Republicans claim that oil spills make them want to drill more...the hell?

Started by DarklingAlice, May 12, 2010, 09:37:08 AM

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DarklingAlice

http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2010/05/politics-of-oil-spills.html

Quote
We have some new national polling coming out tomorrow on offshore drilling. The most astounding number from the poll? 28% of Republicans said the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made them more likely to support drilling off the coast to an equal 28% who said it made them less likely to be supportive. 44% said it made no difference to them and that's understandable, but why would an oil spill make you more supportive of drilling?
Okay, I get how this could leave you neutral. You can say an accident is not a trend. You may believe the environmental damage and risk is an acceptable price to pay for our energy based society. There are a number of rationalizations and arguments for how this should not deter us from drilling.

But to say that it makes you more likely to support drilling? What grounds are there for that? You would have to actually get excited by the loss of environment, life, and money. This spill is not a good thing for anyone on either side of the aisle. How can 28% of those polled be more supportive because of it? Did they poll a madhouse?
For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong.


Callie Del Noire

I'm curious to see how the actual questions were phrased and what the polling division was set up like. I am suspicious of results that sound so blatantly bone headed till I see those.

Too many polls can be skewed to make someone look good/bad if you don't see the variance and such. (+/- %-ages and so on)

Muninn

I haven't read the article and I am about to head to bed but I had a thought (that could be misplaced).

Of course it makes them wanna support it more! I mean, oil spill = LOST PROFIT.  So, of course they wanna drill more to make up for the money that was lost.  I mean, pssh, it's just like Rush Limbaugh said! Oil is just as natural as ocean water, what's the prob? Hyuk.

Yeah, I'll go sleep now.

Wolfy

I like the way Colbert put it.


"Ok, now look..picture this bag full of oil as the oil spill. See, we just cut a hole here, and oh no! It's all spilling out!...Well, to relieve some pressure, we just punch a few more holes into the bag to take the pressure off of that one hole. :D" *Punches a few holes in the bag, and now oil is everywhere* "See! Perfectly fine! :D"

OldSchoolGamer

When it comes to the reality of the incipient low-carbon era, denial is more than just a river in Egypt...

Farmboy

Well, 28% represents the people, on either side, who will always vote the party line. That's my theory. In every case there is always about 1/3rd for, 1/3rd against, and 1/3rd who have to be convinced which way to vote. So, I think it's actually reasonable to expect this. The trick is to know they exist and try to work the middle.

Vekseid

Quote from: Callie Del Noire on May 12, 2010, 09:51:14 AM
I'm curious to see how the actual questions were phrased and what the polling division was set up like. I am suspicious of results that sound so blatantly bone headed till I see those.

Too many polls can be skewed to make someone look good/bad if you don't see the variance and such. (+/- %-ages and so on)

Nate Silver did a breakdown of the problem - it first asks for general support of drilling, then asks this followup which should have been a yes or no question correlated with the first. Not so much a broken poll, just people wanting to maintain that they are firmly in support of drilling even if it means giving a ridiculous response. Having just been polled myself, you're sometimes asked a lot of weird questions and encouraged to provide an opinion on stuff you might not be too confident about.

DarklingAlice

For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong.


RP7466

You said drilling of the coast, did the question maybe have to do with shallow water drilling as opposed to the deep water? I have heard of that as being an issue because of environmental groups drilling has been mostly in the deep water making the process more complicated.

So maybe because of the spill do you support drilling off the coast as opposed to in deep water?

Didn't take the poll so i don't know, i can see that being a question to come up though.
"It's my only politics... anti-wife. Any woman who devotes herself to making one man miserable instead of a lot of men happy don't get my vote"

John Wayne as Sam McCord

Trieste

Probably. I'm starting to think we should put up huge timelines. This one would include, "June 1979: Ixtoc oil spill rages for 10 months in 160 feet of water. Junk shoot: failed. Top kill: failed. Capping the leak: failed. Relief well: meh."

Etc.

RP7466

yeah 160 feet isn't very deep. Suppost they have the best scientist and engineers finding and extracting the oil, not on stopping the leak that's shitty.
"It's my only politics... anti-wife. Any woman who devotes herself to making one man miserable instead of a lot of men happy don't get my vote"

John Wayne as Sam McCord

Trieste

Ja. They are blaming the environmentalist groups for forcing them into miles of water. I wonder who they blamed in 1979?

Tambit

Perhaps it's like in the movie "The Fifth Element" when Zorg says he is supporting life.  He pushes a glass off the table on all these little robots and things come out to clean up the mess and then give him a new drink.  Now the robots have a purpose; he has helped support the engineers who built them, put money into the power grid to power them, etc.  He has sustained life!

