As for there being an oil slick, it is all a fake, created by liberals to smear the oil industry.

Priorities, Phil!

I heard on the radio (unverified) that the Soviets used nukes to plug 3 separate well leaks in the 60s and 70s. Has anyone heard of that?

Benjamin: Ah, but you’ve hit the nail on the head. I would never advocate protecting people from *themselves*. They can drug themselves to death, fall off a mountain, commit suicide, or slip in their Teflon coated shower (heh) — that’s their choice. People can do whatever they want to themselves, regardless of the consequences. It’s when they interfere with others that problems arise.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we all raise the hackles of other people occasionally, no matter how accommodating we try to be. It happens, and in a free-for-all situation (or anything even close to that) people inevitably get hurt. In my version of an ideal reality laws are created solely for when such disputes erupt between (groups of) people, rather than for moralizing (like many laws today do).

@Dave C – There are huge differences in having the government fund a moon landing and forcing through a centralized “green” energy program. I’m often called a climate change denier because I oppose subsidies on supposed green energy programs. I believe global warming is occurring and lacking other smoking evidence it almost certainly is due to human activities, but I am dubious of the scare mongering catastrophic claims pushed forth by people like Al Gore and Professor Mann. And even more importantly I don’t think having the government mandate and subsidize energy policy is the smart thing to do. First of all having te government intervene lets bureaucrats pick winners and losers and their track record at understanding technology and the free-market is not impressive. Look at Spain, which poured billions into solar power at the estimated cost of $750,000 per “green” job created. The country is now in dire financial straits with this highly subsidized solar jobs drying up faster than a damp sponge in orbit.

One thing that is not needed is a centralized energy policy. A mixture of consumer demand, private prizes (think X-prize) and realistic government mandated benchmarks (which have done a lot for the diesel engine industry) will do more than enough to produce a sustainable energy program in this country. This is especially true if the price of gas creeps up and new technology makes other energy sources more viable. If the country relies on a bloated top down government program…we will get something akin to the Apollo Program an expensive feat that looks great but has very few long term benefits to show for it.

“Luckily, peak oil is a myth because as oil gets harder to find the price goes up bringing more people looking for oil. Same goes for coal and natural gas.”

Evidence, please, on the mythological status of peak oil.

Fossil fuels replenish at geological timescales (as should be obvious from their name). We are using them up at very human timescales.

Just because more people are out there looking (would that actually happen? There are rather substantial barriers to entry in the fossil fuel extraction market, barriers which would rise as the sources of fossil fuels grow increasingly remote) doesn’t mean there is an enormous quantity left to be found, or that it could be extracted in a timely and cost-effective manner, even with a substantially higher cost to incentivize increased production.

@ 45/49:

I disagree with your conclusion.

There is little good reason to believe that BP or other companies will magically change their behaviour based on this disaster, or that they would have been motivated in advance to implement the most stringent possible safety measures simply by considering the potential consequences of a disaster.

That thinking is giving humans too much credit for rationality.

As an example, consider handwashing by hospital staff. It is, I hope you would agree, rational to conclude that hospital staff should be handwashing at most opportunities.

One need only search for handwashing statistics on Google to see that campaigns are often afoot to improve handwashing because it is found to be below acceptable levels.

(Concrete example: a PubMed reference for handwashing at a teaching hospital in Switzerland. – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10068358)

I do not know whether the decision makers at BP or Transocean are good or bad people; it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they are human beings, and subject to all the flaws and foibles of being human.

Forget the regulation talk – my question is this: where the F is a president with the stones to say “do it” and get us technologically divorced from fossil fuel propulsion systems? if the race to the moon was a matter of “national security”, how is this not so much more so? ARRGGH!

Not sure that’s correct. The Dust Bowl comes to mind, and research might find others.

[citation needed]

Freedom is the right to smoke in a daycare, drive drunk, and fly planes into buildings. Anyone who tries to stop you is reducing your freedom, and that is unacceptable if you believe if freedom. Freedom as a concept is absolute: either you have it or you don’t. There is nothing in between.

I have yet to hear anyone in any Libertarian camp state that flying a plane into a building is a recognized freedom. Were your strawman to catch fire they’d have to ground all the planes in Europe again. This is why dictionary definitions of isolated words don’t work well in discussion of legal policy. In fact, most Libertarins I meet tend toward the very “maximized noninterference” you describe.

Right-wing libertarians have such an odd an illogical viewpoint that it’s hard to take. Instead of logically analyzing each situation to see what should be done, they have an ideological bent against government and socialism

Jeepers, dude, that’s true of every ideological tribe. You have the folks on the left who go apoplectic at the thought that anyone, anywhere is making a penny of profit, or the religious ideologues who go apoplectic at the thought that anyone, anywhere might be enjoying themselves. It why instead of reasoned debate on, say, the immigration legislation in Arizona, it devolves into one side blabbering “ZOMG! Stop The Invasion” and the other side blithering “ZOMG! Nazi Hitler Zombies!”

