Disasters

Japan needs assistance immediately for those stranded in the northeastern part of the country devastated by the earthquake and tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese tonight continue to be displaced, and in need of basic supplies such as water, food and blankets. Communities are devastated and a sustained humanitarian support effort will be required. While the nation’s military and civilian disaster relief teams are hard at work, supported by the U.S. and other national disaster relief teams, donations to experienced non-governmental disaster relief agencies can help mitigate the suffering. Agencies with strong organizational capacity in Japan are: American Red Cross International Red Cross Red Crescent Save the Children Mercycorps The Japanese Embassy in Washington, DC website carries a list of options for those seeking to donate to the relief effort as well. For U.S. citizens trying to locate family and friends in Japan, the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo has a dedicated page for the relief effort in Japan. Japan-America societies around the United States are also organizing donation efforts. A full list of these efforts can be found at the National Association of Japan-America Societies.

President of International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Tadateru Konoe walks among rescue workers searching through rubble in residential area of tsunami-hit Otsuchi. (Damir Sagolj/Courtesy Reuters) The impact of Japan’s deadly earthquake and tsunami is now apparent. With search and rescue personnel now reaching some of the communities in the northeastern region of Tohoku, the devastation along the eastern coast is complete. Entire villages are in ruin, roads and bridges broken and impassible, and thousands remain stranded in isolated schools and buildings where they managed to retreat in the face of the tsunami. The human toll is tremendous. The confirmed death toll has reached 1,834, but over 15,000 remain unaccounted for three days after the Great Tohoku Earthquake. Over 450,000 have safely evacuated, but many are without water or food. Temperatures in the chilly northeast have dipped below freezing, and many are without heating or blankets. Telephone service is starting to be restored, but water and food are hard to come by. Japanese television on Monday captured heartbreaking stories of those who survived and the long lists being compiled by local shelters of those who are searching for separated family members.   Prime Minister Naoto Kan told the nation on Saturday that this was the worst crisis Japan has faced since the devastation of World War II, and asked every person in Japan to contribute to the effort to recover. The Japanese government has displayed remarkable calm in the face of this tremendous catastrophe, and from the beginning launched an all-out and comprehensive effort to organize the country in the face of catastrophe.    The search and rescue effort has been enhanced by additional Self Defense Force deployments. Over 100,000 have now been mobilized, as well as local fire and police units. Helicopters have been working non-stop to remove those stranded in the midst of this devastation. The U.S. military has added considerable airlift capability and is working to supply the Japanese military ships that have been deployed offshore. Additional emergency relief supplies have also been brought to Japan. The USAID Disaster Assistance and Response Team (DART)—including 150 personnel and 12 canines from urban search and rescue teams from Virginia and California—arrived in Japan on Sunday. As if this wasn’t enough, the Japanese government has been struggling to contain the damage incurred by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. For the first time, a state of nuclear emergency was declared, and residents were evacuated from nearby communities. The radius of evacuation was expanded on Saturday after a hydrogen explosion at Fukushima Daiichi plant’s Unit 1 reactor increased concern. Some of those evacuated revealed limited exposure to radiation. A second hydrogen explosion occurred on Monday at the Unit 3 reactor.    As of Monday, 91 countries have offered Japan assistance. The World Food Program and five other international organizations have begun to organize help as well. On Friday, President Barack Obama pledged full assistance and promised Japan that the United States would stand beside Japan through its reconstruction. U.S. Ambassador John Roos in Tokyo announced on Saturday details of Operation Tomodachi (“friend” in Japanese), including the deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan as well as eight additional naval ships to waters off northeastern Japan. U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ) redeployed its military units stationed in Japan to regions where they could offer full assistance to Japan’s Self Defense Force. DART search and rescue teams will be based at Misawa Air Force Base. U.S. government nuclear experts are also working closely with the Japanese government. In the United States, fundraising has already begun. The American Red Cross, Save the Children, and Mercy Corps (working with Peace Winds Japan) have efforts with their counterparts in Japan. The Japanese Embassy in Washington carries a list of options for those seeking to donate to the relief effort. The National Japan America Society in Washington DC, as well as Japan-America Societies around the country, are organizing to help the disaster victims. Throughout the weekend, as the effort to organize relief gained momentum, the dignity and the calm of the Japanese people in the face of such devastation was on display across the board. Japan’s leaders, dressed in blue disaster relief uniforms, presented the scope of the disaster with clarity and calm, providing detailed descriptions of the complex stream of information becoming available from the stricken regions in the north as well as from the nuclear complex in Fukushima. Japanese television reporters supplied a comprehensive coverage on a similar range of information by providing nuclear physicists to carefully explain the details of the government’s announcements, following the growing number of displaced Japanese in the northeast, and streaming the names of those already confirmed dead.    In community after community, the Japanese people were articulate—if traumatized—about their needs and their experiences. In the face of this overwhelming shock and loss of life, the resilience and the strength of this fragile nation has been on constant display. Needless to say, the effort at reconstruction will be long, and hard. This morning the country began scheduled power cuts across much of Tokyo and its surrounding region in an effort to avoid a power failure. With many nuclear and conventional power plants offline, Japan has lost access to about 25 percent of its electricity. Transportation systems have been affected, and Tokyo commuters lined up in the hundreds at train and subway stations in an effort to make their way to work this morning. Yet, despite the shock and devastation, the Japanese people have gone on to focus on recovery—and they will need all the help we can offer.

