*Without Reform to Federal Oil and Gas Drilling Requirements, U.S. Taxpayers Could Face a Nearly $18B Clean-Up Bill.*

The decision to count only drilling on federal lands omits a large part of the oil drilling, but the fossil companies are clever at skipping out on their future responsibilities. Ultimately the public will have to pay for much of that cleanup too.

But full cleanup is not always feasible. The oil from the Big Spill is still present on beaches on the US Gulf Coast, and still slowly poisons wildlife, although it does not attract attention by killing massive numbers of animals at once.

These costs of cleanup are just a tiny fraction of the cost of the additional disasters that burning the petroleum will cause. But this fraction is easy to prevent, so we would be fools not to do so.