So unless we’re willing to reduce our standard of living significantly or increase our reliance on imported oil, we will need to continue drilling off our coasts. All economic activity entails some risk. For example, 34,000 Americans are killed annually on our nation’s roads. This is a major cause of death, and yet we accept this as the cost of mobility and transportation. Right now, there is a risk of an overreaction to the loss of life and the environmental costs from the Gulf disaster. But that would have unintended consequences that are more costly than the losses incurred by the oil spill, however large.

If it’s remotely possible, let’s inject some sanity into the oil leak that’s stopped the world from spinning. In 1991, as Saddam Hussein’s forces retreated from Kuwait, they dumped 8 million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf. That still stands as the biggest oil spill in history. So, what were the lasting catastrophic effects?

How did the Western world reach this point? Well, as my correspondent put it, we assumed that we were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it? The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work: the modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him. So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it.

Amidst all of our discussions about energy and power we must keep the issue of scale foremost in mind. We cannot, we will not, make a major change in our energy and power delivery systems at any time in the near future because the vast scale of those systems will make any transition away from our existing systems slow and expensive.

According to 2007 OECD data, U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP is actually slightly above the average of (Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. government outspends Canada, too! And since U.S. GDP per capita is higher, the U.S. government actually spends a lot more dollars per person than the average country in Europe.

This kind of disaster is what the Yale University sociologist Charles Perrow has famously called a “normal accident.” By “normal” Perrow does not mean that it is frequent; he means that it is the kind of accident one can expect in the normal functioning of a technologically complex operation. Modern systems, Perrow argues, are made up of thousands of parts, all of which interrelate in ways that are impossible to anticipate. Given that complexity, he says, it is almost inevitable that some combinations of minor failures will eventually amount to something catastrophic. In a classic 1984 treatise on accidents, Perrow takes examples of well-known plane crashes, oil spills, chemical-plant explosions, and nuclear-weapons mishaps and shows how many of them are best understood as “normal.”