Evacuees stand around Shinjuku Central Park in Tokyo Japan March 11, 2011. A massive 8.9 magnitude quake hit northeast Japan on Friday, causing many injuries, fires and a ten-metre (33-ft) tsunami along parts of the country's coastline. (Courtesy Reuters/Kyodo) Japan suffered a tremendous earthquake yesterday afternoon, and already we know that many have lost their lives. My thoughts and prayers are with all Japanese families as they seek to cope with yesterday’s devastating shock and loss. The Japanese government has mobilized the largest relief operation ever, with tens of thousands of Self Defense Force personnel, as well as coast guard, fire and police units, deployed to the northern part of Japan. The U.S. government, too, has pledged immediate and extensive assistance, and U.S. naval ships are already on their way with helicopters and other emergency relief needs. On a more personal note, I wanted to share some preliminary information available for those of you—like me—who are attempting to find family members, friends and colleagues. There is virtually no telephone communication at this moment. The government is asking Japanese not to use the phone lines so that they may be dedicated to the rescue efforts in the Tohoko region. Instead, the internet and the cell phone companies, are making their services available to individuals trying to find people. Google has created a multi-language person finder site. The cell phone companies are also operating message boards—with English options available also—and those within the disaster area can post messages on this site. The areas where this services is available are Aomori, Miyagi, Yamagata and Fukushima prefectures—thanks to Risa Kamio of the Japan-America Society of Washington, DC for providing the links to each company below. For those of us who are looking to hear from friends in Tokyo, we will need to be patient still. Cell Phone Message Boards: For the docomo users: http://dengon.docomo.ne.jp/top.cgi For the KDDI (Ezweb) users: http://dengon.ezweb.ne.jp/ For the Softbank users: http://dengon.softbank.ne.jp/ For the Wilcom users: http://dengon.willcom-inc.com/dengon/Top.do Another way to find out: http://dengon.emnet.ne.jp/

The algae-filled Chaohu Lake is seen in Hefei, Anhui province, on August 3, 2010. (Stringer/Courtesy Reuters) While China’s economy continues to grab headlines, a new report, "Choke Point: China," suggests  that we ought to be spending a bit more time on an often-ignored economic fundamental: water.   China’s environment has been a long-standing passion of mine, both as a research focus and as an area to promote U.S.-China cooperation. While China’s poor air quality has received a lot of attention in the West—we can all see the pollution in Beijing or read about the pollution clouds that travel from China across the Pacific to the United States—the issue of greatest concern for China is access to clean water. We know a fair amount about China’s water challenge already. Both municipal and industrial demand for water continues to grow, as both the economy and middle class expand, and levels of pollution throughout many of China’s major river systems and largest lakes make the water unusable even for agriculture or industry (forget about fishing or drinking). China is sinking as underground aquifers are drawn down, with the result that buildings are tilting, highways cracking, and people relocating as their coastal villages sink beneath sea level. Water is a source of societal concern: the public health costs from polluted water are mounting, and water pollution remains a source of significant social unrest in rural China. Civil society in China, in the form of environmental NGOs, has made enforcement of water pollution control regulations one of their top priorities. However, there is always more to learn, and the new web-based media report, "Choke Point: China—Confronting Water Scarcity and Energy Demand in the World’s Largest Country," produced by the NGO Circle of Blue, takes a fresh look at this issue. It leads with good news: Some cities, such as Beijing, for example, are beginning to recycle wastewater for use in toilets or other grey-water applications. Yet, the bulk of the initial report—and this is the first in a series of twelve postings yet to come—underscores the challenge the country faces, particularly from the nexus of energy and water. Almost 20% of China’s water consumption goes to the mining, processing, and consumption of coal. Coal consumption has tripled since 2000, and Chinese analysts project another 30% increase by 2020. To meet the water demand will require ever more costly, large-scale, and technologically complex river diversion projects—a plan of action that many view as untenable over the long term. "Choke Point: China" doesn’t yet explore the broader ramifications of such growth, such as discussions in Beijing of diverting water from the Yarlung Tsangpo (which flows into the Brahmaputra), which would likely lead to serious political tensions with India or the implications of growing water scarcity for global agricultural commodities. However, I would bet that these issues and many others will be discussed in the rest of the twelve-part series. I, for one, will read each eagerly to see what the water future for China and the rest of the region might hold.

