Stop blaming Obama for oil spill

Good back and forth between David Brooks and Gail Collins of the NYT on the oil spill and the rage that it has stoked.

David Brooks: The crude reality is that life involves risk. Sometimes airplanes crash and hundreds of people die. Sometimes coal mines collapse. Sometimes oil drilling technology goes kablooie. We should regulate these industries to maximize safety while still allowing them to be viable. After an accident or a crash, blame, if there is any, should be assigned and the company should pay damages. But I don't really understand why an oil spill brings out a torrent of rage when a plane crash, say, brings out much less. It's arguable that a plane crash that decimates hundreds of families is much worse than what is happening in the gulf. There's something about the energy industry that touches a quasi-religious nerve.

Gail Collins: Do you have any solutions? I'm tempted to go with the classic knee-jerk reaction and say that we shouldn't be drilling offshore. Didn't feel that way before, but BP is making a convert of me. Or at minimum, there shouldn't be drilling to depths so extreme that nobody but the perpetrators of the leak has the capacity to fix the damage.

David Brooks: The fact that an industry with inherent riskiness sometimes produces catastrophes hasn't really changed my view of the industry. Less offshore drilling just means more oil tankers, a more environmentally risky mode of getting our energy.