It’s why I abandoned a slavish devotion to any ideology before I got out of high school.

Come to California for a left wing example of a tribe that has cratered a prosperous state into absolute ruin because their ideology makes them try the same thing over and over and expect a different result – one of the definitions of insanity, BTW. Admittedly a lot of them are just corrupt beyond belief and simply don’t care, but still.

I also know a fundamental truth about the power of humans in government form. They’ll craft new regulations that may or may not do anything to prevent oil leaks in the future. But that’s not the point. The point is to appear to Take Action. When it comes time for their job review in November, their bullet-points are the laws they wrote. When you’ve got a hammer gripped in your hand, everything suddenly looks like nails. And the power of government is the biggest hammer of them all.

1. I love Wrinkle in Time, mainly for a smart kid being so damn important, and math being used to prevent evil.

2. The Face of Jesus was pretty much already seen in this oil slick. They don’t have to literally see it (I’m sure a few are looking for it), its the idea that this is an act of god, designed to help bring about the end-times. Just listen to Rick Perry, Palin, etcetra. They love this, they want this to be an act of god and not a mistake made by incompetent men.

1) They normally leak slower than wells, and
2) There are several species of bacteria in the oceans that eat raw petroleum. It doesn’t last long… just long enough for a large spill/leak near the shore to get ashore where it can do damage. If it happens in the middle of the pacific all the oil is eaten before anything bad can happen. Once it hits a shoreline it’s a lot harder to get rid of. Most (all?) our offshore rigs are in shallow water fairly close to the shore, so I think you can see where the problem arises.

I’m a centrist libertarian rather than a right-wing libertarian like most of you in the US are. Centrist libertarianism follows the principle not of “freedom” (ie, the right to do whatever you want whenever you want regardless of the consequences), but rather the principle of “maximized non-interference” (you can do whatever you want, even if it hurts yourself, provided that you aren’t interfering with anyone else).

Freedom is the right to smoke in a daycare, drive drunk, and fly planes into buildings. Anyone who tries to stop you is reducing your freedom, and that is unacceptable if you believe if freedom. Freedom as a concept is absolute: either you have it or you don’t. There is nothing in between.

On the other hand with maximized non-interference each person, and thus society as a whole, attempts to not interfere with anyone else. If you (“you” in the general sense, meaning”all or any of us”) drive drunk and I try to stop you, I’m interfering with you. If you drive drunk and hit a little 4 year old girl walking home from school, you’re interfering with her in an egregious fashion. Given the fact that drunk driving drastically increases the probability that the above circumstance will happen, it is not outside the realm of reason to attempt to prevent that situation from having the opportunity to occur in the first place. The interference that would be inflicted upon your life by stopping you from driving drunk is less than the interference that would be caused by allowing you to do whatever you wanted.

Thus, “maximized non-interference”. Anytime two people are in the same room together they’re interfering with each other in some small way. The more people you place in a confine area (ie, a planet;)), the greater the chance that they’ll start bouncing off one another in a way that some of them find unacceptable. The idea is to create a situation that will allow for the least total amount of interference in the life of the *average* individual. Under such a system laws are designed to do exactly that, minimize the friction between the wants and needs of all individuals in society as a whole.

Anywho, definitions out of the way, I’d like to point out that you just contradicted your own logic. You say “the only time to intervene is when they might cause physical harm to others”. Like drunk driving, yes? Or second hand smoke, yes? Or, say, not getting immunized and decreasing herd immunity, yes? If my kid dies because a bunch of nuts that happen to live near us all decided not to get their shots, causing an outbreak, I’d be understandably ticked. Their right to be… “eccentric” (and that is a right:P) doesn’t overwhelm my kid’s right to life. Because of that the principle of maximum non-interference dictates that they’re in the wrong, and they need to be forced to immunize their children.

Right-wing libertarians have such an odd an illogical viewpoint that it’s hard to take. Instead of logically analyzing each situation to see what should be done, they have an ideological bent against government and socialism, and fight against both of those concepts with religious fervour even when they have no proposed replacement that has a snowflake’s chance in hell of actually working in the real world. It’s distressing to watch from the outside. What’s even worse is the internal conflicts that occur in right-libertarians due to their illogical beliefs. They constantly contradict themselves and can never quite settle on the details of their proposed system due to its inherent flaws, but rather than following the logic and modifying their beliefs to fit reality, they just keep preaching, ever louder.

