No Easy Villains May Mean No Easy Oil

As people who like simple narratives, the public and policy makers will be tempted to try to find one locus for blame — whether it’s BP or BOP’s (blow out protectors) — but that may prevent us from figuring out the deeper system of problems that lead to this accident. And we may determine that business as usual doesn’t work for offshore drilling — which leaves us unable to count on the 40 percent of domestic oil production we were expecting to get from the offshore industry in the next ten years. Rereading what’s been written about offshore oil drilling over the last few years, it’s obvious it was thought to be the methadone for our overseas oil addiction. Now what?

The Atlantic