Comments on: Oil companies tax our coast; it’s time we tax them back

By: -GO-

-GO- — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:51:38 +0000

Foster Campbell is an alright guy, but his problems have always been one of adequate fund-raising. He just can’t spend the money necessary to get his face out there to enough folks. Especially in SoLA.

But, he has made an absolute fortune on royalty deals with Natural Gas up in North Louisiana with the Haynesville Shale discovery. He had money before, but now he’s filthy rich, if you know what I mean.

The question for his future political endeavors may be whether he decides to self-finance future campaigns to put his money where his mouth has always been, or whether he’s content to relax, content with his current place in the political game and the fat stacks of cold cash he’s recently come into.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:52:49 +0000

It was bad enough that lax regulations (thanks to a generation of “government is the problem” rhetoric) meant no requirements to build a relief well simultaneously with the main well; adding to the injury is that the well itself more demonstrative than critically necessary. The oil fouling the coast for what will likely be decades wouldn’t have made more than a penny’s worth of difference or so in spot market prices.

But I guess it did manage to demonstrate how thoroughly BP owns the government…

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 15:18:29 +0000

Jacki, because the administration before this was Bush League. I’ll have to come up with something clever for the current one…

By: jacki

jacki — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 14:49:56 +0000

I’ve been asking the same question everywhere….WHY WAS THERE NOT A SYSTEM IN PLACE BEFORE any drilling ever began? It blows my mind that this hasn’t been a requirement, as caretakers of this earth it is our (MOSTLY THEIR) responsibility!!!!

By: Ricky P.

Ricky P. — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 04:52:15 +0000

Gill’s column and a lot of others about this disaster have rubbed me the wrong way. Of course we have some responsibility as citizens of our fine state for the wetlands loss and general environmental degradation we are witnessing, but we shouldn’t minimize the responsibility for this specific event. BP and the rest of the companies responsible for this well are fully responsible for it and every bit of damage associated with it.

Wetlands reclamation is something we can look to in the future, and ought to demand shares from the O&G producers who we grant license to our coast line’s future from. I just don’t think that we ought to lose sight that there are specific people responsible for this event. We’re not those people, no matter how many jobs O&G provide to this state.

By: jeffrey

jeffrey — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 04:46:31 +0000

“By the way, why don’t we just make relief wells mandatory, so that a fairly sure solution is ready-to-hand, in case a blowout occurs?”

I recently found myself asking the very same question. One answer, I discovered, was that Canada already has such a requirement in place AND BP was in the process of petitioning for its removal mere weeks prior to the Horizon explosion.

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/06/03-3

By: Editilla ~New Orleans Ladder

Editilla ~New Orleans Ladder — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 02:07:42 +0000

Really really great throw’down here.

If you don’t have the Land upon which to Stand, you got No States Rights.
Isn’t that the end game here? Voters have to have somewhere to plant the poll.

In the meantime, they want everyone scared to lose the Oil Jobs due to a moratorium on drilling. Right. Silly meeses! Move to the Niger Delta if you really want to follow that one, or Indonesia, Ecuador, Nigeria… then after you get citizenship in those H’oil holes you can come back and work for the US Oil Industry in the Gulf of Mexico where Louisiana used to be. Give it another 25 years at this rate of bow’down. And btw, that Macondo oil was going to Texas –not Louisiana. I would even be willing to bet that this Strike isn’t even planned for the domestic US market but China.

BP isn’t going to go bankrupt on this. Indeed we could seize every asset down to the toilet paper in their gas station bathrooms and it wouldn’t make a dent in their profit. So I say we should do that, and move the money to the recovery from their heinous anus.

Just because we will become shocked out of our wits from this catastrophe, we must maintain our place… or at least the memory of it with nothing left to lose.

Thanks youz,

By: Mark Moseley

Mark Moseley — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:00:22 +0000

Update: I should mention that Sen. Landrieu has proposed legislation to make royalty funds immediately available, and these monies will be needed for coastal restoration. This will go to restoring wetlands that Big Oil and Gas helped kill.

Also, regarding the current moratorium on deep water drilling, I definitely feel for the families affected and for those whose jobs will be lost. Drilling will eventually resume, though, and Big Oil will still be offloading catastrophic blowout risks on to Louisiana’s coast. You would think that before they’d be allowed to drill again, they would have to demonstrate that they have “proven technologies” to quickly stop oil gushers. But, apparently they won’t have to do that. If god forbid another blowout causes another oil gusher, I guess we’ll go through this same top hat/top kill/junk shot showbizness for several months until the relief well is drilled. By the way, why don’t we just make relief wells mandatory, so that a fairly sure solution is ready-to-hand, in case a blowout occurs?