Can Haiti rebuild better, with improved stability and prosperity? Four top experts stress different approaches to enable Haitians to rebuild and sustain their economy and public sector.

Cliff Krauss’s otherwise excellent article in the New York Times yesterday on the safety risks from Cuban oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico had one big and important omission: it said nothing about the quality of the Cuban regulator. That quality, of course, will have big implications for the odds of the sort of oil spill that the article talks about. In a trip to Cuba this past July, I had a chance to meet with Cuban regulators and understand a bit about how they’re thinking. The Cuban regulators seem to be on firm methodological ground. They proudly pointed out that they were using the sort of “safety case” approach that was conspicuously absent in U.S. regulation before the Macondo (BP) disaster. Indeed, in that sense, they’re ahead of the United States. The top regulators also appeared to be technically solid. This is, of course, a difficult thing to judge from limited interaction, but I saw no reason to doubt their skill. What worries me much more is the people I didn’t see -- that is, the lower level people. I have two concerns. First, effectively overseeing operations is not just a matter of studying textbooks – it’s a matter of experience. And, despite the fact that Cuba has sent many of its people overseas, such experience (particularly in the Cuban context) is inevitably limited. Second, given the pathetic salaries that Cuban workers receive, the possibility of bribery (or something more subtle) by oil company officials is going to be ever-present. That may undermine whatever approach Cuba chooses. So what’s the United States to do? Senator Bill Nelson has one answer: change the maritime border so that Cuba can’t drill. Unless the United States wants to go to war, this isn’t going to happen. (To be completely clear: I think that unilaterally changing the border is a terrible idea.) The only option is to engage with Cuba as much as possible in an effort to better understand its approach, and, to the extent possible, to strengthen it.

Pakistan’s floods spell setbacks for the U.S. fight against extremism and its war effort in Afghanistan, says CFR’s Daniel Markey. He says beyond humanitarian aid relief, Washington must focus on boosting Pakistan’s economy through greater trade opportunities.

The international response to Pakistan’s flood disaster has been inadequate so far, says Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special representative to the country. He says Washington is contacting international governments and is sending more aid, including helicopters to assist in relief efforts.

