Trump's latest regulatory rollback should horrify you
Source: Washington Post
Trump’s latest regulatory rollback should horrify you
By S. Elizabeth Birnbaum May 7 at 3:31 PM
S. Elizabeth Birnbaum was the director of the Minerals Management Service, the agency responsible for offshore oil and gas leasing, at the time of the Deepwater Horizon accident. She serves as senior counsel at Arabella Advisors.
April 20 marked the ninth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, an offshore drilling disaster that killed 11 men and triggered a pollution nightmare as uncontrolled oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico for almost three months. Last week, shortly after that anniversary, the Trump administration announced a rollback of regulations that had been written to prevent such an incident from happening again.
This should horrify you. Just three years after adopting the regulations in response to public outcry and the recommendations of a presidential commission, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has concluded that its rules caused “unnecessary burdens” on the industry.
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Last week’s revision of those rules offers many reasons for concern. Mandatory requirements have been replaced with standards written by the American Petroleum Institute, the major trade association for the oil and gas industry. Blowout preventers may be tested less frequently. And the third-party reviewers of drilling safety need no longer be certified by the government.
Each of the rollbacks places greater reliance on industry and reduces the role of neutral overseers. We’ve already seen what happens when the oil and gas industry regulates itself with insufficient government oversight. The new rules do nothing but create another accident waiting to happen.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-latest-regulatory-rollback-should-horrify-you/2019/05/07/01095574-704e-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html
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