Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon Accountability

Show Notes

Nia and Aughie discuss the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters in terms of accountability and settlements. They also explore the ideas around government accountability and conflict of interest between promoting industry and protecting the common good.

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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.

Announcer: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.

N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie?

J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?

N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine. Thank you. I'm looking forward to our conversation today, of course.

N. Rodgers: I've questions about disasters and you and I have history of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness work and in this instance, I am not talking so much about the Homeland Security part as I am the emergency preparedness part. The idea of what happens during the disaster and the specific disasters that I'm curious about and I'm curious about how they get paid for; are the big disasters like the Exxon Valdez or the Deepwater Horizon. Those are both in the oil industry, but like if Bhopal had happened in the United States instead of India or like they got lucky that it happened in India in the sense that the Indian laws, I think, are a lot less restrictive than American laws. But you and I briefly mentioned the Cuyahoga River being on fire in one of our previous episodes.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. When we were talking about the development of the EPA.

N. Rodgers: And the waters of the United States, right? All of that stuff.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Who's responsible for cleaning up when industry goes awry in that way?

J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, what we're talking about here, and we're going to use as our two primary examples, though, because it's both Nia and I will probably digress into other examples.

N. Rodgers: No. That won't happen.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's nice to know each others pathologies before we start a project. But we're using as our jumping off point, listeners, as Nia just mentioned the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon, both of these were oil spills. With the Exxon Valdez, that was the name of a ship that ran aground off the Alaskan Coastline and at the time, Nia, do you recall the year? Exxon Valdez was 1989.

N. Rodgers: Yeah and it should be noted by the way that, I think that all of Exxon ships had Exxon something like that was their naming practice was.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Exxon being the oil company that owned the ship and the ship's technical name Valdez, but I don't remember who was named for anything like that. Sorry, I should've learned that stuff but I didn't, but Exxon ships is like Evergreen. The one that got caught in the Suez Canal, all of their ships are Evergreen something. You can't just call it the Evergreen because Evergreen is the name of the company. That's a quick way for other ships to know whose ship that is.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. In the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez disaster, Exxon paid close to $4 million in cleanup costs and restoration of habitat.

N. Rodgers: But the Exxon Valdez, so it went and got oil in Alaska and it was just in the hold of the ship. It was not in barrels.

J. Aughenbaugh: It was not it was not in barrels yet. Yeah.

N. Rodgers: It was just poured in, essentially.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Then they're leaving Alaska. They're leaving Prince William Sound sailing along and they hit a bunch of rocks.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: A known hazard. Embroiled in this question was, was the captain sober when this accident occurred? That was one of the questions. Another of the questions was, why weren't there navigation maps working? By the way, 1989 is before you have strong GPS and that kind of thing. But why weren't their navigation maps up to date? Why didn't they know that they were coming close to this known hazard? There was also some question about the training of the officers, not just the captain. There's lots of questions about the Valdez in and of itself that are separate from the accident, but that have a question about Exxon and its hiring practices and its training practices. Then you get this. It hits the rocks and it spills.

J. Aughenbaugh: I went ahead and looked that up. Well it had collected 53 million gallons of crude oil and I think they pretty much lost the entire contents. Yes.

N. Rodgers: Eleven million? Think they lost 11 million.

J. Aughenbaugh: Eleven million. Yes.

N. Rodgers: They lost a fifth of what was in the ship.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Yeah.

N. Rodgers: But keep in mind too, crude oil is not the gasoline that you see at the tank. Crude oil is this thick, ooey, gooey stuff that has not yet been to a refinery.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: It's oil has the dinosaurs made it, by going out and dying somewhere.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's in its natural state. It's not yet been refined.

N. Rodgers: When it spills, it's not like, oh, that'll be easy to clean up.

J. Aughenbaugh: It just lays there and again it requires quite a bit of scientific if you will know how to go ahead and first collect it and then you have to engage in cleanup. At that time some of the techniques that were used for the cleanup. What we've now come to find out, those techniques actually did more ecological damage than if we just had let it lay there.

N. Rodgers: I saw that in your notes and I'm fascinated by that. 1,300 miles of coastline were affected.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: For anybody wondering how far 13 miles is, if you started driving in Richmond, you would get to I think just beyond the Grand Canyon, like it's a long distance. That is a lot of coastline to try to clean up.

J. Aughenbaugh: For those listeners who've never been to Alaska, I mean Alaska is huge.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's got significant coastline.

