Last Thursday’s fire on a shallow-water oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico claimed no lives and has caused no environmental damage. It was, however, a nerve-racking reminder that extracting fossil fuels is an inherently dangerous business. As such, it was a very good argument for maintaining the present moratorium on deep-water drilling in the gulf and removing it only when industry has met the standards the administration set forth in the spring.

President Obama imposed a six-month suspension on deep-water drilling in the gulf on May 27, one month after the BP oil spill. On the same day, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar published a set of detailed safety and engineering conditions that industry must satisfy before drilling could resume. These included specific requirements for state-of-the-art blowout preventers — the equipment that failed on the Deepwater Horizon rig — a host of other safeguards and a demonstrable capacity to respond to major accidents.

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