http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704562504575021540843701582.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories

A "large" oil spill on a port in texas. There was a much smaller (18,000 gallons) spill there recently too.

Maybe Cali's fear of environmental damage if they embraced the antiquated oil instead of pushing for modern, cleaner energy wasn't THAT unfounded?

1/23/2010 9:48:47 PM

yes. because oil spills happen all the time

1/23/2010 9:53:42 PM

They do actually:


Just getting rarer, thanks to technology.

1/23/2010 10:11:05 PM

So oil spills have become more rare. But accidents still happen.. so we just abandon increasing domestic oil production and remain an energy slave to mid-east sheiks?

1/23/2010 10:18:02 PM

Quote :

"Maybe Cali's fear of environmental damage if they embraced the antiquated oil instead of pushing for modern, cleaner energy wasn't THAT unfounded?"

Still waiting on that nuclear power the rest of the world seems to have figured out.

1/23/2010 10:23:47 PM

And thanks to the Supreme Court these polluters will have greater leverage to get away scot-free(r?). But let me guess, this is just an acceptable cost of doing business?

1/23/2010 10:29:27 PM

^^ china is building plenty of new reactors (20+), the US has started to issue permits to build new reactors, even the Axis of Evil Iran is trying to get some new plants up (among other things...).

1/23/2010 10:39:05 PM

Of course the fear was unfounded. Is not this oil spill being cleaned up? Will there not be any permanent damage from the spill? Does that not make it a temporary inconvenience?

Therefore, banning oil terminals because they would flood the beaches with oil when in fact they will not, would make the ban a mistake.

1/23/2010 11:33:48 PM

Or perhaps they would rather not take the risk of the likely irreparable damage caused to both the eco-system and the local economy in the case of such a spill?

1/23/2010 11:36:59 PM

Quote :

"^^ china is building plenty of new reactors (20+), the US has started to issue permits to build new reactors, even the Axis of Evil Iran is trying to get some new plants up (among other things...)."

That was sort of my point. We've known how to do nuclear power for years, but we're only just now getting around to taking things seriously again, and just issuing permits. And even then it's not a big priority in this country.

1/23/2010 11:40:09 PM

^^ Which apparently is both rare and does not cause irreparable harm. I don't know, I'm just going on what I've read, and it seems the danger is completely made up. Spills happen all the time in Texas with no discernible permanent damage. As such, the fear of spills must have been over-sold, or is there cause to believe a huge spill in Texas, that did not even make landfall, transported to California would have suddenly rendered the coast uninhabitable? I can think of nothing. As such, an oil industry in California would resemble the oil industry found in Texas: occasionally interesting but largely benign.

1/23/2010 11:57:49 PM

Quote :

"Or perhaps they would rather not take the risk of the likely irreparable damage caused to both the eco-system and the local economy in the case of such a spill?"

couldn't many industries carry that potential? sure there's a risk, albeit very small

and I can promise you that as long as the containment was tackled in a timely manner, it will not cause these "irreparable damages"

1/24/2010 12:53:52 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/17/AR2010011701371.html

Alaska is still dealing with the 1989 oil spill too btw (that’s ~21 years for those that can’t count).

1/24/2010 12:59:42 AM

yes. because the containment did not occur quickly enough. like ^^ was saying

[Edited on January 24, 2010 at 1:01 AM. Reason : ]

1/24/2010 1:00:52 AM

Quote :

"and I can promise you that as long as the containment was tackled in a timely manner"

Valdez is a unique case...even though it was a large spill, it wasn't he largest on record

the reason it raped that local environment is because of it's remote location which allowed for the oil plume to spread ashore before vessels could mobilize to that area

had that happened in a less remote area, it would have been no big deal

[Edited on January 24, 2010 at 1:06 AM. Reason : ^yep]

1/24/2010 1:05:34 AM

^^^ Russia is also still dealing with the after effects of Chernobyl. Like I said in the healthcare thread, you don't make policy and law based on edge cases. Nuclear power is a net positive for the world, thus despite Chernobyl, you're an idiot if you don't think we should continue investing in it. Likewise, oil is still one of the cheapest, most reliable and versatile energy sources we have, thus despite Valdez, you're an idiot if you don't think we should continue to invest in it as well.

[Edited on January 24, 2010 at 1:10 AM. Reason : sdfg]

1/24/2010 1:10:04 AM

I'm not suggesting that we stop investing in oil. I'm saying it's not unreasonable to shy away from oil when we're on the cusp of breaking in to better technologies. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, but sometimes necessity needs a nudge.

1/24/2010 1:14:44 AM

In your opinion. Why should the rest of us be forced to suffer when your opinion of the future does not come to pass?

1/24/2010 1:18:12 AM

Who is suffering and how?

1/24/2010 1:18:48 AM

^ Thank you for bringing up the spill in Alaska. That's actually where I was going with this.

