Policy Changes Presented by Environmental Problems
With more and more use of carbon fuels it has become difficult to manage the energy resources as consumption is increases by leaps and bounds with limited energy sources available. This has becom a big challenge for policy makers and governments.
Environmental Protection is becoming more important and the American public has been deeply divided in recent years regarding climate change and the environment, the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill and its environmental impact on the Gulf of Mexico have singly changed attitudes.
In the Exxon Valdes tanker spill of 1989, Congress responded with the 1990 Oil. Pollution Act, assigning the liability for cleanup costs, to companies responsible for major spills and also required thicker oil tanker hulls. And while the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in a far greater body of water, it’s also much closer to densely populated areas.
That’s why this spill is sure to prompt new safety, oversight and liability regulations for offshore oil drilling and has already undercut Obama’s proposal for expanding that industry. Our reliance on old, fossil-fuel based technologies is devastating for the planet, for society, and for business. This spill is in many ways an expected result of the path we have chosen.
Given the declining stocks of easy access oil, our addiction is forcing us to dig up extremely remote oil something very hard to do that comes with enormous complexity and myriad risks of catastrophic failure.
The assumption that we will continue to dig up more carbon-emitting fossil fuels may be called into question in a serious way by the Gulf oil spill. Governments may very well ask for companies to invest far more in safety. It’s a reasonable outcome that regulators demand that companies invest not only in the technologies to dig oil up, but also in cutting edge ways to greatly reduce the risk of it going all over the place.
References
Rushefsky, Mark E. (2002). Public Policy in the United States at the Dawn of the Twenty first Century. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.IBN 978-0765616630
Instrument Mixes for Environmental Policy” (Paris: OECD Publications, 2007)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
http://www.epa.gov/oem/content/learning/exxon.htm
http://blogs.hbr.org/winston/2010/06/the-bp-oil-spill-top-5-lessons.html
PM World Today – July 2010 (Vol XII, Issue VII Mimi, H. 2010, June 16. Apologetic BP pledges $20B. USA Today, Retrieved June 21, 2010 from http://www.usatoday.com/).
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/politics/The-Spill-Seekers.html
http://byliner.com/rowan-jacobsen/stories/the-spill-seekers
The Spill Seekers, by Rowan Jacobsen
Liked it
