Baker Institute fellow Amy Myers Jaffe has an interesting post on her blog today about the technology failures related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. She writes:
It is understood that some companies use better prevention approaches than others and that prevention strategies keep improving with time, but what about technologies for handling a blowout once it happens? The deepwater Horizon offshore drilling disaster has highlighted a hole in the industry’s prowess. There is apparently no proven technology to handle a blowout in short order. If there was one, someone would be offering it to BP or to the U.S. Department of Interior.
If private industry isn’t developing the technology, whose should be, she asks — especially when the stakes are so high?
The question is: Whose responsibility is it to develop blow out response technology? Industry? Government? Universities? Or perhaps most sensibly, all three. And how do we implement that? Free market? In light of the BP oil spill, we might want to consider that the free market didn’t actually deliver it and how we would remedy that.
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