President Obama is addressing the nation about the oil spill on Tuesday. I hope what he says will sound something like this.
1 comment:
rick
said...
I disagree with the assessment that this letter contains good advice for the president.
This is BP's fault. We can say on a macro, "law of large numbers" level that accidents happen from time to time, but looking at this particular accident, it was BP's game and they screwed up. If they thought the risk was too big, they should have insured it (maybe they did).
Friedman goes on to make some good points about needing to make some serious policy changes. Maybe we shouldn't have permitted BP to drill for this oil in the first place.
But advising the president to put the blame back on the people? We just got done bailing out those banks and a bunch of us are still unemployed while the bankers dance the cha cha.
Perhaps this is a naive analysis, but it seems to me that any individual or collection of individuals who may have "weaned myself off my petroleum-based lifestyle" would only reduce demand in the short term. Maybe oil prices are a little lower for a little longer. Unless the government acts, BP is still going to drill for that gulf oil eventually anyway, no matter how many gardens I plant.
Yes I use too much oil on a daily basis, but I am no more responsible for this oil spill than I am for the starving children.
1 comment:
I disagree with the assessment that this letter contains good advice for the president.
This is BP's fault. We can say on a macro, "law of large numbers" level that accidents happen from time to time, but looking at this particular accident, it was BP's game and they screwed up. If they thought the risk was too big, they should have insured it (maybe they did).
Friedman goes on to make some good points about needing to make some serious policy changes. Maybe we shouldn't have permitted BP to drill for this oil in the first place.
But advising the president to put the blame back on the people? We just got done bailing out those banks and a bunch of us are still unemployed while the bankers dance the cha cha.
Perhaps this is a naive analysis, but it seems to me that any individual or collection of individuals who may have "weaned myself off my petroleum-based lifestyle" would only reduce demand in the short term. Maybe oil prices are a little lower for a little longer. Unless the government acts, BP is still going to drill for that gulf oil eventually anyway, no matter how many gardens I plant.
Yes I use too much oil on a daily basis, but I am no more responsible for this oil spill than I am for the starving children.
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