We Need More Regulation?
The San Francisco Examiner provides one possible explanation for President Obama's eagerness to "persuade" BP to transfer $20 billion to his control ahead of any independent assignment of clean-up cost responsibility.
The Dutch offered to fly their skimmer arm systems to the Gulf 3 days after the oil spill started. The offer was apparently turned down because EPA regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.
As of June 8th, BP reported that they have collected 64,650 barrels of oil in the Gulf. That is only a fraction of the amount of oil spilled from the well. That is less than one day’s rated capacity of the Dutch oil skimmers.
Got that? The enviro-statists at Obama's EPA cited regulations prohibiting the discharge of oily water at sea in refusing aid from the Netherlands, a country that knows a thing or two about managing water, thereby prohibiting recovery of massive amounts of oil near the source from the outset of the spill. Since perfection was not on offer -- extremely oily water would be pumped aboard and slightly contaminated effluent returned to the sea -- the bureaucrats nixed the idea. But don't worry, Obama's boot is firmly on the neck of BP and it will pay every penny, regardless of actual culpability.
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Re: We Need More Regulation?
Well, there's one piece of the answer to the how-deliberate question. The administration didn't dismiss the Dutch because they want the crisis to make everyone mad for cap but because...expert regulations forced them to. More regulations more expertly created, of course, being this administration's solution for everything.
Re: We Need More Regulation?
Peter Robinson once told me that a large part of Reagan's success was his clarity of purpose: lieutenants up and down the federal chain of command could pretty easily predict what the President would do in their shoes, and so they did it. Could part of Obama's problem be the impact his general incoherence is having on decision-making down the line? If the President won't waive the Jones Act, for example, how comfortable can an EPA official feel about waiving a counter-productive oil discharge rule?