Strings, Rings, and Other Things

I guess perhaps the enormous (but often overlooked) externalities involved in oil production are the place where we should have been listening to the hard core environmentalists. Yes, our society requires oil to function, and yes, disasters more or less like this will inevitably happen. So what the environmentalists ought to be arguing is that oil should cost more (with the excess being kept in reserve to pay for compensation after this sort of event). And that's got to be organized by the government (since there's no reason to expect any single company to be able to pay the full cost of a rare disaster it creates), so it's got to be a tax (on drilling and probably on importing oil as well).

Somehow, I don't think that the environmental lobby will win many points with the public by clamoring to raise gas prices due to increased oil production taxes, though.