Stephen Tyndale-Biscoe: In the US, cheap energy comes at a high price

THERE is something horrifyingly remorseless about the unfoldingnightmare of the Gulf oil spill. It is beginning to seem that there is no waking up from it.

The regional newspaper and TV news channels in the area I visited during the opening weeks of the disaster had two pre-occupations: where the oil would make landfall, and would the local beaches and fisheries around Tampa Bay on the Florida Gulf coast escape it?

In conversation, Barack Obama and the Federal Government are blamed for doing too little too late, and looming over every discussion – private and public – is the great corporate culprit, the foreign-owned BP whose executives with British accents feature in numerous news bulletins.

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The company has done little to rescue its reputation. Having grossly under-estimated the amount of oil gushing from its broken well, and prevented any independent investigations which might have given a more accurate – and terrifying – picture of what is going on, it then introduced chemical dispersants in such vast quantities that many

experts fear their long-term impact on the Gulf's eco-systems, the most fragile of which are the fish-rich coral reefs.

So BP has made itself an obvious target for criticism. But there are, of course, other candidates. Never mind, for instance that the faulty rig was hired from the US-owned Transocean Ltd. Never mind that company officials were allowed to fill out inspection forms on oil platforms which were then signed and dated by government inspectors – some of whom, it has emerged, were taking coke and crystal meth and watching porn videos instead of carrying out their proper duties.

The United States may not be unique among nations in experiencing the downside of vested interest, nor the muddle when vested interest and public responsibility go hand in glove. But rather frequently, it seems, ordinary Americans pay a high price for it.

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In the case of the oil spill, that is just about everyone you can think of who makes a living from tourism and the fishing industry along the poisoned Gulf coast.

The muddle in this case arose from the arrangement by which the body responsible for regulating oil wells, the Interior Department's minerals management service, is the same body that collects revenues

from the drilling companies. The companies' profitability is therefore very close to its heart – and who in the organisation would want to threaten it by being officious?

When something like the oil spill happens, there are many who rage.

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Others keep quiet, as are the politicians who had been lobbying to

allow oil companies to drill just five miles off the Florida coast.

To the outsider, it seems to be an accepted fact of life that elected lawmakers in the state governing bodies should be in the pockets of "big business", and or have big business interests of their own.

While I was in Florida, there was controversy about a bill which would have saved major landowners millions of dollars in tax should they have sold agricultural land at the inflated prices paid by commercial developers of condominiums, shopping malls and the like. Its sponsor was none other than the chairman of the Senate Budget, one JD

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Alexander, top executive of two companies which own about 200,000 acres of agricultural land.

The tax break would have come at a time when Florida is closing parks and cutting jobs to cope with declining tax revenues; it would have robbed communities of desperately-needed funds for child care, public safety and other essential services.

Liberal voices in the Press were raised in outrage at the proposal, urging Governor Charlie Crist to veto it.

He did, as it happens, but outside the chattering classes, there is little to suggest widespread disapproval of a publicly-elected lawmaker promoting interests that have little, if nothing, to do with the common good.

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An American's right to make a fast buck may not be enshrined in the Constitution, but it is as deeply embedded in the nation's culture as one which is – I refer to the right to bear arms.

I saw this in a startling way at Webster Westside Flea Market which is in the middle of nowhere and covers an area about the size of the Great Yorkshire Show.

Opposite a stall selling Bibles was one laden with guns, including an AK47 along with more mundane repeater rifles and a range of handguns.

I asked the stallholder what I needed in order to buy a rifle with a 12-round magazine, and he said a driving licence.

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I thought it incongruous that if I had attempted to change into my swimming trunks under a towel on a public beach, I might have been reported to the ever-patrolling beach Police and handed an on-the-spot fine for indecency.

In Florida, however, you can get a permit which allows you to take a concealed automatic to work.

There is a third right which many Americans take for granted – the right to cheap energy.

Environmentalists and certain Left-leaning liberals may have the gall to question it, but in the light of the gushing oil well that can't be stopped in the Gulf, and the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster in Kentucky on April 5 in which 29 miners died, it is becoming apparent that cheap energy can exact a very high price.

Will Americans wake up to the realities pressing in on their American dreams?

Not yet, I think.

Stephen Tyndale-Biscoe is a retired Yorkshire Post journalist who has just returned from America.

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