How do you feel about the way the oil spill is being handled?

[Mr Khan]

famousringo said:
As far as I can tell, the trouble is that due to the nature of the incredibly deep well, plus the sheer size of the spill, there's very little that can be done to contain it, either at the source or on the waves. Your only chance to really deal with the problem is before it happens, and obviously the safety protocols weren't sufficient (or they weren't followed, and therefore the oversight wasn't sufficient).

There needs to be a freeze on deep-ocean drilling until the source of the problem can be identified and safety can be assured. Fortunately, a project off the coast of Newfoundland was just halted so that safety and oversight requirements can be increased in light of the Gulf spill. Until last week, Chevron was still greenlit to drill a well a full kilometer deeper than the Gulf of Mexico well.

My main concern is that even tighter regulations might not assure safety. What if the occasional natural gas blowout is the price of harvesting oil from the deep oceans? Are we going to be willing to just walk away from all that energy?

Accidents do happen (to the credit of Rand Paul, no less), so some of this can be accepted as the cost of doing business, but only when it was something the company really couldn't have controlled. From what i've heard, a single faulty battery, as well as a host of other, more structural problems, was what stood between normalcy and disaster here. BP needs to be taken to the mat for this. Being forced to entirely fund a wetlands reclamation project would be a start.