N. Rodgers: By coastline, they also mean Islands, a huge number of inlets and lakes and rivers in Alaska all have islands in them.

N. Rodgers: They brought in -

J. Aughenbaugh: High pressure or hot water hoses.

N. Rodgers: But it was combination of local and federal response.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: It wasn't just Exxon, it was a combined effort.

J. Aughenbaugh: This was a combined public-private sector response. Researchers are still trying to figure out the damage. I know this is 2022 when we're recording this episode .

N. Rodgers: Yeah; 34 years?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, 33, 34 years, but I mean, it was just catastrophic.

N. Rodgers: It was so sad. You saw lots of pictures on the news of birds. Because they can only fly so far, if they land in it, then they get covered in goo and then they have to be cleaned individually and moved to another part of the coastline where they're safe.

J. Aughenbaugh: Again, crude oil is thick, it's viscous.

N. Rodgers: I can't imagine that it was good for people or animals.

J. Aughenbaugh: In small birds, one of the reasons why they can fly like they do is because they are light weight. They don't have the physical capability of being able to just throw off the oil.

N. Rodgers: I mean, think about that, but yeah.

J. Aughenbaugh: It becomes a weight that holds them down .

N. Rodgers: Which will eventually mean they starve to death.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah they starve to death. That's right. Now, the second disaster, the Deepwater Horizon. You're not ready to move on yet.

N. Rodgers: I'm not because I have a couple of questions about Exxon. Exxon paid some money towards the clean-up costs, right?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I think the total was close to, what was it? $4 billion.

N. Rodgers: They didn't clean up the entire thing?

J. Aughenbaugh: No.

N. Rodgers: They left spots so that we could see what happens when a ship runs aground and spills a bunch of oil. We didn't know what that meant for-

J. Aughenbaugh: This was actually part of the court order consent decree. Some researchers wanted a part of the damaged area to not be cleaned up so they could research how quickly the environment recovered on its own.

N. Rodgers: But you mentioned that one of things that they figured out they could use was high pressure hot water.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: To try to disperse it. You cannot soak it up. You can soak up some of it and you can scoop up some of it, but the rest of it you have to disperse and what you're trying to do there is make the part per million in water lower and lower and lower until it's less deadly.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: To marine life. But didn't they figure out that super hot high pressure water actually kills other marine life that would have survived the initial problem?

J. Aughenbaugh: You're talking about the ecology in a part of the country, the part of the world that is cold for most of the year. All of a sudden you're using high pressure hot water in areas that have slow moving waters that are cold.

N. Rodgers: Instead of feeling like a spa, that felt like you'd been dropped into a pot of boiling water?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: A pot of boiling water that by the way, was being if you will, shoved at you very quickly.

N. Rodgers: Right. You were drinking out of a hot fire hose and wondering why your lips are falling off. I can see that would be really dangerous.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's like when you get into the shower, and you turn it on as hot as you can to get the shower going. But then you forget to go ahead and dial it back.

N. Rodgers: You get under it.

J. Aughenbaugh: Again, depending on how you have your shower head set, it could be blasting away at your neck and your back and your body just goes into shock.

N. Rodgers: Because you can't handle that.

J. Aughenbaugh: You can't handle it because that's not what you're used to.

N. Rodgers: I had not even thought about that.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's what we were talking about in regards to the ecology there. They wanted to disperse this thick crude oil, but in the process, what they used harmed the ecology.

N. Rodgers: But they left some of it and I guess what we figured out now is that in a few years the environment heals itself, it recovers?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. In the Mearns Rock area, they left it largely as it was after the spill. They found that mussels, barnacles, various sea weeds actually returned to normal levels after roughly three to four years after the spill.

N. Rodgers: Could be considered an argument for not doing something?

J. Aughenbaugh: We're coming up with different techniques and that's the other thing. Nia and I both know this because again, of our background in emergency preparedness. A lot of what we now determine is best practice, is because we tried other things in the past and they didn't work out. It's trial and error.

N. Rodgers: Maybe this will work, no, maybe this will work. Did it cover most of the cost? Did that four billion?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Then we're going to talk about Deepwater Horizon, and then we're going to talk about some of the more philosophical questions, I'll get to that later.

J. Aughenbaugh: There are some philosophical issues here that I think interests me for this particular podcast episode, but they are of significant interest in disciplines like Emergency Preparedness, Public Administration, and even for that matter, Business Administration.

