With three shuttered oil rigs preparing to leave the Gulf of Mexico for foreign waters, Gov. Bobby Jindal ratcheted up the rhetoric Thursday against the Obama administration's moratorium on deepwater drilling, saying the White House still doesn't understand the economic pain the forced stoppage is causing Louisiana workers.
Jindal said he had a conference call with President Barack Obama's senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, and appealed to her to shorten the six-month moratorium, arguing that a half-year pause would force oil companies to move drilling operations overseas for years and that the federal government could easily impose new safety standards and monitoring in a shorter time frame.
"She asked again why the rigs simply wouldn't come back after six months," Jindal said. "What worries me is I fear they think these rigs can just flip a switch on and off."
The economy of south Louisiana will take a bad hit from the six-month moritorium. Due to the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen, shrimpers, seafood processors, marinas, bait shops, and other small businesses are already suffering. With the drilling moratorium, a good many more folks who work for oil companies, oil service companies, and marine construction companies will likely lose their jobs, perhaps as many as 38,000.
In addition, the state budget has a large hole in it, and with the additional job losses from the moratorium and oil business moving out, tax revenue will decline, and further lay-offs from state jobs are inevitable. Along with the ripple effect on other businesses, such as retail sales, car dealerships, etc, which will lose out because, those who are laid off will not have money to spend, the losses to our economy could be catastrophic.
I doubt that deepwater drilling can be made safe. It can be made safer than BP's operations, surely, because the company culture was to value production over safety, and we've discovered that over the years, BP cut many safety corners in the name of increasing production and profits. Even with the weakened regulations that the US was left with after Cheney and his oil company cronies loosened things up, BP broke several rules on the Horizon rig that, had they been followed, might have prevented the explosion.
That Louisiana has not diversified and is so very dependent on a single industry, the oil and gas companies and the oil service companies is our own doing, and we should have gone in a different direction, but we didn't, and now here we are. Remember that we do not use all the oil and gas produced here in Louisiana. The bulk is shipped out to keep other parts of the country humming. We have not kicked our addiction to oil, so what we don't get from our own wells in the US or US waters, we will need to buy elsewhere. Jobs will go elsewhere.
Since I'm nearly as distrustful of government agencies as I am of large corporations, I wonder whether the agencies will achieve the goal of actually making deepwater drilling safer. If we must suffer here in Louisiana, I want us, at least, to suffer for a good cause, and I'm not sure that the end result will be safer drilling.
As a country, we are not yet serious about conservation of energy. We are not yet serious about weaning ourselves off our dependence on oil and other polluting and declining sources of energy, nor are we serious about finding alternative, clean sources of energy. And Louisiana must get in on the action of developing and producing clean energy, because when the oil and gas run out, we'll be in an even sorrier state than we are now.
Grandmere, I share your frustration and ambivalence about whom to trust. Two hundred years ago, my German ancestors suffered through the struggle to rise from serfdom. They emigrated to the Midwest, where we now live and struggle, as they did, for a chance to improve our lives against enormous odds struggling to keep us subjugated to more powerful interests.
ReplyDeleteI never imagined myself using such terms to describe our condition, but the confluence of the Great Recession and the outrageous destruction of the Gulf of Mexico trigger a more radical response. For more than a century, we have granted corporations the same liberties we established for ourselves. The result has been more subjugation and less freedom.
I am reluctant to trust government, though, because it is government that has abdicated control and appears to be unwilling to govern. Partisan interests have priority over national ones. The GOP is seriously conflicted over controlling Wall Street and opposing Obama. It co-sponsors legislation and then votes against it. Dysfunction is the order of the day.
Perhaps we need a new constitutional convention, to rethink how we should be governed. We were the prototype, as it were, perhaps we should look at a parliamentary structure or some variant thereof. Two parties are not enough to reflect our diversity, but our polity is not kind toward third or fourth parties.
How do we regain the idea that we are a community that should act together to advance our common interests?
Pfalz Prophet, the majority in the US have lost all sense of the common good. Here in south Louisiana, we've seen the scandalously pitiful response to Katrina and the federal flood and now to the disaster in the Gulf. The well still gushes oil, and I can tell you from first-hand stories that the clean-up effort is woefully lacking and quite disorganized. We see that BP fails us, and the government fails us once again. Why should we believe in the institutions?
ReplyDeleteDid you catch Elizabeth Kaeton's recent link to The BP Oil Spill Re-enacted by Cats in One Minute? If not,check it out.
ReplyDeleteThe video is very good, Lapin. I wish I could use my car less, but here in the small town South, it would be virtually impossible to do so.
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