The Obama administration is rushing to write new safety rules for offshore oil rigs to provide a retreat with dignity from a drilling ban imposed last week.
Accompanying the largest oil spill in U.S. history, it turns out, is the standard template of squeaky wheels. In this case, environmentalists bemoaned President Barack Obama's decision to lift restrictions on off-shore drilling in late March. About 20 days later, the I-told-ya-sos came raining down as the Deepwater Horizon rig run by BP exploded and sank, leaving 11 men dead and a ruptured oil well in its wake.
Last week, Obama put a six-month ban on drilling exploration and on new permits in place. Now, it was the oil industry's turn to complain as the chasm between jobs and the environment became clear. With the six-month ban, oil rigs were said to be packing their gear and calling tug boats for a tow to less-restricted waters. Off-shore Brazil seemed like a nice place to visit for the time being.
It's going to be hard to sell a reversal of the six-month ban as a green decision, given the pelicans and shrimp swimming in the toxic plume -- the underwater version of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano or, as some say, Obama's Hurricane Katrina. But some predict it will take just six months for 50,000 jobs to leave the Houston area, about the last thing Houston or the White House wants.
Whether by design, accident, or divine curse the United States has an addiction to oil.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said BP, which owns the ruptured well, would pay "many billions of dollars" in fines for the disaster in the gulf, which explains quickly why the entire industry quakes when one of the oil dealers, to keep a metaphor alive, makes a mistake.
The Wall Street Journal said the lifted ban would apply to shallow wells, and the White House said it was looking at another situation in which the word shallow might apply -- the $75 million cap on liability damage fines for oil companies that holds unless it is proved the company acted with criminal negligence.
Would a maximum fine in this case even cover the cost of unemployment benefits the White House is considering for oil industry workers whose incomes have been derailed due to the disaster?
The House acted quickly in May to increase an 8-cent per barrel levy imposed on the oil industry that goes to oil spill cleanups to 34 cents per barrel, as part of a larger economics bill, the Journal said.
That's right. The oil industry pays, essentially, a transaction tax to offset costs of possible disaster within the industry. Banks, on the other hand …
In international markets Tuesday, the Nikkei 225 index in Japan rose 0.18 percent and the Shanghai composite index in China rose 0.09 percent. The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong added 0.56 percent and the Sensex in India lost 0.98 percent.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 rose 1.28 percent.
In midday trading in Europe, the FTSE 100 in Britain lost 1.04 percent while the DAX 30 in Germany fell 0.82 percent. The CAC 40 in France dropped 0.99 percent, while the pan-European DJ Stoxx 50 lost 1.01 percent.