Just shrugging your shoulders and saying "Meh, Spills happen." simply isn't good enough.

1/24/2010 1:23:36 AM

Quote :

"I'm not suggesting that we stop investing in oil. I'm saying it's not unreasonable to shy away from oil when we're on the cusp of breaking in to better technologies"

we're on the cusp? really? where are all of these other technologies with efficiencies and cost/MW that are anyfuckingwhere close to that of oil?

1/24/2010 1:26:43 AM

nuclear

1/24/2010 1:29:54 AM

Quote :

"Who is suffering and how?"

I'm afraid I don't know their names, I never ask. But the Cuban state is having trouble paying the heating bills of its mental hospitals, and the patients are dying as a result. If only oil was cheaper, Cuba might have been able to afford to keep them alive. Alas, don't they know we are on the cusp and that their sacrifice will be worth it to some moron on the internet?!?!

1/24/2010 1:33:04 AM

My eyes are open. All this time, i had assumed communist countries are poor models for our economic system, but boy was i wrong. I will never make this mistake again. Thanks LoneSnark.

1/24/2010 1:36:05 AM

About damn time. Cuba has been issuing offshore drilling contracts to private enterprise for years, it is criminal for California not to be. It is appalling to me that Cuba is a more capitalist society than California, but that was the world wrought by moron. Thank God moron has come around and repudiated all his earlier moronic beliefs. And eliminate those pesky environmental regulations too! Cuba doesn't have any, nor a minimum wage, no OSHA either, so why should we? Now, lets get some liberty applied to this problem pronto!

[Edited on January 24, 2010 at 2:01 AM. Reason : .,.]

1/24/2010 2:01:24 AM

much more oil naturally seeps into the oceans per year than all "man-made" oil spills.

[Edited on January 24, 2010 at 2:14 PM. Reason : ]

1/24/2010 2:14:20 PM

Question for libertarian-minded individuals:

Suppose that we lived in a more libertarian ideal society, smaller government and a huge emphasis on individual rights and property rights. How would this clean-up be operated?

My impression is that the company responsible would have to pay to clean up every drop of oil until the waterway was returned to its condition before the spill. I'm assuming the harbor is considered a public waterway, meaning we all own some part of it. Therefore the spill is an infringement of my property rights and the company should be forced to return the waterway to its original condition? The company would also have to compensate other companies that use the waterway for any losses in revenues they might suffer from not being able to use the waterway. If the case could be made that local fish species were affected by the spill then local fishermen would also be compensated for lower harvests? The people that were evacuated due to the sulfur in the air may also need to be compensated for their trouble?


Instead the coast guard seems to be cleaning most of it up (just from reading the article). Seems like another big subsidy to Oil companies to me.

1/24/2010 2:47:14 PM

^ In a more libertarian society, who would make them do it?

1/24/2010 3:05:01 PM

moar nuclear plz

1/24/2010 3:12:14 PM

^^The government/court system?

If you spill waste on someone else's property then I think thats an infringement of your property rights, and one of the government's jobs in a libertarian society would be to protect your property rights.

Of course, there is some confusion for me with the fact that most of the air and water in America is considered public, meaning there is many property owners and not just one.


This question may be a little off-topic. The only reason I bring it up is I've had discussions with environmentalists (actually borderline primitivists) that also happened to be Libertarian on environmental policy and wanted to get some more opinions.









[Edited on January 24, 2010 at 3:21 PM. Reason : Im no expert]

1/24/2010 3:16:37 PM

One solution to most such problems is to privatize the public property. That is what occurs in Western Europe: many water ways are privately owned and managed by a corporation. If you want to sail upon it, withdraw water from it, take fish out of it, or dump waste into it, you need to buy their permission, which usually has strings attached. This is not a recent invention, there is a long history associated with water rights in Europe. They started out with all public water-ways, but eventually enough people died from poor management (the water would invariably become either polluted, unnavigable, or miss-allocated, starving either crops, commerce, or people depending on the whim of government bureaucrats). Privatization seems to work well: the owners have an incentive to pollute because people will pay to pollute the river, but if the river became too polluted then people would stop paying to withdraw now undrinkable water from the river, so they try to attain a balance. If people try to withdraw too much water (threatening to make the river unnavigable for trade) then they raise the price. Similarly, if a spill occurred, such as from a municipal sewage system, then even if the perpetrator was not found or otherwise refused to pay for cleanup (not uncommon even here in America) the owners of the water-way would fix the spill as well as all other maintenance as required, such as dredging, tracking water quality for their customers, wildlife management, and legal enforcement (suing those that fail to pay, dump without permission, or stealing water/fish).

There was a great article on managing water-rights in Reason magazine a few years ago. The problem here in America is that we have always suffered from an over-abundance of water resources, so we never developed a pile of dead bodied high enough to sacrifice public ownership of waterways.

