As it turns out, BP wasn't even good capitalists because it would have only cost them pennies on the dollar to put the proper acoustic blow out valves on that rig vs what it will cost to "clean it up." Nobody wins from this decision to save $500,000 on a safety valve: shareholders, consumers, or the public. "Clean it up," by the way, is in quotation marks because as we learned in Prince William Sound 20 years after the Exxon-Valdez spill, some places are "nearly as toxic as it was the first few weeks after the spill," according to the council overseeing restoration efforts.
But the anti regulatory types want to get government off the backs of industry. So there you go. No meaningful oversight on faulty equipment that puts the public commons at risk. That can only be a function of government. Large corporations simply can not be trusted to be good tenants of the public domain.
In 1979, a structurally similar mishap effectively stopped the expansion of the nuclear power industry in the US. Are we better off now without the dozens, perhaps 100s, of new plants that never went on line? A reasonable person could disagree, but I think not.
As a result of Three Mile Island and Chernobol, the private sector no longer makes building loans for these power plants so any nuclear that gets built here is funded by the government. Also, the private sector will not insure these plants (that ought to be a red flag) so your government ends up providing the insurance. And I thought you guys despised that kind of socialism.
Nuclear has been an over-the-top expensive white elephant. It sounds to me like the market has spoken so why not put government resources into incentives for clean renewables?
"Conservation" is the root word for conservative. I don't understand why conservatives are fighting this transition.