N. Rodgers: And Environmental Protection.

J. Aughenbaugh: Environmental Protection, etc. These are some large philosophical questions that we hope to get to with this podcast episode and perhaps get you all to think about them.

N. Rodgers: Twenty-one years later, platform in the Gulf, the Deepwater Horizon.

J. Aughenbaugh: Deepwater Horizon. This was your classic, if you will, oil platform in the middle of a body of water. Because what we've determined over the years is off the coast of Louisiana, for instance, California, there are deep reserves of petroleum. You build a platform in the water and you drill down to get the oil because that's where the oil might be.

N. Rodgers: The platform is usually a story or two above the surface of the water. You have these four big legs that go down into the body of water, which is why we don't do this in the Pacific or the Atlantic very far off the coast because they are significantly deeper; your legs would have to be miles long instead of probably what the two miles or so that it is in the Gulf. Who knows where the technology will take us in the future? But part of what you do that for is stability because then you have all this equipment on top of it and you have living quarters and food and all kinds of stuff. The platform is huge and it's like a city, it's like a small town.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's like a small town and remember too folks, we're talking about the Gulf of Mexico. You're talking about an area of the world that is prone for at least two to three months every year of some devastating hurricanes.

N. Rodgers: It's got to be built pretty well, and the platform itself was not the problem, well it became the problem.

J. Aughenbaugh: It became the problem.

N. Rodgers: Because it did catch fire, but that was not the initial problem.

J. Aughenbaugh: It was the crack in the pipes drawing out the oil.

N. Rodgers: For those who don't understand, let's briefly, what happens is you sink a tube down through the earth and you pull out the rock as you're sinking that tube, and when the tube hits oil, then you put in another tube. Inside that tube is the vacuum, this is very a simplified. I can hear oil executives screaming right now across the planet that I don't know what I'm talking about. But that's a super simplified thing.

J. Aughenbaugh: There are a bunch of engineers right now who are like.

N. Rodgers: There are just weeping. I'm sorry, I made you cry. But anyway, you suck this stuff out and then when you're ready to move on because what happens is pockets of oil, you get to the end of the usefulness of the pocket of oil. When it's on land, you can do what's called fracking, which is you can explode things and force more oil out of the shale, but in the water, we don't frack. We have not yet figured out that technology and with any luck we won't. Because God help us fracking in the ocean. But anyway, then what happens is they pull out that inner tube and then they tried to close off.

J. Aughenbaugh: They tried to cap the well.

N. Rodgers: That original well tube they tried to cap, and that's where this became a problem. Once they realized they had a crack, then they were like, Oh, we'll just cap it and then that'll solve the problem. They put a cap on it and it went blujh, blujh, and continued to leak. No one is certain the amount per day because BP was like, yeah, it's 25 gallons a day and it was actually leaking 100 times that or something, 500 times.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's considered the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, that's around the world.

N. Rodgers: Because what happens is that surfaces, it doesn't sink to the bottom, it's lighter than the water, it surfaces it's still gooey and terrible. It surfaces and then it makes what's called a slick across the top of the water, and then the slick because of waves gets driven up onto the shore. The Valdez was really close to shore, relatively speaking. It had a lot less problems with the oil getting there, but because the Gulf, that slick was 10 miles long or something, with some horrible.

J. Aughenbaugh: It covered the coastline of three states, Louisiana, Mississippi, and a part of Alabama.

N. Rodgers: It's crazy.

J. Aughenbaugh: It not only devastated wildlife, it basically shut down the economies of coastal communities in those three states.

N. Rodgers: Because guess where you get your shrimp from in the South, you get it off the Louisiana coast. Even if you could get clean shrimp, nobody wanted to eat them because they were afraid of it; it had devastated financially.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then all the tourist areas.

N. Rodgers: Let's go to the beach and hangout in the oil. Wait, what, no that is a terrible idea. The platform caught fire?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Then it was found that the platform didn't have enough ways for people to get off the platform safely. I forgive please my language I'm going to actually curse so trigger warning, this was a shit show start to finish. Because the well wasn't handled well, the capping wasn't handled well, and then the thing exploded and caught fire, and lots of people died.

J. Aughenbaugh: What is it?

N. Rodgers: It is self-caused death which Valdez did not. Nobody on the Valdez died.

J. Aughenbaugh: No. But there were 11 counts of manslaughter that British Petroleum, BP, pled guilty to, two misdemeanors, and for good measure, they also pled to a felony count of lying to Congress. Because afterwards they at least attempted for a short period of time to cover up all the wrongdoing.

