Wednesday, May 5, 2010 | 2:04 a.m.
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The Las Vegas Sun made an excellent point in Tuesday’s editorial that failure to install a half-million-dollar sonic shut-off valve might have limited the environmental impact of the BP oil well explosion. This was apparently a very expensive lesson that can be corrected.
But other journalists and commentators are parroting the environmentalists’ calls to stop drilling. They ignore the fact that we import a half a trillion dollars worth of oil annually that arrives in massive tankers. One tanker breakup would make this well blowout look benign.
We need the oil, and new technology to reduce that need is a long way off. Environmentalists need to compromise and get behind drilling in Alaska and developing the West’s shale oil if they really want to minimize the risks.
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