One Good Thing About the Spill Bill

July 28th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

It gets mom and pop out of the oil drilling business, and that is a good thing.

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While undeveloped countries might have kids slaving over the kitchen fire melting electronics to mine them for lead – in a supposedly developed nation like this, competence should be a sine qua non in the drilling business, for all of our sakes. It is amazing that just about anyone is allowed to drill – even if they have absolutely no way to clean up a mess like just happened in the Gulf.

While it is no climate – clean energy bill as hoped, the spill bill is not bad for a straight environmental pollution prevention bill that cracks down on the lax oil and gas drilling practices that led to the catastrophic spill in the Gulf, and ongoing drilling disasters on land.

Here’s some provisions:

Remove the liability caps for owners and operators of offshore facilities;

Establish procedures for processing damage claims;

Strengthen emergency response planning obligations on regulated industries and establish expedited damage claim procedures;

Expand and direct funding to oil spill prevention and response research, as well a funding to support land and water conservation projects and programs;

Reorganize federal oversight of offshore drilling to separate leasing, environmental and safety oversight, and royalty collection efforts;

Increase criminal penalties for violations of oil spill prevention requirements;

Override recent case law limiting punitive damages under maritime law; and

Upgrade federal capabilities to respond to future spills, as well as the ongoing Gulf Spill cleanup;

And in natural gas provisions, it reverses the Haliburton Amendment that allowed the fracking industry to pollute waterways with impunity. It would finally allow states to require some disclosure of substances used in hydraulic fracturing efforts associated with natural gas recovery.

Image: Greenpeace

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Tags: spill bill

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

adam parsons

Having difficulty following Ms. Kraemer’s logic:

Because of the BP spill (and Exxon Valdez before it), it just goes to show mom ‘n pop operations should be shut down?

Seems to me its the big boys who do the most damage and it wasn’t lack of expertise but good old fashioned greed that made shorting safety regs and lobbying against them so profitable and unofficial ‘policy’

Seems to me if our Oil companies weren’t “too big to fail’ in their own way, the American public could’ve more likelier have the upper hand on smaller oil companies and the politicians when it comes to safety regs and so on….

Like the British did, its easier to divide and conquer….
august

While there is no shame in possessing the material goods needed for human