I vaguely recall the great Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 (although I certainly didn’t remember that the initial blowout of Union Oil Platform A happened the day after my fifth birthday), and have more specific memories of getting tar on the bottom of my feet from walking on a Santa Barbara beach in the late 1980s. So I know why the political decision was made to ban oil drilling off much of the U.S. coast.
But I also get why Charlie Crist and John McCain are pushing to reconsider that ban. For one thing, there’s been enough offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere around the world since 1969 that it’s pretty clear than Santa Barbara-style disasters are now extremely unlikely. For another, there may be truly significant amounts of untapped oil and gas out there (which almost certainly isn’t the case with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). And finally, the ugliness and the real if small risks of offshore drilling platforms strike me as pretty minor environmental threats compared with other things we tolerate with relatively little complaint. Here are six I came up with in about two minutes of thinking:
1) The Hummer division of the General Motors Corporation
2) Subsidies for corn-based ethanol
3) Subsidies for growing corn, period
4) Suburban Phoenix
5) Leveling mountains in West Virginia for the coal inside
6) Lawncare products
Got some more for me?