Spill Baby Spill, cont'd
After I wrote my Spill Baby Spill post, some people accused me of using a straw-man argument when writing that the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe doesn’t invalidate the premise of supporters of domestic drilling, and that saying it did is basically the equivalent of saying “Let them eat cake”, because drilling has to happen somewhere.
This week, here’s what Lexington, The Economist‘s pseudonymous America columnist, had to say on the matter this week:
Disasters can be instructive. Both regulators and oil firms will learn useful lessons from the Deepwater Horizon fiasco, and safety will surely improve as a result. But it is easy to learn the wrong lessons, too. After the accident on Three Mile Island in 1979, Americans grew scared of nuclear power and stopped building new reactors, even though no one died in that accident. Had the nation not panicked, it would now have many more nuclear reactors, making the shift to a low-carbon economy significantly easier. Similarly today, panic is likely but unhelpful.
So long as Americans do not reduce their consumption of oil, refusing to drill at home means importing more of the stuff, often from places with looser environmental standards. The net effect is likely to be more pollution, not less. Nigeria, for example, has had a major oil spill every year since 1969, observes Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation, a think-tank. (…) oil is both useful and precious. Extracting it domestically, with tougher safety rules, would bring a windfall to a Treasury that sorely needs one.
Couldn’t have put it better.
Of course, what Margonelli goes on to say (in the various places where she has commented on the mess) is that the impossibility of completely and always preventing spills indicates the importance of reducing not just our dependence on messy foreign oil, but on oil generally. Which is what sets many of us off about the “drill, baby, drill” slogan — it was employed while blithely ignoring the environmental costs of drilling, home and abroad, and indicative of a prevailing attitude in which attempts to curb our fossil fuel addiction and promote alternative energy sources are viewed as idiotic tree-hugging nonsense.
It’s quite possible to object to “drill, baby, drill” for those reasons and yet not subscribe to the premises you attributed to the laughing liberals in your previous post (premise 1: “I have ‘a fabulous super secret plan to build a petroleum-free society’” or premise 2: ‘Oil spills are ok as long as they don’t happen near Americans’). It’s even possible, I think (because I do), to coherently believe that (a) off-shore drilling is a necessary risk at this time and (b) the cavalier attitude indicated by “drill, baby, drill” is incredibly unhelpful in weighing the costs and benefits associated with that drilling.
As I said in the previous thread, I think the LOLcats summary goes a bit like this:
A. “Drill, baby, drill”: Objections to off-shore drilling are absurd.
B. “Spill, baby, spill”: This incident indicates that objections to off-shore drilling are not all absurd.
I don’t think that believing (B) in any way implies (premise 1) or (premise 2).
— rob · May 11, 03:28 PM · #
I assume you’ll be pushing hard for the new improved safety rules and the carbon taxes to generate that windfall?
— LarryinLA · May 11, 04:13 PM · #
I accused you of attacking a strawman, and still do, because I had and have seen absolutely no one making an argument near to the one that you attacked. This post does nothing to change that.
— Freddie · May 11, 05:16 PM · #
“So long as Americans do not reduce their consumption of oil”
This seems to do a lot of work in that argument. Those most concerned about oil spills are also happy to take steps towards reducing consumption of oil. I’m not aware of any notable arguments that we should do the one without the other.
I could see making an argument that environmentalists are going to be better able to convince people to reduce domestic drill than to reduce oil consumption. That’s plausible, although it also indicates that people making that argument should consider working harder to champion reducing consumption. But there’s other environmental mitigation tactics available, for example working to raise standards of Nigerian drilling. It’s not like oil companies like spilling oil. Unlike many forms of pollution they have a strong incentive to minimize loss.
— Greg Sanders · May 11, 06:10 PM · #
History marks how the Santa Monica spill led to the OPEC crisis, which led to the petrodollars that destabilized countries in the Caribbean like Venezuela and on both sides of the Persian Gulf, making us more dependent
on the same product, the TAPS line was the only positive element from that
instance, opposed by our current vice president, in his infinite wisdom of
his freshmen year in the Senate, so the Economist is taking the long view, but we must panic, since we’ve already solved the problem, QED
— ian cormac · May 11, 06:12 PM · #
“Had the nation not panicked, it would now have many more nuclear reactors.”
And we’d have an even faster-growing problem of where to put the waste, because nobody has yet come up with a good way to handle and store stuff that has the potential to cause environmental catastrophe for millions of years to come.
Nuclear fission is not “clean” power. There’s a radioactive legacy spread across the United States which says so.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · May 11, 06:18 PM · #
Corrigan, Toronto Star
— Keid A · May 12, 03:02 AM · #
Freddie: I guess you haven’t been looking at the right places then — including the comments thread of my previous post on the issue.
rob:
I would actually agree with this. I would only point out that “drill baby drill” is a slogan, and that like all slogans it is limited, but the McCain/Palin had a detailed, thought-out energy policy which involved offshore drilling, nuclear power and renewable sources and all of the rest, which I feel is roughly the right approach.
You can absolutely dislike a rhetoric while not disagreeing with the substance behind the rhetoric. My point is that a lot of self-declared opponents of “drill baby drill” conflate the rhetoric and the substance, which I think is wrong.
Travis: This is too big a debate to get into right now, but I would note that I am a strong proponent of nuclear power and I disagree with you. The waste problem is one which is slowly being managed. Areva, the (French) global leader in nuclear power is now experimenting with reactors that can actually recycle waste and use “waste” as fuel. I firmly believe that the waste problem can and will be solved.
But — and this is the crucial thing — the only way you can solve the waste problem is by investing in nuclear technology. Areva and others would not be coming up with these innovative new technologies if there had not been investment in nuclear technology that would make this R&D effort worldwide. If you stopped nuclear technology tomorrow, you would have a waste problem for thousands of years. By boosting investment in nuclear now, you will solve the waste problem sooner.
— PEG · May 12, 08:47 AM · #
Ok, but how does that prove you weren’t attacking a strawman?
When people accuse you of “attacking a strawman”, do you understand what that means?
— Chet · May 12, 09:19 PM · #