Group items tagged

10 MAY 2010: ANALYSIS The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen The oil slick spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has shattered the notion that offshore drilling had become safe. A close look at the accident shows that lax federal oversight, complacency by BP and the other companies involved, and the complexities of drilling a mile deep all combined to create the perfect environmental storm. by john mcquaid It's hard to believe now, as oil from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon well encroaches on the Louisiana marshes. But it was only six weeks ago that President Obama announced a major push to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. Obama's commitment to lift a moratorium on offshore drilling reflected the widely-held belief that offshore oil operations, once perceived as dirty and dangerous, were now so safe and technologically advanced that the risks of a major disaster were infinitesimal, and managing them a matter of technocratic skill. But in the space of two weeks, both the politics and the practice of offshore drilling have been turned upside down. Today, the notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd. The Gulf spill harks back to drilling disasters from decades past - including one off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. in 1969 that dumped three million gallons into coastal waters and led to the current moratorium. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a classic "low probability, high impact event" - the kind we've seen more than our share of recently, including space shuttle disasters, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. And if there's a single lesson from those disparate catastrophes, it's that pre-disaster assumptions tend to be dramatically off-base, and the worst-case scenarios downplayed or ignored. The Gulf spill is no exception. Getty Images/U.S. Coast Guard Fire boats battle the fire on the oil rig Deepwater Horizon after the April 21 explosion. The post-mortems are only beginning, so the precise causes of the initial

Normal accidents: living with high-risk technologies Charles Perrow 2 Resenhas Princeton University Press, 1999 - 451 páginas Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk--complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling--this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them.The first edition fulfilled one reviewer's prediction that it "may mark the beginning of accident research." In the new afterword to this edition Perrow reviews the extensive work on the major accidents of the last fifteen years, including Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger disaster. The new postscript probes what the author considers to be the "quintessential 'Normal Accident'" of our time: the Y2K computer problem.

From the oil spill to the financial crisis, why we don't plan for the worst Network News X PROFILE View More Activity TOOLBOX Resize Print E-mail Yahoo! Buzz Reprints   COMMENT 50 Comments  |  View All »  COMMENTS ARE CLOSED WHO'S BLOGGING » Links to this article By Richard A. Posner Sunday, June 6, 2010 The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the latest of several recent disastrous events for which the country, or the world, was unprepared. Setting aside terrorist attacks, where the element of surprise is part of the plan, that still leaves the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global economic crisis that began in 2008 (and was aggravated by Greece's recent financial collapse) and the earthquake in Haiti in January. THIS STORY If it seems unthinkable, plan for it Why is BP's CEO still on the job? In all these cases, observers recognized the existence of catastrophic risk but deemed it to be small. Many other risks like this are lying in wait, whether a lethal flu epidemic, widespread extinctions, nuclear accidents, abrupt global warming that causes a sudden and catastrophic rise in sea levels, or a collision with an asteroid. Why are we so ill prepared for these disasters? It helps to consider an almost-forgotten case in which risks were identified, planned for and averted: the Y2K threat (or "millennium bug") of 1999. As the turn of the century approached, many feared that computers throughout the world would fail when the two-digit dates in their operating systems suddenly flipped from 99 to 00. The risk of disaster probably was quite small, but the fact that it had a specific and known date made it irrational to postpone any remedies -- it was act now or not at all. Such certainty about timing is rare; indeed, a key obstacle to taking preventive measures against unlikely disasters is precisely that they are unlikely to occur in the near future. Of course, if the consequences of the disaster would be very grave, t

Socializing Risk: The New Energy Economics May 27, 2010frankackermanLeave a commentGo to comments from Frank Ackerman Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department's Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames and then sink, causing oil to gush out uncontrollably and befoul the oceans. The odds seemed low, and still do: Aren't there lots of drilling rigs in use, year after year? Twenty years ago, your elected representatives thought that you'd be happy to have them adopt a very low cap on industry's liability for oil spill damages.  Nuclear power was never quite free of fears; it was too clearly a spin-off of nuclear weapons to ignore the risk of a very big bang. Yet as its advocates point out, we have had hundreds of reactor-years of experience, with only a few accidents. (And someday when Nevada's politicians aren't looking, maybe we can slip all of our nuclear waste into a cave in the desert.) Again, the risks are so low that you'd be happy to learn about a law limiting industry's liability for accidents, wouldn't you?  Environmentalists have long warned that the world could run out of energy and resources, from the "limits to growth" theories of the 1970s to the more recently popular notion of "peak oil." The response from economists has been that prices for energy and raw materials are still moderate, and declined over the course of the 20th century; if we are running out of something, why doesn't its price skyrocket? The problem is that what we're running out of is low-risk conventional energy supplies. Because our economy conceals and socializes energy risks, prices remain deceptively low for an increasingly risky energy supply. The market wasn't supposed to work this way. In the