Some people find it shocking the many ways that Europeans are more capitalist than us Americans seem to believe we are. Iceland even privatized the ocean within its economic zone. Yet we Americans can't even manage to privatize the post office!

[Edited on January 24, 2010 at 4:07 PM. Reason : .,.]

1/24/2010 3:58:33 PM

^Yeah I understand the idea that privatizing the waterways might reduce some of what I consider the misuse of our waterways ie: The price of water or its usage reflecting its scarcity which might reduce overuse etc. The idea that ownership can usually protect a resource.

But like I said earlier I had a few questions that couldn't be answered in an earlier discussion and wanted to get some more opinions. I think libertarianism brings some good ideas to environmetal policy, its just not discussed very often and seems convoluted

the ability of water to move around (and fall from the sky) brings up some questions. For instance a company that owns a river may decide to allow a lot of pollution, to attract certain businesses. The river then flows into a bay that someone else owns (and whose most important product is shellfish). Is the bay owner able to demand compensation for his loss or even demand that the water be pristine? I think this question is even bigger for Air. How do you privatize air and what would it do to air pollution?

Im also interested to hear your thoughts on how rainfall would be treated. Do river owners own the rain that runs off someone else's property but eventually makes their river?


and of course is water a human right? it does fall from the sky.

1/24/2010 5:31:19 PM

Your questions demonstrate a misunderstanding about the libertarian outlook (or similar systems). Libertarians answer the question of 'who decides' by placing in charge those that most stand to benefit from reaching the right conclusion. Which conclusion they reach is not obvious, as it is quite true that sometimes the best outcome for everyone involved is a polluted lifeless river (Dump all the pollution into one river and fiercely defend all others as the water supply for the entire region).

The benefit to making such issues local and private is that you don't need one rule that applies everywhere. The owner of the Neuse River may welcome rain runoff from his tree farmer neighbors. Meanwhile, the neighbors of the Cape Fear River may all be hog farmers, so the owners of the Cape Fear River would demand high payments and that steps be taken to contain the pollution. In Europe some areas take steps to isolate rain runoff from their sewer systems, changing the fees they would pay to dump the resultant polluted water into payments for clean rain water.

The concept of privatization requires an economic concept called excludability. If I am granted legal title to the bay but I have no method of excluding you, which owns a large river, from dumping your water+refuse into my bay then my bay becomes non-excludable, once again a public good, defeating the purpose and becoming wealth destructive. The solutions are simple, but not always possible due to transactions costs. One of us can buy the other out. You might stop allowing your river to be polluted if you also owned the bay. Another possibility is reaching an engineering solution, diverting your river water past my bay and directly into the ocean. Or, maybe the Coase theorem will dominate, as I pay you an annual fee in exchange for you managing your river in a way that stops harming my bay.

To libertarians water is not a human right, it is property just like any other. If I discover oil under my land tomorrow, it would be little different than if it just fell from the sky (only less predictable). If rain falls on my land it belongs to me as long as I have control of it. If I store it all in barrels, that is my right. What happens next is up to social convention or negotiation. You may let it flow onto your land in exchange for ownership, you may demand I stop the flow, you and I may even be willing to share a pond so I don't have to build one (I lent you my water for storage). It would be up to us to figure out how we want to arrange our lives, free from interference from others that want to enforce price ceilings (landowners selling water is illegal in many states) or otherwise impose their preferred outcomes upon us.

Air is harder. Not even Europe has figured that one out. Western Europe suffers very little from water pollution thanks to privatization, but air pollution tends to be worse than we Americans are accustomed to.

[Edited on January 24, 2010 at 6:18 PM. Reason : .,.]

1/24/2010 6:15:11 PM

Actually, thanks to convoluted water privatization laws out west it is still illegal in a few states to collect the rain water that falls off of your own roof because that water would have otherwise flowed into a stream or river that is, in fact, owned by someone.

1/24/2010 6:18:46 PM

^ Outstanding property rights. The owners of the land upon which the house was built sold their water rights in perpetuity to someone else in exchange for a lump-sum payment. They can always buy their water rights back

1/24/2010 6:21:56 PM

As a layman, I have to ask...

Does "oil spill" necessarily mean a spill in water?

Obvious consequences: as depletion sets in throughout Texas's wells, it seems obvious that more operations will move to the Gulf, meaning that more accidents will result in an "oil spill". Alternatively, oil spills will be on average much more environmentally damaging - depending on what the correct terminology is.

I mean... water disperses stuff. The fishies die and otters get all nasty, etc.

1/25/2010 11:21:05 AM

I love to see people in this thread pushing nuclear power. It's a shame (some) environmental whack jobs and (some) stupid gov't regulation has set us back over 30 years compared to where we should be.

1/25/2010 12:58:56 PM

i don't think "oil spills" only refer to leaks in water. But, that would be a question for the graph that was originally posted. Might change how things are construed.

1/27/2010 1:03:02 AM