N. Rodgers: We got the cap under control, there's no problem, and then when the big giant fire happened, they were like, I wonder what how that happened. I can't remember who the guy who was in charge of BP, I don't remember his name. Tony something, Tony. Go ahead.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, Nia goes and looks that up.

N. Rodgers: Yeah. Because I got to know now.

J. Aughenbaugh: Very good, and listeners, this is the exact word.

N. Rodgers: Tony Hayward.

J. Aughenbaugh: Oh yeah, that's right. Tony Hayward.

N. Rodgers: Tony Hayward, who said, "I'm having a really bad day" to the reporters. Really? You're having a bad day. Eleven people are dead, the entire coastlines of a whole bunch of states are oily and slicky and gross, animals are dying left, right, and center, industries are falling apart, and you're having a bad day. Perhaps, Mr. Hayward, you have chosen poorly in what you said to reporters.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. There are bad days and then there are bad days. Mr. Hayward, you're not even on our bad day scale right now. First of all, BP agreed to pay a fine to the US government of over $4.5 billion.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then BP agreed to cover all the costs related to cleanup charges and various penalties to both the federal government and various state governments for violating environmental laws. That total was 65 billion. BP then also agreed to set up a fund that was administered by a special master to compensate all of the businesses who basically had to close down because of the oil spill.

N. Rodgers: What's interesting is BP pleaded guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter. They were treated like a person in the legal sense. People who get angry about some of the SCOTUS decisions like Citizens United, I'm thinking, where corporations are treated as people and we don't like that. We loved it in the case of BP because they were held responsible.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: I think they were also banned from having any contracts. They lost money, they lost opportunity, the government did actually say, "You can't just destroy the Gulf and walk away; that's not how this works."

J. Aughenbaugh: That's not how it works and actually Nia, it's funny you mentioned that because occasionally I'll have students who are critical, as you just mentioned. Because American courts have in certain contexts allow corporations to be classified under the law as individuals.

N. Rodgers: For Citizens United it was about campaign funds I think.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Is that right?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, in the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court said federal law could not restrict what corporations and political action committees spent on campaigning.

N. Rodgers: Everybody's all grumpy. They're not people, they're corporations.

J. Aughenbaugh: The First Amendment protects individual rights not corporate rights. They said, well if corporations aren't individuals then all of the various criminal statutes at the state and federal level that make corporations legally liable for criminal wrongdoing we got to throw those out because corporations aren't individuals. Of course my students are like, no, no, no, no, no and I said, so there should be an exception for criminal wrongdoing.

N. Rodgers: Or for campaign donations.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, and I said, so we have a consistency of principle issue here.

N. Rodgers: Which by the way is where we get into the philosophy of these questions. Which is, is this idea of being held responsible. The first thing I want to go on record saying is, do not mistake paying, setting up funds, doing all those things for corporations being good citizens because they are not. They did that because one, they were compelled by the government, and two, because they wanted to heal their reputations. After the Exxon Valdez, people wouldn't buy gas at Exxon stations; they were mad at Exxon. The same thing happened after Deepwater with BP. My social justice warrior friends were like "I will never buy BP gas again." And I'm like okay that's fine.

J. Aughenbaugh: My friends say same thing.

N. Rodgers: But now all of that seems to have been forgotten, at least in my friend group because it's been long enough. This was 2010 and now it's 12 years later and my friends are like, "I get gas wherever is close to me." Because it's really hard to maintain being angry at a company especially when the company rehabilitates its image.

J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, to your point. Listeners, let's be very clear about this. Neither Nia nor I are trying to give Exxon or BP a pass here.

N. Rodgers: Heck, no.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because they were not good corporate citizens in both of these cases.

N. Rodgers: They lied.

J. Aughenbaugh: Heck yeah, they lied in court proceedings and they got caught.

N. Rodgers: They tried to hide what had happened.

J. Aughenbaugh: They tried to hide what had happened, there was evidence in both cases. Particularly the BP case where BP execs knew for years that there were issues with not only the Deepwater platform, but a number of their platforms.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, and they knew that their subcontractors were crap. They chose the cheapest people in the industry which guess what? You get what you pay for.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: They knew of the negligence and Exxon knew of the negligence of the captain and didn't, but Deepwater is far deeper. That negligence went, I think a lot further.

