Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Quote Of The Day

There have been many good posts on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by current and former oil workers. I just want to highlight this one, by a Daily Kos diarist named Fishgrease, about how oil booms should be deployed to catch on oil spill such as this one:

Not only is Oil Spill Booming a large industry in the USA, teaching Oil Spill Booming is a large industry in the USA. Most of BP's production and pipeline employees in the USA have attended at least one booming school. Many have attended two or three. Most oil and gas production employees in the USA have attended booming school. Some of us have attended really good, really extensive, week or two-week booming schools. BP's production employees have attended the best booming schools. I know this. I've seen them there.

BP's drilling folks have mostly not attended booming school. They're sometimes sent to booming school, but they fuck off in the bar and their bosses sign off on that being okay. Because for Drilling Hands, booming is for pussies. This is a generalization. Not all drilling hands think that, but most of them do and I guarantee BP's drilling executives think that booming is for pussies -- and that's if they think about booming at all or even know what it is. That's not so shocking. In the major oil companies, there are likely a few drilling executives that don't even know what drilling is. I'm not kidding.

Fishgrease: DKos Booming School

As Fishgrease goes on to point out, BP was clearly not prepared for this event. It's also clear that they weren't interested in properly doing quality assurance on, or testing, the blow out preventer (BOP) that failed to operate.

Here's the problem: drilling creates profits, at least if the drilling ends up finding oil. Things like quality assurance, testing, and disaster preparedness are overhead. They eat into profits. Few company executives, in any business, are going to voluntarily do more of those things than they deem absolutely necessary. I've worked in the aerospace, and defense industries, and I've followed the computer industry enough to feel like I worked there. I have yet to see an example of this not being true.

This is why the libertarian philosophy that allowing huge court settlements and otherwise let the markets run free is, to put it mildly, exactly the opposite of what is going to prevent something like this. To put it more accurately, thinking that such a policy will prevent or minimize these sorts of catastrophes is batshit crazy. Executives will always take current profit over preventing a possible disaster later. They know that they can hire good lawyers, and with a little prior planning, they can get the sort of federal judges appointed who will look favorably on their shenanigans. We're seeing that at work right now.

Nor do I think that the threat of putting a company out of business that fails to prevent or handle such disasters is likely to change things. Arthur Andersen's departure from the world of accounting didn't prevent the sort of abuses we've seen with the finance industry since Enron. There are several reasons for that, I think. First of all, unless there's gross incompetence, disasters of this sort are an unlikely event. We can argue about whether that situation applies here, but I'd bet real money that BP executives didn't think that either they or their employees were unusually incompetent. Besides, disasters like this always happen to the competition, who are inevitably less competent, and less gifted with fashion sense, than they are. Executives usually have huge egos. Disasters don't happen to them, they happen to stupid people.

Executives of publicly held corporations are also required by law to maximize return on investment. Profligate spending on overhead items doesn't get you there, at least not in the short term.

The only thing, in my opinion, that is ever likely to prevent things like this in the future is to make sure that the proper safeguards and procedures are in place before the companies responsible see a dime of profit. Any approach that doesn't do that effectively will make the current attempts to corral all that oil look like a smooth operation in comparison.


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