August 08, 2010
The NYT has a very good piece on the Minerals Management Service and the culture at the agency that led to a disregard of safety and environmental concerns. However, it gets an important point dead wrong at the very beginning. It begins by discussing a lease auction held in March of 1997 and tells readers that this was a period of rising oil prices.
That’s not what the data show. Oil prices had been weak throughout the 90s and were headed down in March of 1997. At that point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, oil prices were near their lowest level of the post-war period. This can be seen as a secondary issue in terms of the article’s main focus, but it is important to recognize that the world was not suffering from anything resembling an oil shortage at the time that that the government began this renewed push to open the Gulf to drilling.
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