J. Aughenbaugh: Further. But in both of these instances, what arose and scholars began to ask is to what extent should the government, and when I say the government I'm talking about multiple levels of government. Both federal and state, because remember with Exxon Valdez it was right off the coast of Alaska. It's been basically the stated policy of numerous Alaskan and state governments to pursue as much extraction of petroleum from Alaskan lands as possible. Likewise with the Gulf of Mexico, the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. But particularly Louisiana have consciously chosen over multiple decades to pursue economic development based on petroleum and chemical extraction.

N. Rodgers: Exactly, they benefit as states. Where the question comes in for us and what we're bringing this as far as government is concerned, is if the government's job is to encourage an industry.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: It is because in almost every industry except industries where it's just the point of killing people, which is there is no industry of that. But in every other industry the reason the government is supposed to pursue them is because they create jobs and they bring money to the local economy. There's all these things that happen when you have good local industry or rather robust local industry. Local government is going to pursue that in every instance. In every single instance they are going to do that, you know why? Because we tell them to, we as taxpayers and voters tell them that's what we want. We want you to bring us jobs, we want to bring money into our economy, we want to improve our schools and improve our roads.

J. Aughenbaugh: We want a diverse tax base because if we have a diverse tax base then none of us individually gets socked with high tax rates. This is what we tell our elected officials.

N. Rodgers: Then we also say we want you to regulate them and make sure that they don't do goofy things to the water so that we can't go swimming in the Gulf of Mexico for the next 15 years and the government's like "Those are competing [inaudible] ."

N. Rodgers: Competing imperatives.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, right?

N. Rodgers: How would you like us to encourage all this and absolutely guarantee your safety? We cannot do that. We can't do both things.

J. Aughenbaugh: This is where scholars, particularly in emergency preparedness and in public administration have gone ahead and started asking some of these questions like, what is the government liability or responsibility for some of these disasters? I'll just focus on the petroleum industry in the United States.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, we can mention tobacco. We're looking at you chemicals.

J. Aughenbaugh: You asbestos.

N. Rodgers: Yeah. I mean, we're looking at all you all. But we're picking on oil right now. Just know that we have you in our side eye. You have not escaped our notice, but we're talking about others.

J. Aughenbaugh: But just using the petroleum industry in the United States. What many Americans don't recognize is that, for decades the United States Congress provided tax breaks for petroleum companies to explore.

N. Rodgers: Go find pockets of oil because we like it and we want more of it.

J. Aughenbaugh: We want to be "energy independent." They have at the time we're recording this podcast episode, energy independence is once again raised its ugly head in American politics because the West is concerned that there is a madman in Russia who might turn off all of Russia's oil and gas output to the West. The United States gets some of its oil from, Russia.

N. Rodgers: Russia. It's not huge. It's about three percent. I'm going to ask all Americans to drive three percent less, they're going to say, wait what? I'm not going to do that.

J. Aughenbaugh: You got the United States federal government encouraging petroleum companies to find new wells of petroleum.

N. Rodgers: Do I get to say it?

J. Aughenbaugh: Go for it.

N. Rodgers: Drill, baby, drill.

J. Aughenbaugh: Drill. That's right. Drill, baby, drill.

N. Rodgers: Drill, baby, drill. There's a whole industry of t-shirts.

J. Aughenbaugh: Here's another element. The federal government then also provided subsidies for oil companies to build petroleum refinery plants. Once you pull up the petroleum out of the ground, then you have to refine it for the various uses. Primarily gasoline in vehicles, but nevertheless. At the same time, we're encouraging the industry to engage in various activities, we also want the government to regulate it.

N. Rodgers: We say drill, baby, drill in Alaska, and then we say to the EPA protect moose, baby, protect moose.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: That is a lot harder t-shirt to wear by the way.

J. Aughenbaugh: By the way listeners that will be part of our growing swag and merchandise line.

N. Rodgers: Protect moose, baby, protect moose.

J. Aughenbaugh: Moose, baby, moose.

N. Rodgers: One of the reasons Aughie and I want to talk about this is that like so many things in politics, this is a divisive issue that is nuanced.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: This idea that you could have any conversation about it without maintaining your civility as we've talked about, without recognizing that both sides have a point. If we have built a society which we have on the American car and car ownership and the idea of freedom and the wind in your hair and driving down the road.

J. Aughenbaugh: You've had a rough day, Nia. You've had a rough workweek. This is part of the American myth, right? You wake up on a Saturday morning, you get in your car you drive someplace, right?

