British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig has already spewed at least six, and maybe more than eleven million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet, according to New York Times, the Obama Administration has continued to grant permits and environmental waivers for drilling in the Gulf [2].  The Deepwater Horizon itself, of course, like many other Gulf rigs, had been granted a waiver from full environmental review.  If nothing else, the Deepwater Horizon tragedy has proven false the “Drill Baby Drill” crowd’s central conceit: that offshore oil drilling is safe. Yet the Obama Administration has not retracted its plan to drastically expand such drilling in US waters. In short, our policy-makers and regulators and have failed us.

Obviously, those who care about the environment and the people who live in it must pressure the Administration to drop plans to expand off-shore drilling and to tighten controls over ongoing drilling.  But that is hardly sufficient.  All oil, after all, must come from someone’s environment.  And given the inadequacy of our own government’s oversight of the oil industry, why would anyone think that officials in countries like Nigeria and Peru where a significant amount of our oil comes from, countries with less-well-developed regulatory regimes and a far higher incidence of corruption than ours, have either the will or capacity to protect their citizens and environment from the dangers of oil pollution?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t. And they never will. Volumes of social scientific research has taught us that oil production actually leads to corruption and inhibits democracy. It also, all too frequently results in human rights abuses, as ERI’s human rights litigation against Unocal [3], Chevron [4] and Shell [5] for torture and murder associated with oil and natural gas extraction in Burma and Nigeria demonstrate.  To put it bluntly, if you are outraged at the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, you shouldn’t be buying oil produced in the Gulf of Guinea.  I realize, of course, that our way of life is built on oil -- that oil is for now, something of a necessary evil. But the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, not to mention the challenge of global warming, has made clear that we are not likely to make oil any less of an evil. The only answer then is to make it less necessary.  We need a sensible energy policy that transitions us away from fossils fuels.