Cui Bono

Whatever oil might be recovered from the outer continental shelf will never do American consumers much good. The market for oil — however imperfect — is global. The addition of supplies from deep offshore might reduce the price of gas at the pump by a couple cents, no more. The only people the oil really benefits are oil companies. Moreover, oil rig workers will always make mistakes and no matter how good the technology gets, with deep water drilling there will always be catastrophic leaks. For the industry, that's an externality, just a cost of doing business. For states and local communities it's a catastrophe. An intelligent country simply wouldn't drill. But there's another dimension to deep water drilling nobody mentions, which should disturb the sort of people most enthused about its future: deep water platforms are stunningly susceptible to deliberate destruction.