N. Rodgers: Or you're old and on Sunday you go to church and then you go for a little drive afterwards.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: Where you drive along the roads at very slow paces where I'm behind you yelling at you.

J. Aughenbaugh: The infamous, oftentimes criticized by other drivers, Sunday drive.

N. Rodgers: We encourage that as a society and as a culture. Then we also say, yeah, but I don't want you to hurt anything while you're doing that. Okay, well, but when you have an accident, millions of animals die and thousands of miles rather of coastline are destroyed. That's wetlands and all kinds of [inaudible].

J. Aughenbaugh: Endangered species and ecosystems that took thousands of years to develop. We destroy in less than 24 hours. The question becomes, what should be prioritized?

N. Rodgers: Exactly. I've had this conversation Nia and I think you have too, friends of ours who were born and raised in Europe, that have less of an emphasis on an automobile lifestyle. They have great subway systems and public transportation systems and they have laws and rules that require high density within urban areas, etc.

N. Rodgers: They make oil expensive there. Petrol as my friends in England call it, is enormously expensive there. Makes you think about whether you're just going to get in the car and go for a ride. You're probably not going to do that.

J. Aughenbaugh: Not going to do that. But there are trade offs. Because their tax rates are significantly higher than those in the United States in part because they have to maintain these well developed, elaborate, excellent public transportation systems.

N. Rodgers: Exactly. I say all the time that I would love to have a light rail system in Richmond.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Then somebody says, well, that's going to cost you and I'm like gulp. I am willing to pay that, but it will be painful. It will be something I have to think about.

J. Aughenbaugh: Who should bear the cost?

N. Rodgers: Is that just users? Do just users pay for buses? No we all pay for buses.

J. Aughenbaugh: Buses, because if we're going to force the users, many of the users are poor people who cannot afford automobiles, etc. Who bears the costs? You're going to tell somebody that they can't use their car as much. Or if they do, it's going to cost them more to pay for a system they don't use that will be frequented or used by a whole bunch of other people. Good luck getting elected on that policy platform.

N. Rodgers: Exactly, you also get the cycle of ridership is low, so there's no reason to build out more so we don't build out more so ridership is low.

J. Aughenbaugh: It's a chicken or egg type argument.

N. Rodgers: Exactly. It's a big circle that comes around and around in public administration and government. Is this idea of how do we balance these two things, and when something goes horrifically wrong, whose fault is it?

J. Aughenbaugh: You saw this in the notes that I wrote up from this podcast episode. There are actually some public administration scholars who say, "Yes, most of the blame should be on Exxon and British Petroleum." But you have some public administration scholars who were like, "But where is the government's culpability in this?" They had the legal authority delegated to various agencies by Congress to regulate the petroleum industry, specifically the Department of Energy. But what they found is, in many cases, the regulators were in very close working relationships with guess who?

N. Rodgers: The oil companies.

J. Aughenbaugh: Those who we're supposed to be regulated.

N. Rodgers: Well, I think the way that works is an oil executive is appointed to be the head of the Energy Department.

J. Aughenbaugh: The Department of Energy, right?

N. Rodgers: They're the head of the Department of Energy for four to eight years depending on the presidency, and when they are booted out, guess where they go? Back to the oil industry.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: But they are not; unless this is going to be their last job, which we may need to think about as a society if that's what we want is, your being the head of an agency is your last job, and we just give you some public support after that for financial aid, so that you can't go back to those industries. Because if not, you're going to make regulations that those industries like so that they will hire you when your time in government is done. That's a natural thing that happens in political positions.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, Nia, let's just assume for a moment that that crass narrow self-interest of the former departmental head who goes back to work for the industry that they just regulated. But let's just assume that that's not the motivation.

N. Rodgers: Look at you being generous.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I'm playing devil's advocate here.

N. Rodgers: Just go along.

J. Aughenbaugh: Let's say you're the head of the Department of Energy, and you know that at most, you're going to have eight years in office. You might have only four. Do you want to spend all four years of eight in court because your, "Overzealous regulation of the industry," is challenged every single time you issue a regulation? Or do you try to go ahead and find some common ground so you don't spend all four or eight years with a whole bunch of headaches?

N. Rodgers: Well, and in fairness, change is, usually, best done incrementally because you can get more people on board for an incremental change than you can get for a radical change.

J. Aughenbaugh: Your radical change.

N. Rodgers: That's a fair point.

J. Aughenbaugh: When you talk about broad sweeping changes with industries, you're talking about a whole bunch of people's lives who could be fundamentally changed in a short period of time.

