Missed an argument
The editorial “Oppose cap-and-trade” missed a vital part of the argument to stop cap-and-trade (OGJ, Mar. 9, 2009, p. 16).
A tax is a simple matter to stop. Putting a cap-and-trade system into place is creating another bureaucracy. As all should know, a bureaucracy never gets undone. It only grows.
Neither system would do anything for climate change. Either of them would be an expensive waste.
Toby Elster
Consulting geologist
Wichita
Platform flyways
The industry cannot thank you too much for publishing “Oil and aviation safety” (OGJ, Mar. 16, 2009, p. 20). Hopefully, responsible parties will buy reprints and circulate them to vital news media worldwide. This would update and support such previous documentaries as the API’s “Steel Reefs” film that showed huge fish swarms around marine offshore petroleum drilling and production platforms.
Particular interest should exist, too, in long-distance bird migration across the Gulf of Mexico. Surely there are instances of exhausted birds resting on such platforms, drinking rainwater collected thereon, and doing their own replenishment fishing before proceeding to their destinations. Perhaps intelligent estimates are published of the number of birds with prolonged lives because these platforms exist.
Since air traffic is now monitored on these installations, they might also monitor migratory bird traffic if so instrumented. Such data should be of interest to a big variety of entities—e.g., the Audubon and National Geographic societies—and might be further documented from various other discrete sources.
Harrison T. Brundage
Retired geologist and technical writer
Houston
