Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (44695)	8/23/2010 1:48:50 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 71588

* SEC. 104. OIL AND HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCE RESPONSE PLANNING: This section mandates that the government must have a plan if another spill of this size happens again. The US has never had to deal with a spill of this magnitude, nor has it ever had to intervene at the level it has with the Gulf spill. As a result, it stumbled from strategy to strategy. A well thought-out and well described plan should help in future catastrophes. * 204. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ADVICE AND GUIDANCE. A non-government, non-industry group of science and technology experts would weigh in on whether the government's oil spill response plan is adequate. * SEC. 205. OIL POLLUTION RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT: This would allow the Department of the Interior to research ways to clean up oil spilled in the continental shelf and figure out how much damage this spill actually caused. There generally isn't good follow-up to spill damage once the slicks are gone. This would be a welcome change. * SEC. 626. CERTIFICATE OF INSPECTION REQUIREMENTS: Under this section, floating rigs would have to adhere to the highest safety requirements. The key part of this is regulating blowout preventers - the section demands that all rigs have one that works. Most rigs out there do. Still, given the blow out preventer problems with the Deepwater Horizon, it couldn't hurt to put this requirement more firmly on the books. Those all seem like good ideas (at least in principle, the devil is of course in the details), but than there are surely a lot of other things in the bill, some perhaps not so good. The major point of contention was the lifting of the liability cap. Generally, Democrats want to hold companies accountable for spill-related damage over $75 million(See editor's note.) Republicans think that the liability cap should stay, so that spills won't bankrupt oil companies. I could see keeping a cap, but not a cap anything like the one we have today. If your going to have a cap it should be more of a real cap (you can keep the gross negligence exception, but the exception for violating any regs makes the current cap almost meaningless, in the context of how extensive regulation is now, and probably even more so in the future with added regulation being likely). At the same time while $75mil is really high for most types of liability caps, its way too low here. Ten times as high would be more reasonable (not that I'm specifically pushing for $750mil or any other specific level, it could easily be 20 times as high, and if our system of lawsuits where more reasonable, I probably wouldn't support having a cap at all).