N. Rodgers: That's true. If you suddenly came in with about, "Fine. You're making a good argument." I hate it when you do that. But it makes sense to me that one of the things that a department head or an agency head would want to do would be to protect workers in the industry, who it is not their fault. BP executives are vastly different from the dude who was working on the platform, right?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: His ability to change that industry is nothing compared to their ability to change that industry, and I can see where he would need protection from an agency head or a department head. What can we do that won't make these people instantly lose their jobs? How about we phase something out, so they can transition to a different job so that they can still feed their families and pay their bills.

J. Aughenbaugh: In this kind of story, go back to a more fundamental question, Nia, and I want listeners to go and think about this. If we're going to have the modern administrative state where the government assumes more regulatory responsibility, then should the government also assume some of the legal responsibility when harm occurs? You understand the question, right?

N. Rodgers: If you claim more regulatory power, are you also taking on responsibility for when those things don't work out? Let's use Deepwater as a thought example on that. If the government had been all over BP with, "These platforms don't work, and this thing doesn't work, and that thing doesn't work, and you need to get this fixed by tomorrow," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

J. Aughenbaugh: The government then signs off.

N. Rodgers: BP had done it, and the government signed off or BP didn't do it, but the government signed off on their promise. Then would the $65 million have needed to come from the government?

J. Aughenbaugh: 65 billion, not million.

N. Rodgers: Billion, sorry. I was thinking just a moment, I was like, "Wait, that's too low." The answer would be yes, I think.

J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, I'll give you a more recent example with a phenomenon that Nia's mentioned a couple of times to me off recording. Nia is fascinated by the driverless automobiles.

N. Rodgers: Nia hates this idea with the power of a thousand burning suns. Hear that Elon Musk? You suck. Seriously, it's a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea unless all cars have it. Anyway. But that's a philosophical question we have for another day.

J. Aughenbaugh: But we have driverless automobiles, and we've had various federal and state government agencies sign off on their use. But now because we have more of those types of automobiles, we are now seeing accidents that are being caused. Some of the lawsuits have, actually, named these government agencies as defendants because the government agencies had at least given temporary or probationary, if you will, approval to their usage. Now, the government agencies are claiming in court filings that I've read so far, Nia, that the government can't be sued because the government didn't create the technology. All the government is tasked with doing is to make sure that they meet existing safety requirements. But those who have been injured are saying, they're asking the question in court. But you are allowing these automobiles to be used on city streets, on highways. If the government says they are safe, and the industry is going forward by producing more of them, and more consumers are buying them, should not the government also be held responsible?

N. Rodgers: I think so. I think that if the government says that a Pinto is safe and someone taps you in the back of your Pinto and it explodes, the first people that are responsible isn't Ford. I think that was a Ford Pinto.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Ford Pinto.

N. Rodgers: The first people who are responsible are Ford and Ford's engineers. But also the government regulators had said, Pinto are safe because government regulated. Like if you make a car, you have to submit that to the government for safety issues. You don't get to just put a car on the road and say, "Tada! I made a car." That's not how that works.

J. Aughenbaugh: The National Highway Safety and Transportation board.

N. Rodgers: They have to ensure that your model is safe for people to be in. I can see where that argument could be made that if they said it was a safe thing. I mean, is it the FAA that gets sued when there are airline crashes? That's not an illegitimate thing.

J. Aughenbaugh: But what if the corporation lied to the regulators?

N. Rodgers: That's what the regulators would have to prove. They'd have to prove that they signed off on something that wasn't true. It's like fairness. She said all those things, the miracle things that she could do with a drop of blood and nobody got the proof for it. A whole bunch of people are liable because they didn't do due diligence. If the government does due diligence and they're lied to, then I would say that that would remove them from legal censure or liability.

J. Aughenbaugh: The liability is then separated or tenured.

N. Rodgers: But they'd have to prove they were lied to. Well, for instance, tobacco for years, lied to the government and said, "We have absolutely no proof that smoking causes cancer." When in fact, they had tons of proof that smoking causes cancer. But they told the regulators that they didn't, until they couldn't get away with that lie anymore.

J. Aughenbaugh: But of course listeners, Nia just gave us another example of how the government at times is schizophrenic.

N. Rodgers: Has competing interests.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, competing interests.

N. Rodgers: Because as a person who was raised on a tobacco farm, well, I wasn't raised on a tobacco farm, but my uncle owned a tobacco farm, he had subsidies to raise tobacco.

