JUNE 25 / The Houston Chronicle feels the oil industry's pain

IT REALLY does. Just not enough to . . .

. . . oppose the administration's six-month deepwater drilling ban. 

Instead, the editors on Wednesday gave us reportage (the moratorium "hasn't sat well with many Gulf Coast lawmakers and . . . businesses . . . to say the least"), sympathy ("We feel the industry's pain."), and milder-than-milquetoast jabs at the president (He "missed a fine opportunity to show leadership . . . .").

But as for opposing the ban, no could do.

"[It] isn't that simple."

Compared with the Chronicle's 851 words of public anguishing about the drilling ban, Hamlet was a model of decisiveness.  

The editors were paralyzed between the reality principle (oil is good; it fuels our economy; we need a bunch of it; the ban will hurt the local and national economies) and the left's many pleasure principles (oil is bad; anything that causes us to produce and consume less is good; the weather is hot; it's all our fault; so give us your money and do as we say). 

Which principle won out in Wednesday's smackdown?

The Chronicle might say the editorial was evenhanded and didn't, you know, take sides.

But it did, really. By not calling for an end to the drilling moratorium, the newspaper implicitly supported the ban. Saying a few unkind things about it doesn't really count. 

And by supporting the drilling ban, even while admitting the economic damage it will cause, the editors can be said to intend that economic damage should occur.

How?

Under what is known in the common law as objective intent.

Subjective intent is what is going on in the recesses of the mind, which is unknowable as a practical matter.

If a person loads a pistol, for instance, and points it at someone and pulls the trigger, then says he did not really intend, in his heart of hearts, to kill or injure the person on the receiving end, who's to say that he's not right?

But the objective intent of someone who does such a thing is clear enough, and he is presumed to have intended the harm he caused. Call it common sense.

So with the Chronicle. The newspaper favors a policy that it knows will harm the economy; therefore the newspaper can be said to intend to harm the economy.

To read the gutless editorial, if you must, go here: "Moratorium worries: No simple answers on right way forward for Gulf exploration and drilling," Houston Chronicle, June 23, 2010.

* * *

The editors' allegedly evenhanded approach to energy policy is an exception to the general rule at the newspaper, which is to uncritically support leftwing policies -- more taxing, borrowing, and spending our kids into oblivion, more regulation, more welfare statism, more judicial activism, more Californianism -- without ever admitting the harm they cause. 

One good thing about the editorial, however: It never once invoked a metaphorical bridge to the Promised Land Beyond Petroleum.   

Here: Krauthammer on why the administration won't back down on the drilling ban. The same arguments help explain the Chronicle's refusal to condemn the ban.  

Comments

[Jeff]

Lying on environmental impact statements is okay. Having no plan to clean up spills is okay. Having regulators who have been looking the other way for decades and can't be fired because they're government bureaucrats, not political appointees, is okay. We don't care about Gulf Coast shrimpers; their jobs don't count. We can eat farmed shrimp imported from Thailand anyway when there's nothing available to "buy American." We don't swim in the Gulf anyway, it's too salty; we prefer the freshwater pools in our expensive beachfront hotels anyway. Anyway, there will be no beach; it will all be washed away once they build the Ike Dike, and nobody will want to pay for replenishment because there's no sand nearby. Offshore bottoms around here are all mud.

[Rorschach]

Ironically when much of the city is unemployed, Houstonians will be cutting back on unnecessary expenditures in order to make the unemployment insurance stretch as far as possible. And one of those expenditures will be the newspaper subscription.