Sunday Audition: No Use Crying Over Spilt Oil

It's been over a month since the Deepwater Horizon burst in a fountain of unquenchable flame and started leaking thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. While this incident may seem to indicate stronger controls over deep offshore oil wells are needed, clearly the opposite is true.

A full month of an uncontrolled spurting geyser of crude shooting right into the ocean. And aside from the unfortunate few that were on the platform at the time, no one has been injured. All the extremist alarms raised by environmental watchdogs and special interest groups have been shown to be totally over-exaggerated and completely out of scale.

Environmentalists warned of birds and sea life being coated in slimy sheens of toxic and life destroying oil and yet in this massive oil spill, where are the oil-covered animals? Sure a handful have been spotted, but with the scope of the spill that has sprung from BP's site - it hardly seems credible. More likely that the extremely rare affected animal is a plant by liberal animal rights and anti-oil groups. I envisage Greenpeace catching pelicans in the wild and dunking them into a barrel of crude for the purpose of increasing next quarters donations.

Consider how many billions of dollars are being sunk into controls on these deep oil rigs. And for what? Sure the lives of those brave workers might have been saved with stricter controls, but deaths from oil drilling are probably less than those killed by falling coconuts. Is this a good use of resources? Clearly not.

And the threat of environmental damage has been proven false by this very "disaster". It's a failure of a scope greater than any envisaged by the most deranged lefty blogger - and yet no real harm has been shown to have been done. Clearly environmental regulations on oil rigs are way too strict and should be loosened immediately, if not sooner.

The Deepwater Horizon incident is just proof of what the most sensible path for the future is. In the words of a great American, possibly the greatest American ever - Drill Baby, Drill!