The spill bill is in deep trouble in the Senate. Democrats want to eliminate the existing libability cap for offshore oil accidents. The Wall Street Journal summarized the Republican position yesterday: “The main effect, if it passed, would be to push the small- and mid-sized producers that account for most domestic drilling out of the Gulf, regardless of their safety records.” Jon Chait gave the basic Democratic response at The New Republic: “The pure free market position is that oil companies should be able to drill wherever they want as long as they’re responsible for their own externalities, like cleaning up the cost of oil they spill. The Journal’s position is that this is no fair -- not every oil company can afford to clean up the cost of their oil spills! So the government has to subsidize offshore drilling by promising to cover the cost of any cleanup beyond a given size. The justification for this corporate subsidy is that even oil firms with great safety records won’t be able to afford the insurance. But why not?....  And if insurance companies won’t cover that risk at a price small oil firms can afford, that means the risk is too high.” Chait goes on to add: “That is, if you think the market works. The Journal sees this as a market failure requiring government intervention.” I share in his enjoyment at watching the Journal editorial page twist itself into hypocritical knots. But alas, on this count, I think that they’re probably right. There are three potential market failures here. First, while there are public risks associated with offshore drilling, there are also public benefits. When a company extracts oil from the Gulf of Mexico, the government collects part of the rent in the form of royalties, which benefits the American people as a whole. Leaving that oil in the ground is leaving money on the table. That doesn’t mean that all oil that’s out there should be extracted – but it does mean that the market won’t recognize its entire value by itself. Second, U.S. production displaces production elsewhere in the world. The United States produced 1.6 million barrels per day (mb/d) from the offshore Gulf of Mexico last year. Let’s say that removing the liability cap knocked out 0.5 mb/d (more on that in a moment), and that OPEC countries responded by increasing their own production by 0.5 mb/d, holding the price of oil (and hence demand) constant. At $80/bbl, The United States would send an extra $40 million abroad each day for oil, for a total of $14.6 billion each year. At the same time, OPEC countries would gain $14.6 billion in annual revenues. Removing the oil spill liability cap is worth something in terms of reduced oil spill risk. I doubt that it is worth paying a $14.6 billion annual premium to OPEC. Basic market dynamics do not price this problem in. All of which leads to the critical question: Would removing the liability cap really knock out a big chunk of production? I think there’s good reason to believe that it would. Supermajors will probably fail to pick up a good chunk of the leases that smaller players control if those independents are put out of business; the business is just too different. Those independents won’t survive if they can’t get insurance. (Or at least those with somewhat diverse portfolios, which they won’t be willing to risk, won’t survive.) Chait makes the standard argument to the contrary – insurance companies should be able to price the risk of a spill and sell insurance accordingly. But that’s not quite how insurance companies work. Say I have a one-in-a-thousand risk each year of incurring $40 billion in oil spill damages. I should be willing to pay a bit more than $40 million each year to insure that risk, and an insurance company should be willing to sell me that insurance for that price. But the insurance company has another consideration: it needs to have the money around to pay out in case I have an accident. $40 billion is a lot of money. Even if I’m insuring a few dozen companies, I’ll only take in a few percent of that (at most) each year. There are decent odds that I’ll decide that it’s not worth risking my insurance business to pick up these small premiums. The small and medium sized oil companies will be out of luck. So what’s government to do? It can step in as the insurer. Here’s what I suspect the government needs to do. First, figure out what sort of premiums would make sense for an insurer that is only worried about the probability of having to pay out, not about risks to its own solvency. Next, sell companies that insurance (or at least the part of insurance that isn’t available in the private market) itself at that price. In practice, this would probably look like a fee on oil producers, combined with some sort of liability cap. Some companies will be knocked out -- and they should be. Also, there’s no doubt that the government won’t get the price or the cap quite right. (And industry lobbyists will help it screw up even more.) But the laissez faire alternative may be to implicity set the price of insurance for most independents at somewhere around infinity, while ignoring public benefits from offshore production. That doesn’t seem right either.

In the wake of the Gulf spill, the United States should craft regional pacts with its neighbors to address pollution and liability issues arising from ever deeper oil and gas exploration, says expert Caitlyn Antrim.

The Obama administration has overreacted to the Gulf oil spill by suspending most new offshore drilling and moving to expand liabilities for future accidents, with implications for U.S. energy security, says Jack Coleman, an energy industry official and legal expert.

There is a lot of buzz over Senator Frank Lautenberg’s suggestion that oil companies be required to drill a relief well at the same time as they drill any deepwater production well. That would allow the company to go in and plug any leak in relatively short order. Kate Mackenzie over at the FT Energy Source flags the most promiment objection, other than cost, as articulated by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson: “Well I would say you just doubled your risk. This is an exploration well so it means you’re drilling in an area that’s not previously been drilled before. If you look at the history of well control problems and blowouts, most of them have occurred on the way down to the objective, not once they reach their objective. They’re caused by shallow gas hazards, they’re caused by unknown pore pressures on the way down to the objective, so if you have two wells going down at the same time it means you have just increase your risk of having a problem on the way down to them.” I have two problems with this argument. It is representative of a pre-Deepwater Horizon mentality that focuses entirely on the probability of a blowout and largely neglects the consequences of an event. It may make sense to accept a doubling of the (small) probability of a blowout if, at the same time, we can drastically reduce its consequences. Indeed politically, if deepwater drilling is to be maintained, the government will need to be able to explain how it will stop a blowout. Simply pointing to reduced odds of one won’t be enough. The pre-drilled relief well provides a means of answering that question. My second problem is with the assumption that the two wells would need to be drilled simultaneously. That is the least-cost option, but it is not the only one. Drilling the two wells in sequence, rather than in parallel, would seem to substantially lower the odds of an accident with the second one, since the area would be much better known by the time that well was being drilled. It would, of course, be more expensive and time consuming. But that is the foundation for a cost-benefit analysis, not a reason to reject the option altogether. My sense is that the big question is indeed cost, and, consequentially, the impact on production. Profit margins for deepwater production may or may not be high enough to absorb the extra cost without foregoing production. (There is also a cost-benefit question, but producers would do well to keep in mind that the politically realistic alternative to adopting expensive failsafe mechanisms may be seeing a huge amount of reserves put off limits completely.) I may do a back of the envelope calculation later to get a sense of how these numbers work. But this is something the EIA should be able to crank out. When it does, it should also look at the international impact. Other countries may well copy any new regulations that the United States imposes. The U.S. government should make sure that it anticipates the production consequences of such a move.

