Two things. The first is that the response to the gushing oil leak on the bottom on the Caribbean Sea is not just BP's problem. It is not just the government's problem. It is the problem of every person who is using an unsustainable amount of fossil fuels in their day to day life. That would include me.
It is distressingly rare to hear someone say "What can I do?" If it were not so consistent it would be amusing that all the people who want small government seem to also want the government to have a limitless ability to respond quickly and effectively to a range of man-made and environmental disasters. Not possible.
But what can we do to prevent this in the future? One thing is to decrease our dependence on oil. Decrease the pressure to take these kinds of risks. There are very few of us who are doing what needs to be done in this arena, and this disaster could serve as the impetus for all of us to start actively encouraging our elected officials to step up incentives for alternative sources of energy and to upgrade the national energy grid to accomodate these alternatives.
The second is that I haven't heard much in the way of commentary on the role of regulation in all this. If we are going to drill in the ocean, then we need to verbalize what we are willing to tolerate in the way of this sort of disaster. With the airlines, we tolerate zero airplane crashes. The level of regulation and enforcement of those regulations reflects that. We did not have a collective voice on what was intolerable related to deep water drilling. So long as we depend on oil and it exists under the ground, whether that ground is above water or underwater will probably not matter. We need to determine the cost we will pay to get it, and then enforce those regulations.
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