J. Aughenbaugh: One agency of the federal government, the Surgeon General's office.

N. Rodgers: He will give people money to raise this tobacco and another agency says, "Don't do that; that kills people."

J. Aughenbaugh: The Surgeon General's office went ahead and concluded in the late 1950s that tobacco caused cancer. For easily another four decades, the United States Congress passed appropriations bills that gave subsidies for farmers to continue to grow tobacco.

N. Rodgers: Yeah. Because the Southern lobby is powerful.

J. Aughenbaugh: Again, listeners there's not necessarily a correct answer here. Once again, I cannot emphasize enough.

N. Rodgers: It is not cut and dried.

J. Aughenbaugh: Exxon and BP deserved to pay all the fines, all the clean-up costs, etc. They don't get a free pass.

N. Rodgers: How is it that they had a giant platform in the middle of the Gulf and the United States government did not know that it was a piece of crap that was going to fall over, catch fire, and kill 11 people? How is that a thing? I'm falling into the category of the government should have been held somewhat liable for that.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because again, we hear this all the time, listeners. Nia, you and I've talked about this. We have government officials that make claims that if you do X, then Y won't occur. The risk will be gone. I know some of you who are listening are like he's going to launch into another discussion of COVID-19. I could, but I won't. But we see this in all kinds of public policy areas. But you can't remove the risk completely.

N. Rodgers: Those jobs benefit thousands of families.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: They are how they send their kids to college and they are how they pay for their medical bills and their food and their shelter. Those are good paying jobs. If we're not going to have those industries, what are we going to do with those folks? How are we going to have them maintain a decent life? It's complicated. I think it's what we're trying to get at.

J. Aughenbaugh: You just talk about job creation. There is a federal law, listeners, that Congress passed that I think President Truman signed into law that said, one of the goals of the federal government budget is to provide employment for all Americans.

N. Rodgers: Really?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. When you have the government make those claims in law, it's not surprising that a bunch of people start relying on those claims. I'm not going to tell the listeners where I live in the Richmond area, but I live in a county outside of Richmond, that says, my drinking water is clean. Every time I turn on the tap, I rely upon that claim. Well, what happens when that's not the case? Think about all those people in Flint, Michigan. These are some serious philosophical questions.

N. Rodgers: Yes, they are.

J. Aughenbaugh: Our purpose, listeners, is not to go ahead and completely blow you-all's minds or to make you completely risk averse with what you do in your daily lives.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, don't go outside. That's what we're saying. Don't go outside, don't do anything. No, we're not saying that. But we're saying that it's not as simple as corporations are evil, or the government is evil. You know what I mean, there is no one bad guy.

J. Aughenbaugh: There are so many trade-offs in this discussion that oftentimes, Nia, I'm not entirely sure that we as American citizens are understanding the trade-offs that are involved.

N. Rodgers: Right. You know what helps with that? Listening to all the sides.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, having conversations.

N. Rodgers: It helps to listen to all the sides and hear what they say they're responsible for and not responsible for, which will also help you figure out where the holes are in policy. Nobody thinks that they're responsible for X thing and turns out X thing is really dangerous.

J. Aughenbaugh: Get you to re-examine what are your values and beliefs.

N. Rodgers: When you go into the polling booth, how are you representing those?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Because if you go ahead and believe that we should get out of automobiles and we should decrease our dependence on fossil fuels for energy. Then perhaps you should, when you go to vote, throw your vote behind candidates who want to have, for instance, more robust public transportation systems.

N. Rodgers: You want to ask them in debates.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: What's your stand on, or when you have a local town hall with an individual. What are you going to do about public transportation?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Put them on the spot, make them answer.

J. Aughenbaugh: How are they going to pay for it? Who's going to pay for it? Are you willing to accept that trade-off? But these are tough questions. As Nia, as you pointed out, this tension between, on one hand, the government is trying to encourage job growth industries to do well, but at the same time, we want to minimize the economists love this phrase, negative externalities of marketplace behavior. How do you accomplish those two? Because a lot of times it forces you to make tough decisions.

N. Rodgers: Thanks, Aughie. This has been a really good episode. It's been really interesting for me and I hate when you make good points that I now have to go away and think about.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, occasionally I have them. Not all the time, but occasionally.

N. Rodgers: No, I appreciate you giving me different way to view that. Thank you. We'll talk again soon.

J. Aughenbaugh: All right. Bye, Nia.

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