The Perfect Spill: Solutions for Averting the Next Deepwater Horizon By Robert Costanza, David Batker, John Day, Rusty Feagin, M. Luisa Martinez, Joe Roman National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) f we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction-if we don't factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs-we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future." -President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010 he continuing oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon is causing enormous economic and ecological damage. Estimates of the size and duration continue to escalate, but it is now the largest in U.S. history and clearly among the largest oil spills on record.1 s efforts to plug the leak and clean up the damages continue, it is not too soon to begin to draw lessons from this disaster. We need to learn from this experience so we can prevent future oil spills, reevaluate society's current trajectory, and set a better course. ne major lesson is that our natural capital assets and other public goods are far too valuable to continue to put them at such high risk from private interests. We need better (not necessarily more) regulation and strong incentives to protect these assets against actions that put them at risk. While the Obama administration's demand for a trust fund to compensate injured parties is appropriate, it arrived only after the fact. Common asset trusts and new financial instruments like assurance bonds would be better able to shift risk incentives and prevent disasters like the Deepwater Horizon. The Costs: Damages to Natural Capital Assets he spill has directly and indirectly affected at least 20 categories of valuable ecosystem services in and around the Gulf of Mexico. The $2.5 billion per year Louisiana commercial fishery has been almost completely shut down. As the oil extends to popular Gulf Coast beaches, the loss of tourism

The central goal of this book is to provide a state of the art overview of the literature with respect to the economic analysis of tort law. It sure meets the challenge, offering with great expertise a comprehensive presentation of tort law in both economic and comparative perspectives. The clarity of the text, unusual in the law and economics literature, makes the book accessible to a broad readership of economists with a limited legal background and lawyers with limited economic skills.' Olivier Moreteau, Louisiana State University, US 'Tort Law and Economics, ed. Michael Faure, provides a highly useful economic overview of the most important topics of tort law. The authors clearly show the main developments of the discussion, examining the results of recent studies and stating their own opinions. Detailed bibliographies are included. The volume has to be warmly recommended to friends and foes of economic analysis who are provided with a comprehensive update in this field while also indicating areas which critics have to focus on.' Helmut Koziol, European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law, Austria This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the literature on the economic analysis of tort law. In sixteen chapters, the specialist authors guide the reader through the often vast literature in each domain providing a balanced and comprehensive summary. Particular attention is paid to the evolution of the field, further refinements to economic models and relevant conclusions and lessons for the policymaker. Tort Law and Economics is part of the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, and enables readers, some not familiar with law and economics, to obtain an insight in the relevant economic literature concerning tort law and economics. This book will be of interest to lawyers and economists, practitioners and academics interested in accident law, tort law, insurance and regulation. It will also appeal to students in economic analysis of law and policymakers working on

About the Deepwater Horizon Study Group   The Deepwater Horizon Study Group was formed by members of the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) in May 2010  in response to the explosion and fire at British Petroleum's Deepwater  Horizon well on April 20, 2010.  CCRM is a group of academic researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines who attempt to share their knowledge of safety, organizational reliability and the mitigation of adverse human and natural events.   CCRM researchers have laudable expertise in engineering, law, the offshore petroleum industry, accident investigation, protection of sensitive environments, and in organizational management for dangerous environments.  Prompted by inquiries from industries, government agencies, the news media, and concerned individuals around the world regarding the causes and possible remediation of the oil spill at Deepwater Horizon, CCRM members organized the Deepwater Horizon Study Group (DHSG) to consider ways they might help to mitigate the effects of this incident.  DHSG is comprised of faculty members from the University of California and other institutions, accident investigators, petroleum engineers, social scientists, environmental advocates, and directors of research centers. DHSG members identified critical goals for the better understanding and prevention or mitigation of future accidents.  The first goal of DHSG is to capture facts and observations from workers, managers, witnesses, regulatory agencies, and other sources that may be lost if not gathered and preserved immediately.   An archive for this evidence will be established and accessible to interested researchers and investigators.  DHSG will produce its own in-progress reports and analyses of this incident from these data.  Finally, DHSG will attempt to disseminate the results of its inquiry and analysis to the public, to national and local governments, to industries that must operate in potentially dangerous environ

