An Imminent Danger

This is very disturbing news from the New York Times:

"A federal judge in New Orleans issued an injunction against a six-month moratorium on new deep-water oil and gas drilling projects that was imposed by the Obama administration after an explosion on a drilling rig led to a vast oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Associated Press reported.

The White House said the administration would appeal the ruling. Ruling in favor of oilfield services companies whose business suffered under the moratorium, District Judge Martin Feldman said that the Interior Department failed to provide adequate reasoning for the moratorium, and instead merely seemed to
assume that one rig failure meant all deep-water drilling posed an imminent danger."
Read More:  http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/22/us/AP-US-Gulf-Oil-Spill.html?emc=na

Why doesn't this "one rig failure" mean all deep-water drilling poses an imminent danger?  Couldn't the same thing happen to the other rigs, with the same oversights and shortcuts being taken?  We won't know for a long time just how great a catastrophe this spill has been, and how far-reaching the damages.  Many people along the coast are already out of work - people who could be put to work and want to work.  It's way past time that we seriously engage ourselves in alternate, clean energy sources -- I'm not saying that people who have spent their lives fishing will be able to suddenly change careers -- I ache for them -- but we should investigate ways for them to maintain their livelihoods.

I think it'd be great if President Obama  instituted a new WPA, (see http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/do-we-need-another-wpa

not only to employ manual laborers to repair our infrastructure (to avoid future structural disasters like the Minneapolis bridge collapse), but to put writers to work, as was done with the WPA Federal Writers' Project.  According to Kevin Nance in the current issue of Poets and Writers Magazine, "Employing up to 7,500 people annually during its four-year run, the Writers’ Project nurtured a generation of authors who otherwise might have been forced into nonliterary careers." 

Why not do the same again?