One of the sleazy things about oil spills like the current British Petroleum mess in the Gulf of Mexico is that they’re front-loaded and back-loaded with our money. It’s what we pay that makes oil a profitable business, and, until Congress changes the laws governing liability for spills, we pay at least a part of the cost of mitigating the damage done in pursuit of those profits.
Consider that in eight years in Congress, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a tireless advocate of offshore drilling, has gotten more than $400,000 in donations from oil companies. That’s an average of over $50,000 a year, totally apart from other donations she receives—and from her salary and the generous benefits we, the taxpayers, foot for our representatives in Congress.
So we as consumers pay for the oil that brings in the profits and enables the petroleum companies to give to Murkowski and other politicians. And we as taxpayers pay Murkowski’s salary so she can advocate for drilling that may bring on another disaster that we will have to foot much of the bill to clean up unless Congress raises the cap on liability for oil companies.
Which Murkowski last week voted against its doing.
To be fair, Murkowski may be telling the truth when she claims that she does favor raising the cap, which is currently $75 million, but that the figure of $10 billion named in the bill she voted against had been chosen arbitrarily and too fast. On the other hand, estimates of the cost of remediating the BP spill were running as high as $12 billion or more last week
One could argue that there need to be some deliberations about the ceiling on liability. One could equally well argue that there should be no ceiling at all, and that oil companies (and nuclear power companies, but that’s a story for another day) should have to pay the costs of whatever remediation their blunders necessitate. If they go bankrupt, hey, that’s life in the free market.
Another reason for raising the cap into the double-digit billions is that more large-scale accidents may lie ahead. In published comments on the BP spill, Hampshire College professor Michael Klare, an expert on the politics of oil, observed that, as oil exploration and drilling are carried on under increasingly extreme conditions because the more easily accessible drilling sites have been tapped out, other mishaps will likely occur.