The next catastrophe: reducing our vulnerabilities to natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters Charles Perrow 3 Resenhas Princeton University Press, 2007 - 377 páginas Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. InThe Next Catastrophe, he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness. Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their size to minimize damage and diminish their attractiveness to terrorists. He focuses on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--and shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow reveals how the threat of catastrophe is on the rise, whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. Along the way, he gives us the first comprehensive history of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect us. The Next Catastropheis a penetrating reassessment of the very real dangers we face today and what we must do to confront them. Written in a highly accessible style by a renowned systems-behavior expert, this book is essential reading for the twenty-first century. The events of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina--and the devastating human toll they wrought--were only the beginning. When the next big disaster comes, will we be ready?

ArticlesOnline Exclusives Questioning World Risk Society: Three Challenges for Research on the Governance of Uncertainty By Fabrizio Cantelli, Naonori Kodate, Kristian Krieger The concept of the World Risk Society (Beck, 1998) is often associated with major disasters and accidents. And indeed, safety from the forces of nature can no longer be taken for granted even by the population of industrialised countries, as an increasing number of floods, hurricanes and winter storms over the last two decades demonstrates. Similarly, industrial accidents, such as Chernobyl, Sandoz and Bhopal, cause severe and lasting damages to human health and the environment (Perrow, 1999). In view of accelerating technological change and increased competitive pressures, as well as climate change, it is reasonable to expect that such disasters will continue to undermine the safety of the population and commentators will keep on referring to the idea of a 'risk society'. While the association of the concept of a risk society with disasters is not wrong, it is incomplete. Developed by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in the mid-1980s (1991, 1995, 1996, 1998), the idea of an emergent risk society refers to a fundamental transformation or modernisation of industrial societies. More specifically, increasingly individualised and disembedded citizens question - partly in view of the devastating consequences of industrial production - the very foundations of the society, most notably the belief in economic growth, and political, technological and scientific control of production. This 'questioning' of the foundations results in 'reflexive modernisation'.

seful, simple graphic showing twenty years of trends in Gulf of Mexico oil production by water depth. In the figure, shallow is 0-999 ft, deepwater is 1,000-4,999 ft, and ultra-deepwater is anything over 5,000 ft. As I've been arguing, part of what we're seeing here is the inevitable "normal accidents" from changing technology as we transition from one extraction depth regime to another.

Managing disaster risk in Mexico: Market Incentives for Mitigation Investment Alcira Kreimer, World Bank 0 Resenhas World Bank Publications, 1999 - 57 páginas Disaster Risk Management Series. Since 1980, Mexico has suffered from 79 disaster events. Over half of these disasters were weather related, such as hurricanes or flooding. One fourth of them were geology related, that is, volcanic eruptions, landslides, or earthquakes. The rest of them were instigated by humans in the form of industrial accidents, chemical and oil spills, explosions, and structural fires. Mexico was chosen for the first appraisal mission due to its experience with natural disaster losses, and because it is considering significant public policy changes in the realm of insurance regulations. The World Bank established the Disaster Management Facility in July 1999 to provide proactive leadership in coordinating efforts to introduce disaster prevention and mitigation practices in development-related activities. This report synthesizes the findings of a World Bank mission to Mexico on disaster management, mitigation, and financing, which was followed up by a workshop to discuss those findings. The scope of this study is quite broad and examines the following issues: -- Mexico's experience with disasters of all kinds; -- how risk and vulnerability are assessed and can be assessed as a means toward greater mitigation, that is, better planning and construction standards; -- disaster mitigation in practice; -- the specific contribution that the insurance industry can make to disaster mitigation in Mexico, and why this industry is so underutilized at present; and, -- the government's role in risk transfer as a way of enhancing mitigation especially through the operation of its Natural Disaster Fund, FONDEN.

