I’ll keep this short and sweet. Steve Mc at ClimateAudit has a post up on the BP cleanup plan. These plans have to be filed as part of the routine paperwork needed to get the final permit to drill. Now much has said about how government has failed us, and the buck is being passed as far back as Reagan (!) as well as to all private parties involved. Nothing surprising there. But Steve also asks this:

I also presume that the BP Oil Spill Response Plan (including prior editions) and Response Plans of other operators have been available not merely to regulators, but to environmental organizations for many years (I don’t know this, I am presuming it.) If effective skimming capacity is insufficient to deal with the present blow out – or whatever else is missing in the remediation capacity – shouldn’t this have been apparent to someone in the environmental movements? Has this been an ongoing topic of controversy for environmental organizations over the past 10 years? Not just in the abstract way of condemning all offshore drilling, but in the practical way of pointing out potential shortfalls in skimming capacity (or other practical defects in the Response Plan)? Just asking.

Very interesting question, indeed. Instead of photoshopping polar bears on to ice, shouldn’t these “watchdog” organizations, many of which have multibillion dollar budgets, be looking over the shoulders of both the oil companies and the government? Or are they really entitled to call themselves “watchdogs”? And while not denying the responsibility that both the private companies and the government have in this, is it not possible that someone in the NGO sector might have been able to prevent this by demanding that the government do its job, and in turn demand that BP produce a serious response plan, and not 500+ pages of platitudes?

Which leads to the next question: are there people at BP and in the government that they didn’t want to piss off? Or did they really secretly want some event of this sort to happen, and didn’t want to prevent BP from stabbing the entire industry in the back like they did?

It seems like questions beget questions. So next time some hippy from Greenpeace comes knocking on your door, these would be some good questions to ask.