" and on and on and on?

It is a pathetic joke that BP is held to scrutiny of one standard for ruining the Gulf of Mexico while our own government gets to ruin every state in the nation with no accountability whatsoever.

Someone please explain this paradox to me.

Some Rational thoughts on the BP Oil Spill

I find myself in constant amazement at the stupidity of the American people. Just when I start thinking that maybe my fellow citizens deserve a little credit for having some common sense, another reason to have no faith in the economic intelligence of humans resurfaces.

To date, BP has lost over $1 billion as a result of this historically epic oil spill. Every second, BP officials can watch an underwater camera film profits gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. BP will end up spending far more on lawsuits, cleanup costs, new regulatory contraints on deepwater drilling and more. BP's reputation with consumers is tanking. Stockholders are fleeing. Bondholders are probably selling off in droves.

And yet, the American people think BP does not care about what is taking place. BP cares more than anyone! BP cares because it has the biggest reason (over 1 billion of them) to care. It is as if - when you listen to other people - that this evil corporation is somehow responding slowing and/or stupidly to the spill because it is, of course, an evil corporation that cares only about profits and stockholders. It is precisely because BP only cares about profits and stockholders that BP keeps trying to stop this spill.

Many will say that this is proof that deepwater drilling is too risky to continue or that BP and other companies should have had to take more precautions before they started drilling that deep. Nonsense.

First, the odds of something like this happening were - and still are - so low that it would not have made sense for BP to incur tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in added costs to drill relief wells at the same time the primary wells were being drilled. Think of it this way. We have a better chance of dying from a car wreck than an oil rig has of sinking. Should Ford build cars that look like tanks with several feet of protective steel, bomb-proof windows and bumpers that are 10 feet thick? That would save many more lives, right? What would cars then cost?

If all of the oil companies took into account every possible disaster and then incurred costs to prevent even the lowest probability events, you would have the pleasure of paying much more for gas than you do now. Then you would complain about $6 gas and the "excessive measures" that oil companies are wasting money on.

The reality of this spill is quite simple. BP engaged in rational engineering to provide us with fuel at the lowest possible cost. Government regulators (who failed over and over again to do their jobs) implicitly trusted that BP loved getting money for oil and would try not to spill any. When the lowest probability event actually happened we got a spill into the nation's common property that BP should now pay to clean up. It will be bad for the Gulf States for a long time. Billions, potentially in tourism and seafood revenue will be lost. That is part of the price of keeping gas around $2.50 per gallon.

If you want a full-proof method for keeping all oil out of the ocean, then ban all drilling offshore, pay your $6 per gallon and shut up about the high price of gas.