President Obama caught some flak last week for appointing former EPA Administration William Reilly to cochair his oil spill commission. Rachel Maddow’s blog has highlighted the fact that Reilly sits on the boards of ConocoPhillips, DuPont, and Energy Future Holdings. (He will be taking leave from the ConocoPhillips board.) Tom Philpott at Grist has run with that report, noting that Obama also employs former BP chief scientist Steven Koonin as DOE Undersecretary for Science, and has called on Obama to “purge his administration of petro hacks”. I can understand their concerns. The reality, though, is that the Obama administration is dangerously short of senior people who actually understand how the oil industry works. Even if the United States were to (wisely) adopt an ambitious policy that dramatically lowered U.S. dependence on oil, we’d still be consuming a lot of oil for quite a while. Given that reality, it would seem wise to have some people around who understand the guts of how the oil world works. (Full disclosure: I know both people mentioned above. Bill Reilly was on a climate change task force that I directed in 2007-8. I’ve known Steve Koonin since 2002 through my work on radiological weapons; he was also the external examiner when I defended my PhD.) Take a look at the organization chart for the Department of Energy, which, in principle, is the primary department responsible for energy in the U.S. government. It is populated by an extraordinary group of people. Yet Koonin is the only person with energy industry experience at the undersecretary level or above. He is also the only person at that level or above who entered the administration with substantial fossil fuel expertise. Most oil people, I should note, would beg to differ; Koonin had essentially no exposure to the oil industry prior to 2003, when he left his post as provost of CalTech. Secretary Chu had been deeply immersed in renewables issues; Undersecretary Dan Poneman is an authority on all matters nuclear; neither of them had oil experience. Chu has, by all accounts, benefited enormously from the counsel of Matt Rogers, his special advisor for stimulus act spending, who, having once run McKinsey’s U.S. petroleum practice, has essentially doubled as a fossil fuel advisor to the Secretary; with much of the heavy lifting on the stimulus over, though, it would not be surprising to see him leave relatively soon. The reality is that very few people accumulate substantial expertise about the oil industry without being in it. Or take a look at the staff of the National Security Council, which should be running the interagency process in this area. (I would provide a link if I could; there isn’t one.) The heavy lifting of interagency coordination typically happens at the senior director level. Yet, more than a year into the administration, the senior director for energy slot remains was unfilled. (UPDATE: The slot was apparently filled a day or two before the oil spill started. The new senior director for energy is Glen Sweetnam, who has decades of industry experience, and is currently on detail from the EIA. That’s good news, and a credit to the administration.) The reason? It’s complicated, but most people with deep practical oil expertise also have ties to industry, and, as a result, have conflicts of interest that making them unhireable. Moreover, if my conversations with people in the energy world are indicative, many of those experts who are free of conflicts have been wary of joining an administration that they perceive as being unwelcoming to those on how to live oil while we have to rather than on how to get off oil entirely. Again, this surely isn’t the full explanation, but it’s a significant part of it. None of this is an argument for loading up the administration with people who have big stakes in the oil industry’s financial fortunes. But during the decades-long journey to an low-carbon economy, the United States is going to be hugely vulnerable to the vagaries of oil, be they environmental, economic, or geopolitical. Understanding those dangers – and the ways we can mitigate them – requires(among many other things) understanding how the oil industry works. Obama would benefit from having more people with such knowledge, not fewer, in his employ.

