New Oil Spill in Gulf … 100-Mile Slick

Washington’s Blog

A new 100-mile slick has been confirmed in the Gulf, only 30 miles from the site of the Deepwater Horizon. See this, this, this, this, this and this.

As I noted after the Deepwater Horizon spill, big oil spills will keep happening if we go for harder to get to oil reserves without increasing safety regulations.

Indeed, the oil spills in the Gulf and the existence of unsafe nuclear power plants follow the exact same pattern as the financial crisis: As long as big companies know the government will bail them out if there’s a “meltdown” and will help them cover up the scale of the accidents, as well as the fraud and corner-cutting which led to the disaster, they’ll keep doing dangerous things which put our economy, our environment and our health at risk.

As long as there is corporate socialism for the too big to fails and “tough love” for the rest of us, the big boys will continue to get into trouble.

As long as the government uses claims of “national security” to protect the big energy companies and big banks, there won’t be the transparency needed to ensure a free market and reasonable public accountability.

Oh, and by the way, the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill did not magically disappear. Here is a roundup of some of the news from the Gulf of Mexico from the first couple of weeks of March:

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