Well, I guess economics is what it's really all about, isn't it?

But if you're going to adopt that attitude, then you need to address the real costs and benefits to everyone involved. I'd be willing to bet if we could find some way to really assess the true costs of oil to the entire economy, over all time, (i.e., if the oil industry would have to help pay the environmental, social and even military costs of an oil economy, the cost of oil would skyrocket, making it suddenly a lot less attractive). At the very least, we wouldn't have been so wasteful of it in the past.

Put it another way, if BP has to pay it's fair share of the clean-up and economic damage caused by this spill, other companies may suddenly decide that drilling offshore is simply not worth the price of insurance. Many modern technologies, (the automobile and all its associated infrastructure, for example), only make sense when the true cost is subsidized by the consumer. This is the dirty little secret the boosters never like to bring up.

Something very similar happened with nuclear power. The utility companies were perfectly willing to build the plants and market the power, but they did not pay for the initial research that made them possible, they could not pay for the insurance needed to operate them, and they would not pay for the fuel reprocessing costs that would make them safe and economical in the long run. Hidden costs again, and those are usually paid for by the taxpayers and the consumers.

If BP doesn't pay up, then who will? And who will pay the next time there's a spill? No matter how good our technology is, part of its cost will have to be devoted into clean-ups, just like part of our personal transportation budget must go into collision insurance.

No one is suggesting we go back to the horse and buggy era, and accusing critics of advocating that is a convenient way of evading the real issue. But we have to be ready to pay the real cost of technology, not just the up-front cost of ripping the resource out of the earth. The fossil fuel economy is incredibly expensive, it's cost is not just in what we pay for a gallon of gas, it is also hidden in every penny we pay to keep it flowing to our shores.
Part of that cost goes into little things like aircraft carrier battle groups, which are now an essential part of the "energy supply infrastructure" because we pissed away all our cheap oil and we have to be ready to fight for it now.

And no matter how much we drill offshore, or in pristine public lands, we still will need to maintain a fleet to guarantee the bulk of our oil we need from overseas. How much does BP and its sister companies contribute to that?