How Soon Until the Free Market Stops the Oil Spill?

I'm wondering who to blame for this. The list is long, but, in part, I blame anyone who bought into the lines: "government is the problem" and "the era of big government is over." It's been systematic deregulation and the elevation of free market libertarian laissez-faire capitalism that have wrought this damage and allowed potentially destructive corporations to write their own rules and do as they please.

Does anyone seriously believe that BP has suddenly become a philanthropic venture interested in doing whatever it takes -- sparing no expense -- to make the Gulf region whole again? It will do the absolute minimum necessary to weasel its way through this crisis. Not a red cent more.

BP continued its effort to fight regulations in Canada mandating relief wells for every offshore rig.

Forty years of corporate deregulation by conservative Republican Ayn Rand fetishists (and their Democratic enablers) have successfully poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. Ironically, the most liberal pro-regulation president in this same span of time -- the president who has announced on several occasions a significant break from Reagan's "government is the problem" mantra -- appears to be the only politician being blamed for this so far. One of many reasons why I fear it'll be another 40 years before we roll back this free market monster.

And, as I watch this video, the solution occurs to me: they should just plug the oil leak with every single existing copy of Atlas Shrugged.

OIL SPILLS

Oil spills of over 100,000 tonnes or 30 million US gallons, ordered by tonnes^[a]

Spill / Tanker	Location	Date	*Tons of crude oil	Reference
Gulf War oil spill	Persian Gulf	January 21, 1991	1,360,000–1,500,000 (9,968,800-10,995,000 barrels)	[22][23]
Ixtoc I oil wells	Gulf of Mexico	June 3, 1979–March 23, 1980	454,000–480,000 (3,328,000–3,518,000 barrels)	[24]
Atlantic Empress / Aegean Captain	Trinidad and Tobago	July 19, 1979	287,000 (2,104,000 barrels)	[25][26]
Fergana Valley	Uzbekistan	March 2, 1992	285,000 (2,089,000 barrels)	[23]
Nowruz oil field	Persian Gulf	February 1983	260,000 (1,906,000 barrels)	[27]
ABT Summer	700 nautical miles (1,300 km) off Angola	1991	260,000 (1,906,000 barrels)	[25]
Castillo de Bellver	Saldanha Bay, South Africa	August 6, 1983	252,000 (1,847,000 barrels)	[25]
Amoco Cadiz	Brittany, France	March 16, 1978	223,000 (1,635,000 barrels)	[23][25]
Amoco Haven tanker disaster	Mediterranean Sea near Genoa, Italy	1991	144,000 (1,056,000 barrels)	[25]
Odyssey	700 nautical miles (1,300 km) off Nova Scotia, Canada	1988	132,000 (968,000 barrels)	[25]
Sea Star	Gulf of Oman	December 19, 1972	115,000 (843,000 barrels)	[23][25]
Torrey Canyon	Scilly Isles, UK	March 18, 1967	80,000–119,000 (586,000–872,000 barrels)	[23][25]
Irenes Serenade	Navarino Bay, Greece	1980	100,000 (733,000 barrels)	[25]
Urquiola	A Coruña, Spain	May 12, 1976	100,000 (733,000 barrels)	[25]

^a One tonne of crude oil is roughly equal to 308 US gallons or 7.33 barrels and 1 oil barrel is equal to 42 US gallons approx.

• The BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill flow rate has not been reliably established. Based on estimates of experts,^{[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]} it has reached at least 55,660 tonnes of oil leaked by May 24, 2010 but the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be 20 times the size of BP's earlier claims of 5000 barrels per day (2.4 million gallons spilled as of May 24, 2010), according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR.^[37]

OIL SPILL

clipped from: news.bbc.co.uk

In that spill, the exploratory oil well Ixtoc 1 suffered a blowout and wasn't capped until more than nine months later, having released 461,000 tonnes of oil in total.

Only two of the spills in our list of the world's largest originated from oil rig explosions, the rest are tanker-related.

But far bigger than any of these peacetime accidents is the amount of oil spilled in the immediate aftermath of the first Iraq War, 1991. Although not a single offshore spill, it saw massive oil leaks that easily dwarf Ixtoc 1 with an estimated 1.4 million to 1.5 million tonnes of oil released into the Persian Gulf by Iraqi forces as they retreated from Kuwait.