The sad truth is that our industrial society requires lots and lots of power (for everything from heart and lung machines to plugging in an electric car), and right now oil, coal and natural gas are the easiest and most cost effective ways of creating power. Wind and solar are not steady enough sources (though technology may soon change this) and require too many subsidies to be truly useful. Nuclear is expensive because it requires such a major up-front cost that few are willing to risk the investment given the anti-nuke political climate, and hydro causes environmental problems and is limited in where it can be placed. So really the fossil fuels are our only viable choice. Luckily, peak oil is a myth because as oil gets harder to find the price goes up bringing more people looking for oil. Same goes for coal and natural gas. We will probably see a gradual increase in energy costs, leading to a replay of a few years ago when gas went over $4.00 a gallon. Like then people will move to smaller more fuel efficient cars and modify their lifestyles. But when the government intervenes costs increase and efficiency goes down. So despite spills like this oil is still our best bet unless we want a catastrophic economic collapse.

Benjamin

P.S. Phil is right. Despite really disliking anti-vaxxers one of the most important human rights is the right to be stupid. You can’t force people to do the right thing or make healthy choices. The only time to intervene is when they might cause physical harm to others, and parental rights trump this because if they didn’t the state would have the power to take kids away from any parent the felt like…including gays, the unwed or even atheists.

Requiring them for all schoolchildren, for all government employees etc would be a start. Yes, this is the case already in many places, but more needs to be done.

> Plus, remember that anti-vaxers thrive on the conspiracy angle and mandatory
> vaccinations will give them enough ammo for a year of hysteria.

As anyone who follows PZ (or even this blog) knows, the world is full of wackiness. If we let the wackos dictate our agenda, we might as well pack it in now.

> Then why didn’t you ask him in that post since it’s actually related to your question?

I did, but didn’t get enough response. I now feel that the issue has been noticed.

People don’t usually start moving until you light a fire under them. Will this light a fire under funding more research for alternative energy? I hope so. Remember, we have only 5 years to perfect flying cars (BTTF:II)

While it’s an awful mess down there, lets hope for the best and safety of the people that are working to get it under control.

True, but the problem is that tracking compliance is difficult and if people are really terrified of vaccinations, they’ll find a way to avoid them. Plus, remember that anti-vaxers thrive on the conspiracy angle and mandatory vaccinations will give them enough ammo for a year of hysteria. Besides, herd immunity requires a roughly 90% compliance for many diseases and with good science could with a forceful dispelling of scaremongering myths, we can get that rate back up to its previous average of around 92% in pockets where it fell to the danger zone of 80% or so.

“… when someone who knows about vaccinations, … suddenly says ‘wait a minute, mandatory vaccines aren’t libertarian’ in a discussion about herd immunity, I think it is fair to raise the question of whether he was blinded by ideology for a moment.”

Then why didn’t you ask him in that post since it’s actually related to your question?

First, I don’t claim excellent judgement, and my remark could actually be both.

He did himself use the word “libertarian” in relation to himself in connection with his qualms about mandatory vaccines.

““I’m still puzzled over [Phil's] comment where [he was] questioning mandatory vaccinations, citing that libertarianism speaks against such restriction of liberty.”

He did, saying that vaccinations should be accepted and taken on merit rather than by force and I’d support that idea as well. The point of having a vaccination isn’t to obey Big Brother, but to protect yourself from disease by training your immune system to make more antibodies. Having people take vaccines at gunpoint isn’t going to help anyone trust vaccinations more, and that’s why it would be a poor policy. It’s a libertarian argument, sure, but not all libertarian arguments are insane and in this case, it does follow good science and PR policies.”

Even I myself am libertarian enough to support the right of people to die whenever they want and however they want. However, this isn’t the issue here. The issue is herd immunity, where people who don’t get vaccinated endanger others, in particular infants who are not old enough to be vaccinated. A person’s liberties have to stop where they restrict other people’s liberties even more. The right to life for an infant is more important than an adult’s right not to get vaccinated.

““Thus the question arises whether [Phil] champion[s] libertarianism with regard to government regulation of industry.”

No, it doesn’t because that’s a non-sequtur. Just because someone expresses his support for something associated with a particular movement, doesn’t mean he buys into everything else it carries. ”

I agree that in general it is a non-sequitur. But when someone who knows about vaccinations, knows about the cost-benefit analysis, recommends them, debunks the anti-vaxxers, is worried about babies dying etc suddenly says “wait a minute, mandatory vaccines aren’t libertarian” in a discussion about herd immunity, I think it is fair to raise the question of whether he was blinded by ideology for a moment.

Most people just don’t get the magnitude of the badness of this situation. It’s already bad, and it has the potential to get much worse. Not only is this an environmental catastrophe, it is a catastrophe for those men and women whose livelihood depends on these waters.

As I heard one fisherman saying the other day – the shrimp breed in around the reeds near the shoreline. If that gets gunked up with oil, a major pillar of the food chain in a significant area of the gulf disappears. It could take a long while to return to a semblance or normality – oil by its very nature has a nasty persistence in nature. I was watching a doco the other day about Prince William Sound. The area was supposed to have been cleaned up by Exxon, but the narrator simply walked down the beach flipping over stones, and found little pools of oil under every one. The oil industry should have the f__ regulated out of it.