George H. W. Bush tried it, but the courts defeated him.

George W. Bush tried it, but the courts defeated him, too.

And now Obama and his underlings at the US Department of the Interior have given Shell Oil permission to drill offshore in the Beaufort Sea, and if anything goes wrong, nobody can fix it.

“Beaufort Sea” sounds like an obscure little body of water, but it actually encompasses about 170,000 square miles, and that’s a lot of water, all of it sitting right at the top of the world, all around the North Pole, where sea ice would make it virtually impossible to clean up an oil spill.

But not to worry!

Shell Oil promises that nothing will ever go wrong, and denizens of the Arctic like bowhead whales and the Inupiat people won’t even know that huge wells have been drilled in the seabed.

Never mind that sometimes something goes wrong with oil in the Arctic, like a 267,000 gallon spill at Prudhoe Bay in February 2006, which nobody even noticed for almost a week, although that was an onshore spill and significantly easier to notice than a spill hundreds of feet underwater.

It’s a peculiar little factoid about the spill at Prudhoe Bay that all that oil leaked out of a hole that was only 1/4th inch in diameter. 267,000 gallons of oil ran out a tiny little hole, not much bigger than a soda straw!

But enough oil to fill up a couple of million cans of soda ran through that tiny hole, no bigger than a soda straw, before anybody even noticed.

And that was a hole in a pipeline, where all you have to do is turn a valve and the flow of oil will stop, so you can patch that tiny hole.

So what could go wrong a few hundred feet under what’s left of polar ice? What could go wrong where enormous well-head pressure makes a pipeline look like a soda straw? What could go wrong where nobody can clean up oil under ice that plays a crucial role in the climate of Planet Earth?

What could go wrong?

Nothing, says Shell Oil, and we might as well believe them, while we can.