Halt On US Offshore Oil Drilling Lifted

[BigJKU316]

I think that if they don't know how to safely and responsibly drill at those depths (which they obviously don't), they shouldn't be allowed to.

End of line.

Is someone incapable of driving a car because they get in one wreck?

There are thousands of oil platforms in the world. Sometimes things just go bad.

And the ban only would have affected 33 of them.

If 1/34th of a kind of car explodes and wipes out thousands of square miles of sea I think its time to recall those cars. Get your facts from some place besides Fixed News.

33 that as far as we know have not had any problems. Tyrr hits this right on the head. Simply put something bad happened and we should examine what went wrong and fixed it. A kneejerk shut them all down approach is not really productive at all. For all we know deep water drilling could be something of critical importance in the next 100 years. To just shut it down because it is politically expedient seems silly.

[Monroe]

33 that as far as we know have not had any problems. Tyrr hits this right on the head. Simply put something bad happened and we should examine what went wrong and fixed it. A kneejerk shut them all down approach is not really productive at all. For all we know deep water drilling could be something of critical importance in the next 100 years. To just shut it down because it is politically expedient seems silly.

Actually the Atlantis ocean rig has a worse safety record prior to the spill than the rig that blew up and its in deeper water. I totally agree with should examine what went wrong and until we do that we shouldn't risk any more spills by these poorly maintained and operated rigs. Its just 33 more rigs. People are screaming that its going to shut down all 3600. That's just false.

[Tyyr]

Actually the Atlantis ocean rig has a worse safety record prior to the spill than the rig that blew up and its in deeper water. I totally agree with should examine what went wrong and until we do that we shouldn't risk any more spills by these poorly maintained and operated rigs. Its just 33 more rigs. People are screaming that its going to shut down all 3600. That's just false.

Actually you don't know if they're poorly maintained and operated because the governmental department in charge of monitoring them has been out to lunch for a decade or so. Some are definitely being run poorly but you don't need a 6 month moratorium to fix the problem. We know what happened with a good degree of certainty with this spill. We know why it happened and how to fix it. We can mandate improved safety standards immediately and with a significant boost to the MMS (or whatever it is now) we can start ensuring those standards are met. We don't need to slit our own economics throats to do it.

And yes it's just 33 rigs, in much the same way that I own just two cars. In other words it's all of them. Will the wells shut down? No. However no new wells will be drilled. The owners of those rigs aren't going to just let them sit there for six months doing nothing. There are plenty of places to work where there isn't a moratorium like Brazil and once those rigs move they aren't coming back anytime soon. In other words it's not a 6 month pause, its going to be a multi-year shutdown of drilling in the gulf. It could be years or more than a decade before those rigs come back. In the mean time you're going to lose thousands of jobs in an area that already got its balls ripped of by Katrina and now this accident. Less domestic oil, jobs lost for years, and its not even needed except to make it look like you're doing something rather than admitting that right now the president can really do two things about this spill. Jack and shit.