Thoughts on the oil moratorium.

Yesterday, on facebook, I posted that I agreed with Judge Feldman's move to halt Obama's 6 month moratorium on deep water oil drilling in the gulf. Several of my liberal friends had, let's say, a sharp disagreement to this. The following is excerpted from my responses to them, I'm vain enough to feel it was worth highlighting for general consumption.

"Two towers falling were a very real image as well, and the hasty, emotional response from that was that NYC lived in some nebulous Code Orange for the next 8 years, and I have to take my shoes off when I fly. My fear isn't that oil will get overly regulated. Fuck big oil. My fear is politically motivated regulation that is enacted too hastily and WON'T WORK. And this across the board 6 month moratorium feels politically motivated."

"I'm all for comprehensive regulations. I'm all for an independent federal regulator on each deep water rig, on the oil companies dime, paid for by a mandatory slush fund managed by the feds that each company leasing rigs in the gulf has to contribute to. I'm all for mandatory relief wells on any pipe 300 feet or lower. I'm all for an armada of oil cleaning ships, docked east of Galveston, on constant standby, all funded out of that same slush fund. 

I want all of those things, but that's a deep and calculated response to an incredibly complicated series of problems. And, I'm sorry but "AHHH OIL BAD, SHUT IT ALL DOWN!" doesn't strike me as the first step towards a calculated response. It strikes me as something designed to primarily satisfy a short term political need, and my fear is that once the short term political need is met, the knee jerk halfassed, ineffective solution will become the permanent solution."

"This is a real complicated mess. We see Tony Hayward on the news everyday and we fucking hate him. But Tony Hayward isn't affected by this moratorium. He still gets to keep his yacht. The guys I went to college with are the ones who get fucked, the guy trying to put his two kids through school and worrying about his seniority if 33 wells suddenly stop and there's no more on the horizon. What's he going to do, take up fishing?

There's not many industries left in southern Louisiana and I don't think there needs to be any hidden agenda or corruption for someone to go, "wait... are we SURE that putting all these people out of work is the best solution to this problem?"

As much as we might hate oil spills, and hate the fact that we're an oil guzzling country, it doesn't change the fact that we ARE, at present, an oil guzzling nation. And tomorrow, with the lack of any other resource, we're all going to wake up and need more oil to guzzle. I'm ALL for getting off the oil, but it's not going to happen in the next 6 months.

My personal opinion is that the chances of another deep water horizon happening in the next 6 months are incredibly small, and there's no reason to put thousands of struggling middle class families that live in a region that has already been ass raped by man and god through more ass raping while the government does whatever investigations they need to do, investigations I believe in and thoroughly support."

We are addicted to oil. It sucks, but it's true. Our society runs on it, our economy runs on it, and plenty of our fellow citizens make a modest living providing it to us. Any decisions about our use of oil has to take these factors into account. We have to accept that we can't wake up tomorrow and be an oil free society, so until we can we have to strive to be a better oil using society. Never, Baby, Never! is just as absurd as Drill, Baby, Drill! and simply because a Republican has an idea doesn't make it corrupt or without merit.

Now, I'm going to play with the new iPhone software update.