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Steinzor BP Spill Op-Ed in Baltimore Sun: Learning and Acting Slowlyby Matt FreemanRight about this time a year ago, Americans were learning about a massive explosion aboard an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico called the Deepwater Horizon that had occurred the day before. Video footage of the flame-engulfed rig began splashing across television screens, and we were told that 11 workers on the rig were “missing.” (In fact, those workers had been killed.) Also unclear or unrevealed was the extent of the environmental harm that was being done. In the day-after stories, BP and the federal government expressed the view that pollution was not much of a concern. Here’s what the New York Times article said,
And change it did. The months-long ooze of crude oil from the well beneath Deepwater Horizon eventually came to be the largest oil spill in U.S. history. We learned the facts about the BP oil spill slowly, as presumably did BP and the federal government. And according to an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun this morning by CPR President Rena Steinzor, we’re acting on the lessons of the disaster even more slowly. She notes that post-spill reforms at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (the renamed Minerals Management Service) haven’t undone the fundamental conflict of interest confronting the operation: that Interior both regulates drilling safety and collects money when it approves oil drilling leases. She goes on,
Where the BP Spill is concerned, we’ve both learned and acted slowly.
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