"An explosion last week at a British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas refinery in Texas killed fifteen workers and injured seventy others, five critically. As usual, myopic media accounts blamed BP and its allegedly unsafe work conditions – and called for more intense government regulation and fines. Not even BP was willing to assign proper blame for the accident. According to one media account:
[The deadly explosion] has increased scrutiny of the safety record at BP PLC, which has been dogged by a spate of accidents . . . The British oil giant said the cause of the blast was still unknown . . . It will start an internal investigation and will cooperate with outside investigators, including U.S. workplace safety regulators. . . . The incident could lead to increased regulatory scrutiny for BP . . . The company may also face hefty liabilities in any civil suit brought by the victims, family members of dead workers or businesses affected by the blast.
Why is this account myopic? It focuses on penultimate causes and ignores the ultimate cause. It is equivalent to those outrageous PBS-style documentaries which appeared after September 11th – the ones that claimed the World Trade Center towers fell due to faulty construction and safety features.
The alleged “solution” to the Texas blast, according to industry critics, is still more regulation, even though regulation was the ultimate cause of the accident (and many others that have occurred in the industry). Fact: not a single new oil and gas refinery has been built in the U.S. since 1976; the last one built was in Garyville, Louisiana that year. Worse, today there are 54% fewer oil and gas refineries in the U.S. (149) than there were in 1981 (321). Why? Not only have environmentalists lobbied government to block new refinery construction; they’ve also lobbied to have refineries decommissioned. Moreover, environmental regulations have materially raised the cost of operating refineries, making many of them unprofitable. It has been estimated that today it would take seven years, 800 permits and $2.5 billion to build a new refinery; nearly half of that cost is due entirely to the arbitrary and unnecessary costs imposed by environmentalists and their obstructionism. The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association reports that environmentalist-related costs have totaled $47 billion over the past decade; that’s enough to have built 19 new refineries (even at today’s bloated cost of $2.5 billion per unit), or 13% more refineries than exist in the U.S. today. ......
How do these facts relate to accidents, deaths and injuries at refineries? A steadily-declining number of refineries, coupled with an ever-growing demand for the products of refineries, means companies must push their plants to the limit; many today operate at 95% of capacity, well above the norm for industry in general. That leaves little time for the maintenance, repair or upgrade of existing plants. This necessarily leads, in turn, to less-safe equipment and less-safe operations. Obviously, more regulation and more fines cannot possibly solve this problem. They caused it. The restraint we need today is not restraint on oil companies (let alone more restraint); that approach has been tried – and it’s been both deadly and economically costly. What we need is restraint on the destructive environmentalists and their lap-dogs at the EPA. If lawsuits are to be filed and fines imposed, let them be filed and imposed on the real enemies of production and safety: the environmentalists.
More here
The hot air convention: Kyoto
"The latest ceremony of signing the Kyoto Protocol at the UN, and the taking of yet another opportunity to attack the US (and Australia) for not signing it too, was a pretty limp affair. Some of the UN officials, such as Kofi Annan and the High Commissioner for Refugees, seem to have had more important personal matters on their minds.
The missing chairs at the ceremony included those of the developing nations, some of whom are rapidly joining the league of major polluters; but who are exempt from Kyoto. China, just getting into her stride as a leading world manufacturing power, already equals Europe as a polluter. But there is not a word of reproof.
For one thing, she would be no more likely to accept checks on her behaviour here than in any other of her activities, and would resist - successfully - any proposals for inspection, or enforcement. Yet the China lobby in the West isn't going to speak out and risk some financial penalty from Beijing, while our Greens are being similarly circumspect.
India, without any fanfare, is expanding at a remarkable rate. I have just seen a plan to mass-produce cars in India for $6,000 a car, then later, for $2,500 a car - which should prepare us for some really hard-core pollution.
But Kyoto wasn't supposed to be about seriously tackling pollution worldwide. It was about attacking the United States, while the Left could attack capitalism. Not industrialism, or the car industry, or urbanisation - for these vital parts of the problem are off-limits, just as are the breakneck industrialisation and transport plans of China, India, and possibly Brazil.
It is tragic that such momentous issues should be politicised and truncated in this way. The Greens - both opportunistic and pusillanimous - have failed the test of showing the way, or even of explaining the issues. Not that the case for global warming has been established.
As Andrew Bolt concluded (Melbourne Herald Sun, February 25), having gone through the arguments and considerations put forward in favour of there being an unmistakable, open-ended and world-wide process of global warming in train: that case has not been made out".
Source
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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