Instead of devoting its efforts to social engineering, why hasn't the EPA required that drillers develop remedies for calamities?

Reckless capitalism resulted in the Gulf oil explosion and resulting spill, which will do incalculable damage before it is remediated.

Reckless social engineering, inspired by leftist schemes to place all human activity under governmental control, bears responsibility for the failure to have control mechanisms in place to deal with the oil platform explosion and resulting catastrophe.

The event itself was predictable, if not in detail. Something, somewhere, was going to interfere with completion of a deep-sea oil well. What would happen then? Were there any shut-off valves spaced along the completed portions of the pipeline. Was there a system in place to cap the pipeline at the break?

In a rational political system, the Environmental Protection Agency, which is, after all, charged with protecting the natural environment, might have asked such questions and acted on the answers.

The EPA, however, is not much interested in such mundane questions. The EPA is more interested in seeing that carbon dioxide, which plants inhale before exhaling oxygen, in a natural process essential to life, be designated a dangerous gas that eventually will cause the oceans to boil.

That is the entry-level argument that the EPA makes in its effort to persuade American voters to cede their preferences, including their source of power supply, to the government, which could then shut coal mines and nuclear power plants and dot the countryside with windmills.

In other words, the EPA wants the United States to adopt a policy that has proved to be a catastrophic failure in Spain.

Why hasn't the EPA spent its time insisting that deep-sea oil drillers have mechanisms and plans in place to deal with an explosion that results in oil gushing from a pipeline one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico?

The real answer is that there is no romance and little applause to be had from providing practical answers to inevitable calamities.

The romance lies in reengineering American society so that the leftists who provide the plans can determine how people live, what they buy, and when they die.

This plan is readily available. It's called the Obama agenda.