Handbook of environmental risk assessment and management Peter Calow 0 Resenhas Wiley-Blackwell, 1998 - 590 páginas At the heart of environmental protection is risk assessment: the likelihood of pollution from accidents; the likelihood of problems from normal and abnormal operation of industrial processes; the likely impacts associated with new synthetic chemicals; and so on. Currently, risk assessment has been very much in the news--the risks from BSE and E. coli, and the public perception of risks from nuclear waste, etc. This new publication explains how scientific methodologies are used to assess risk from human activities and the resultant objects and wastes, on people and the environment. Understanding such risks supplies crucial information--to frame legislation, manage major habitats, businesses and industries, and create development programmes. Unique in combining the science of risk assessment with the development of management strategies. Covers science and social science (politics, economics, psychology) aspects. Very timely - risk assessment lies at the heart of decision making in various topical environmental questions (BSE, Brent Spar, nuclear waste).

Offshore Oil and Gas Development in Northwest Russia: Consequences and Implications Original title: Offshore Oil and Gas Development in Northwest Russia: Consequences and Implications Report number: 2007 Authors: Nina Lesikhina, Irina Rudaya, Anna Kireeva, Olga Krivonos, Elena Kobets Publisher: Bellona Format: ISBN: ISSN: Price: 0 Download the report: Conclusion for Oil and Gas Report (0.05MB) Chapter 5. Environmental impact of oil and gas activity in the Arctic (1.23MB) Chapter 4. Oil and gas accidents prevention and liquidation (0.34MB) Chapter 3. Environmental risks when extracting and exporting oil and gas (0.79MB) Chapter 2. Transporting oil and gas in Northwest Russia (0.49MB) Chapter 1. Oil and gas resources on the Arctic Continental shelf in Russia (1.06MB) Introduction for Oil and Gas Report (0.03MB)

Responsabilidade Civil e Análise Econômica Horas-aula: 30 Professor(es): Eugênio Battesini, Marco Fridolin Sommer Santos Súmula Fundamentos teóricos de análise econômica da responsabilidade civil: Antecedentes históricos. Objetivos do sistema de responsabilidade civil. Metodologia, análise positiva e normativa. Causação unilateral, níveis de precaução e negligência. Causação bilateral e culpa concorrente, cooperação entre as partes e aplicação da teoria dos jogos. Formatação das regras de responsabilidade civil. Assimetria de informações e relação agente-principal, reflexos na responsabilização civil. Risco da atividade e sistemas de seguro. Reparação e quantificação dos danos. Análise econômica dos regimes especiais de responsabilidade civil: Acidente do Trabalho. Danos ambientais. Responsabilidade profissional. Relações de consumo. Acidentes de trânsito, Transporte, etc... Objetivos da Disciplina A disciplina tem por objetivo qualificar o corpo discente, transmitindo-lhes conhecimentos que lhes permitam interpretar os sistemas de compensação de danos, com ênfase para o sistema de responsabilidade civil, através do instrumental da análise econômica do direito. Metodologia de Ensino Aulas expositivas e debates. Critérios de Avaliação Trabalho de conclusão da disciplina. Bibliografia ALPA, Guido, CHIASSONI, Pierluigi, PERICU, Andréa, PULITINI, Francesco, RODOTÀ, Stefano, ROMANI, Francesco, Analisi Economica del Diritto Privato. Milano: Giuffrè, 1998. BOUCKAERT, Boudewijn; De GEEST, Gerit (org.). Encyclopedia of law and economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2000. 1094 p. CANE, Peter. Atiyah's accidents, compensation and the law. London: Buttenworths, 1999. COLOMA, German. Analisis economico del derecho. Buenos Aires: Ciudad Argentina, 2001. COOTER, Robert; ULEN Thomas. Derecho e economia. México, FCE, 1999. HATZIS, Aritides (org.) Economic analysis of law: a european perspective. Cheltenham: Edward El

In this paper we analyze the factors that should be considered when allocating a given policy function at a particular level of government and how these factors affect the growth and evolution of multi-level governments. After discussing the interplay of economies of scale, economies of scope, and heterogeneity of preferences in determining the optimal level of legal intervention, we show that the subsidiarity principle can have mixed effects as a firewall against progressive centralization. Our economic model of subsidiarity reveals that once some functions become centralized, further centralization becomes easier and often unavoidable. Contrary to its intended function, a piecemeal application of the subsidiarity principle can trigger a path-dependent avalanche of centralization, turning subsidiarity into a self-defeating statement of principle.