So if there's another oil spill, there'll be even MORE life!!  Right?

(ignore the picture of a dying bird)

Cythieus

We need to drill more and get all the oil out so this can't happen again lmao.

Seriously this doesn't make me want to drill any less, I just think it was handled stupidly. Bomb the well shut, who cares if we can't drill that one anymore?

Vekseid

Problem with the underwater nuke approach (aside from political bs from people who think of radiation like the gullible think of dihydrogen monoxide) is that what you want to do is collapse the well shaft - meaning you need to exert a lot of lateral pressure. In principle, sure, we can do this, we have done this... by drilling into the ground, setting the nuke in, and covering it up.

The only advantage it has over a relief well, if there was no concern about the device handling those depths, is that there is no such thing as missing with a nuke. But you're trading one issue for another, there.

Cythieus

Quote from: Vekseid on June 11, 2010, 01:41:16 PM
Problem with the underwater nuke approach (aside from political bs from people who think of radiation like the gullible think of dihydrogen monoxide) is that what you want to do is collapse the well shaft - meaning you need to exert a lot of lateral pressure. In principle, sure, we can do this, we have done this... by drilling into the ground, setting the nuke in, and covering it up.

The only advantage it has over a relief well, if there was no concern about the device handling those depths, is that there is no such thing as missing with a nuke. But you're trading one issue for another, there.

I understand the danger, but it seems it was never mentioned enough as if it was hidden as a solution and whats more is other oil company spokespeople and the like are doing the old "this is a private issue". Its like no, its not, I'm not even the kind of person to care about the environmental issues really. But I live a mile from the coast and everyone knows what oil does to coast lines, wild life, food supplies and industries that depend on them. But I do realize there's a danger with this of a lot of things. And that a nuke in the gulf wouldn't go over well. But I don't think that oil out there is really going over well either.

Josh the Aspie

I don't normally post here.  But if I wasn't in support of drilling new wells before, this current debacle could make me want them to start the drilling on a new relief well.

Last I saw, the cap was starting to work, but it'd never work 100%, and the only way they knew to completely stop the leek was to mud-pack it.  They already tried that, and it didn't work.  And the only way to reduce that pressure would be to drill a relief well.

So if I previously supported 0 new wells, and I now supported 1 new well, wouldn't that be an increased support for new drilling?

Vekseid

As I understand it, relief wells are inappropriately named. Regardless, drilling to plug a current well is not drilling for more oil.

Cythieus

I don't get how you can not support new wells. Do you think that until we fix the energy crisis and convert things over we'll just no use anything made of oil?

Vekseid

The sensible answer of having both a disaster plan ready and in place, along with strict, thorough and transparent regulations, supplemented by increased public investment in undersea, geological, and other forms of research, combined with aggressive drilling is lost on people.

There are already 'conservatives' complaining about over-regulation. Certain 'liberal' elements see the word 'nuclear' and have an apoplectic fit (where they are actually in part responsible for genuine over-regulation).

Josh the Aspie

The post above didn't say drilling to increase oil production over the long term.  It just said drilling off the coast.

The question is not only what the survey question actually said (which is important), but what people had in mind when they said that the spill increases the amount of drilling they wish to be done.

How far off the coast?  Where the oil spill is?  Do they believe the report that the drilling will help save marine life by reducing oil being pumped into the gulf?

I'm not saying this would be my response on the survey.  The original poster asked how or why people could answer that way.  I tried to present a situation where the though process could be reasonable, if perhaps not the most educated of reasoning.  But then survey takers aren't there to educate, often refuse to elaborate on the question, and those that do often elaborate in ways counter to the assumptions of the survey makers, so people have to guess at what the survey actually means.

After all, to some people a vague term like "off the coast" could mean that anything in the gulf is off the gulf coast (as in not on it).

Because of the question of the original poster I am working backward here, and trying to come up with understandable reasons that people might have answered that way.

((Edits made in an attempt to further clarify my post after re-reading my own post a few more times))

Cythieus

Quote from: Vekseid on June 15, 2010, 11:54:46 PM
The sensible answer of having both a disaster plan ready and in place, along with strict, thorough and transparent regulations, supplemented by increased public investment in undersea, geological, and other forms of research, combined with aggressive drilling is lost on people.

There are already 'conservatives' complaining about over-regulation. Certain 'liberal' elements see the word 'nuclear' and have an apoplectic fit (where they are actually in part responsible for genuine over-regulation).
Nuclear is probably the safest long term bet, but this is also clearly a problem of under regulation. I mean I saw the number of safety violations BP had and it was astronomical. A few of them caused deaths. Yet they were never really troubled about it at all.