BP and Over-Regulation

It’s been 66 days since BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers and causing an oil spill that’s leaking anywhere between 25,000 and 160,000 barrels of oil per day.

It’s a huge disaster, everyone is angry and pointing fingers, but I think we can all agree on one thing:

We need less offshore drilling regulation.

The BP leak has been going for two months, and we can’t stop it because we don’t know how. And we don’t know how because we’ve never dealt with a leak this severe before. And we’ve never dealt with a leak this severe because of too much regulation. We will eventually figure out how to plug this leak, but it will be too late because we would have already known how to if it wasn’t for those pelican loving regulations.

How ironic that the majestic sea birds we hoped to protect with regulations are the ones we hurt the most. And it’s not just the pelicans that are paying the price. Let’s say the leak is spewing 50,000 barrels of oil a day. Over 66 days that’s 3,300,000 barrels of oil. One barrel of crude oil produces 19.5 gallons of gas, which means we’ve wasted 64,350,000 gallons of unleaded. The current average national price for gasoline is $2.74, so we’ve lost $176,319,000.00. That’s a lot of money.

But if we got this oil spill over in 1999, when gas cost $0.99 per gallon, we’d have only lost $63,706,500.00. That’s a savings of $112,612,500.00, and in this economy every 112,612,500 dollars can help.

When you think about it, the only real tragedy is that no one messed up earlier. So instead of being mad at BP, we should be thankful they made up for lost time before gas prices rose even higher.

Overly Ambitious Ensemble Sketch Team

It’s been a really busy week for my UCB Comedy Beta team, The Brig. We have THREE new videos.

Our latest is Overly Ambitious Ensemble Drama, which Zack Phillips wrote, Jason Guerrero shot and I directed and edited.

The thing about a parody of an overly ambitious ensemble drama is that it’s also an overly ambitious ensemble sketch, but Zack not only wrote such a challenging sketch, he produced it and organized all the actors (Zack and I also probably spent about 8 hours planning out the whole shooting schedule).

Who are the actors? I’m glad you asked. In no particular order: Tim Martin, Amy Heidt, Ben Rameaka, Dru Johnston, Corey Brown, Emily Axford, Shaun Diston, Alex Charak, Rob Michael Hugel, Matt Fisher, Kim Ferguson, Verónica Osorio, Jason Saenz, Don Fanelli, Will Hines, Jon Gutierrez, Amber Petty, Dan Hodapp, Brandon Gardner, Josh Patten, Molly Lloyd, Keith Bethea, Jordan Hirsch, Matt Starr, Eddie Brawley, Will Storie, Matt Cutler, Amanda Hirsch, Drew Tarvin, Jeff Wisniewski, Scott Yacyshyn, Dave Bluvband, Ben Ragheb, Matt Mayer, Adam Sacks, Morgan Evans, Zack Phillips and Jason Guerrero.

Also out this week is Time Life’s Rough Drafts Music Collection. Written and directed by Matt Mayer, and featuring the singing of Eliza Skinner, Morgan Phillips and Matt Mayer.

Rough Draft Music Collection
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Finally, here is BP’s spokesman pointing out the brighter side of their oil leak.

BP: Rich Fish
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Written by Jon Gutierrez, directed by Matt Mayer, edited by Nathan Russell and starring Andy Secunda.

And that’s all. Just three videos. If you want more per week, you just have to to pay our rents.