The Canadian Press reports that Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice is using the Deepwater Horizon debacle to make the case for the Alberta oil sands: “I think it’s always been clear that the oil sands provide a safe, stable, secure supply of energy and they need to be developed in an environmentally responsible way. The risks associated with the oil sands, the environmental risks, are significantly different than, and probably less than the kind of risks associated with offshore drilling.” (Emphasis added.) Is this true? Probably not. Here’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation that leads me to that conclusion. Assume the damages from the Deepwater Horizon incident are $3 billion. Assume, further, that (a) this sort of incident is the primary source of damages from offshore drilling, and that (b) this sort of incident happens once every ten years. (The second assumption is probably very pessimistic.) This would yield average annual damages of $300 million. Double it to $600 million just to be careful. What are the environmental damages associated with oil sands production? The impacts of greenhouse gas emissions are the easiest to quantify. Oil sands production yields about 0.1 extra tons of carbon dioxide per barrel produced compared to the average barrel of oil consumed in the United States. Production was about 1.3 million barrels per day (mbd) in 2008 (slightly less than total U.S. offshore production) and rising. That results in an extra 47.5 million tons of CO2 emissions annually. The EPA is currently assigning a “social cost” of $21 to each ton of CO2 emitted. (Some environmentalists have protested that that number is too low.) That implies extra annual damages of about $1 billion – almost twice the (very pessimistic) estimate of the local environmental impacts from offshore drilling accidents like Deepwater Horizon. The margin would grow if one were to include the hard-to-quantify local impacts of oil sands development on water, forests, and local health. (I would appreciate pointers from readers to any studies that do a good job of quantifying those impacts.) It would also grow if climate damages turned out to be greater than $21 per ton. (I should add another caveat: the environmental impacts from offshore oil accidents accrue primarily to the local environment, while the climate damages from oil sands production fall largely on the rest of the world.) This doesn’t mean that prudent oil sands development is unwise. I have argued just the opposite at some length – a position I still hold despite having taken significant flak for it from some friends in the environmental community. From a parochial U.S. perspective, the energy security benefits of oil sands development probably outweigh the climate damages in the immediate future. From a Canadian perspective, the economic value of oil sands production – about $10 billion annually even if the profit from each barrel produced is only $20 – is almost certainly higher than the local environmental damages (so long as a decent fraction of the proceeds are captured for local benefit). But the environmental costs are real and significant, and the current incident in the Gulf of Mexico should not be used to downplay them.

Most analysis of the oil spill’s policy implications has focused on the future of offshore drilling and on the implications for efforts to move beyond fossil fuels. My guess, though, is that natural gas might actually be a real near term winner. Offshore natural gas would obviously suffer from a climate when expanded offshore drilling is impossible. Last year’s EIA Annual Energy Outlook estimated that if all the offshore areas opened up to drilling by the Bush administration were removed, the impact would be 0.8 trillion cubic feet (tcf) less offshore gas production by 2030. (The areas Obama was likely to open would have been a fraction of that.) The same report estimates that unconventional gas production from shale gas rises from 1.2 tcf in 2007 to 4.2 tcf in 2030, a jump of 3.0 tcf, nearly four times the fall in offshore production. Big policy decisions made for shale gas are likely to have a larger effect than those made for new offshore gas. And I can see two ways in which the oil spill could lead to increased support for shale gas. First, past calls from people ranging from Boone Pickens to John Podesta to increase incentives for the use of natural gas in heavy duty and fleet vehicles are likely to gain more traction. Using natural gas for such vehicles would directly and immediately replace oil, making the argument in their favor relatively simple to articulate. Electric vehicles, in contrast, suffer from a longer time horizon; their impact will ultimately be greater, but it may be trickier to make the immediate case. (Renewables other than biofuels, meanwhile, have only an indirect connection to oil use, through electric vehicles.) Moreover, I suspect that it may be easier to push for natural gas without being accused of “politicizing” the oil spill tragedy than it would be to push similarly for broad energy and climate legislation soon. Second, the oil spill may lead to greater industry support for serious regulation of shale gas production – and that would be a good thing for production in the long term. If one bad apple causes a bad shale gas production accident, it will tar the whole industry, leading to severely curtailed shale gas production. This danger of this dynamic should now be obvious to industry, given the massive impact that BP’s offshore accident is going to have on ExxonMobil and company’s access to new acreage for offshore drilling. The lesson should be clear: serious regulation is in the interest of responsible companies, because it protects them from the consequences of others’ mistakes. If serious shale gas players didn’t understand this before, they certainly ought to now. Of course, the spill has some negative ramifications for shale gas too. Some will see the oil spill as a sign that all drilling is dangerous, and become more entrenched in their opposition to all shale gas production. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the politics tip in that direction. But increased support for gas – together with tighter regulation – seems to be the more likely outcome.