OnEarth Magazine

Green Living Ideas - Keeping Green Ideas Simple and Down to Earth Environmental Management & Energy News · Environmental Leader Casting Oil Upon the Waters: The House Drilling Bills | David Goldston This week, the House could vote on three bills to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. It is remarkable enough that the House would take up such measures before Congress has done a thing to make drilling safer. But what is truly astounding about these bills is that they would actually make the system that governs offshore drilling weaker than it was before the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. These bills are more than a Big Oil wish list; they are a sort of oil utopia – and they could make sense only in a utopian world in which oil spills could never ever happen, in which there are never conflicts between the oil industry and other economic interests like fishing and tourism, and in which oil companies always take environmental and safety concerns fully into account. So what would the bills actually do? Now think about that. This is replacing oil policy with a kind of oil mania. Shutting down the courts is particularly wrongheaded in this instance for two reasons.