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"Deepwater Oil Drilling: Is deepwater oil drilling safe?" Issues & Controversies, Infobase Learning, 2 Aug. 2010, http://icof.infobaselearning.com.eznvcc.vccs.edu:2048/recordurl.aspx?ID=2017. Accessed 28 Nov. 2018.

Opponents Argue: Deepwater Drilling Is Not Necessary

The disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has highlighted the fact that the risks presented by deepwater drilling are not yet fully understood, critics of the practice say. Experts must take time to investigate exactly why Deepwater Horizon exploded, and temporarily halting deepwater drilling is the best way to accomplish that goal, critics insist. "Continuing to drill at these depths without knowing what happened does not make any sense," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration.

Therefore, opponents say, a government-imposed moratorium is crucial to determining whether deepwater drilling is safe in the first place. Because the potential consequences of unsafe deepwater drilling can be so far-reaching—as the BP spill has shown—the federal government is well within its rights to temporarily, and perhaps even permanently, limit the practice. "It's crystal-clear what the federal response to the [BP oil spill] ought to be," said Senator Frank Lautenberg (D, New Jersey). "Bring [this] dangerous offshore drilling pursuit to an end."

The government must intervene in the deepwater drilling industry because energy companies have proven that they cannot be trusted to maintain safe working environments on deepwater rigs, critics charge. Like most big corporations, energy companies care more about their profit margins than they do about the safety of their workers and the environment—a fact that was driven home by the BP explosion, opponents argue. The House Energy and Commerce Committee found that with its Deepwater Horizon venture, BP "repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk." Representative Waxman, the chairman of the committee, was even more forceful when he was directly addressing BP's Hayward at a hearing in June 2010: "BP cut corner after corner to save a million dollars here and a few hours there. And now the whole Gulf Coast is paying the price."

Opponents have further criticized the courts that ruled against Obama's six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling expeditions. They say it was absurd for any court to have decided to allow energy companies to continue doing business as usual in deep waters at a time when oil was gushing relentlessly into the Gulf of Mexico. Opponents further note that Judge Feldman, who initially reversed the moratorium on June 22, owned stock in at least one major oil company that engages in deepwater drilling (Exxon-Mobil Corp.) at the time he agreed to hear the case. Critics maintain that there was a clear conflict of interest, and that Feldman should have recused himself.

While many critics of deepwater drilling have argued that the practice should be halted temporarily to ascertain its safety, other opponents contend that deepwater drilling is so obviously unsafe and harmful to the environment that it should be outlawed completely. The irrationality of deepwater drilling, writes Slate's William Saletan, is summed up by the fact that the wells are drilled so deep that humans must rely on remote-controlled robots to maintain them. After a BP official compared the task of fixing the Deepwater Horizon leaks to heart surgery, Saletan wrote:

[I]f this is heart surgery, the wound that made it necessary was inflicted by the surgeons themselves. BP drilled the well. It did so knowing that its robots couldn't handle a blowout and its people couldn't get there. If a surgeon did that—if he opened a hole he couldn't reach to stop the hemorrhage—he'd lose his license.

If anything, those opponents say, the Obama administration should push for a much tougher moratorium than the one they have imposed. The most strident critics of deepwater drilling say that, even if the six-month moratorium survived all legal challenges, it would have little effect; production would be shut down at only 33 existing deepwater drilling sites, leaving the remaining 3,000 deepwater rigs fully operational.