After oil spill cleanup, will we tighten the laws?

As the BP oil spill cleanup continued last week, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) proposed new legislative action that would raise the BP's liability. Are we entering a new era of increased regulation?

Earlier this week, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) responded to the continuing Gulf oil leak by proposing new legislative action that would raise the liability BP could face for the disaster. Sen. Schumer’s action is merely the latest move in Washington’s month-long reaction to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and if history is any guide, it won’t be the last.

Throughout the last century, environmental and industrial catastrophes have often provoked an outraged citizenry to demand action from their elected officials, resulting in new regulations aimed at preventing future catastrophes. Experts point out, however, that many of those regulations failed to stop subsequent calamities, leading some to question whether the responses to the Gulf oil leak will have a lasting effect.

“Basically, you have a pattern of crisis, response, and retrenchment,” said Thomas McGarity, a professor of administrative law at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. “Ultimately, the response to the crisis doesn't produce as much change as would have been expected during the crisis. This has happened since the Progressive Era [1890s to 1920s].”

New era of crises?

The Department of the Interior has already responded to the oil leak by segregating the investigative and permit granting functions of the Minerals Management Service to prevent future conflicts of interest, but that’s probably just the beginning, said Jody Freeman, director of the Harvard Law School Environmental Law and Policy Program.

“You could imagine recommendations that go even further and revise the entire system of permitting,” Freeman told LiveScience. “You could imagine requirements for more comprehensive planning on the part of the oil industry and new requirements for redundant safety systems.”

At the very least, the government is likely to raise the $75-million liability cap that limits the damages BP would pay as a result of the leak, McGarity said.

That momentum might also carry over into other arenas as well, with the Obama administration using the Gulf oil disaster as an example of how government regulations are needed to protect citizens from a wide range of business practices, McGarity said.

“What we're seeing now is a possibility of a new era. We're having so many crises, across so many areas of our domestic experience, that there's an opportunity for a new public interest era,” McGarity told LiveScience. “As they keep coming, the public is willing to accept this.”

Of course, not every analyst is quite so confident the Deepwater Horizon disaster has galvanized enough support for a large-scale change in regulatory law.

“There will definitely be a reevaluation in the wake of the Deepwater disaster, but I don't imagine dramatic reshaping of the law,” said Doug Kysar, a professor of torts, environmental law and risk regulation at Yale University Law School. “This is something that oil companies and insurance companies have learned to deal with over the last 20 years.”

The United States is too dependent on oil to impose regulations that might dissuade oil companies from doing business here, Kysar said. The oil companies could threaten to move their operations to countries with less strict regulations, an outcome that members of Congress, who might lose an election if oil company employees in their states and districts get laid off, will work hard to prevent, Kysar said.

Watering down the laws

Even if government agencies do impose new regulations, the agencies might not effectively enforce them, and those regulations might not have the power to stop future disasters anyway, said Jeffrey Rachlinski, a professor of administrative law at Cornell University Law School.

For instance, many U.S. legislators, in response to the current oil disaster, are proposing laws that were originally proposed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, but were watered down or simply not followed, Rachlinski said.

FULL ARTICLE http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0607/After-oil-spill-cleanup-will-we-tighten-the-laws

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After oil spill cleanup, will we tighten the laws?

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