The first near-disaster was an explosion on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico -- shades of Deepwater Horizon. One day before the rig -- Marine Energy's Vermillion Block 380 -- blew, one of that company's officials complained about Barack Obama's crazy deepwater drilling moratorium. "I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us," Barbara Dianne Hagood said. "The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the gulf coast, gulf coast employees and gulf coast residents."
After warning about financial disaster, Vermillion Block 380 flirted with environmental disaster -- which brings us back to financial disaster again. Maybe Hagood didn't notice, but the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon was really expensive. And it's going to stay expensive for a long time. But corporations are shortsighted -- practically by design. When your top-paid employees do almost nothing but obsess over quarterly returns, spans of five or ten or twenty years become almost foreign concepts. The corporate future lasts about three months...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
