Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening.
Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall.
You’re reading Dispatch Markets, a weekly newsletter on economics featuring Scott Lincicome, Kyla Scanlon, Karl Smith, and Marian Tupy. To access more Dispatch reporting and analysis, become a member today.
You’d think that the easiest job in government would be enforcing the law on people who want to comply with it—but, as it turns out, it is not that simple.
If you’ve spent much time around the oil-and-gas business, you’ll have heard executives talk about “high compliance” when it comes to environmental and workplace safety rules, by which they basically mean giving regulators everything they ask for plus about 5 percent extra, interpreting vague mandates or rules in a stricter way rather than in a more self-indulgent way. You might think that sounds like companies are working against their own interests at the regulatory margins, but the opposite is the case: Work interruptions and entanglements in regulatory snafus generally cost a hell of a lot more than a little bit of extra scrupulosity where government rules are concerned, and—because real life is not a dystopian Hollywood fantasy—oil and gas producers do not actually want to pollute the groundwater or endanger their employees and neighbors.
