Opportunities

Some have already made the charge that the Obama administration is letting a chrisis go to waste by not coming down hard on off-shore drilling in the wake of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but if there's one good use for accrued outrage over this, it should be to strengthen a forthcoming bill on global warming.

The global thirst for fossil fuels is, after all, the reason why BP can by many counts afford to pay for cleanup and compensation without going under as a company. The incentives for oil companies are all wrong, and that can't be sustainably remedied by national legislation to control drilling. The price of oil simply has to come down to the point where it's no longer profitable to go after it in places where the environment makes it expensive to drill (if not for fear of cleanup costs then simply because it costs much more to drill deep offshore, or tear up huge areas of oil shale, etc).