BBC:

The major oil companies drilling off the US coastline are as unprepared as BP for a major spill, the chairman of a Congressional panel has said.

Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell all have identical response plans to BP, Henry Waxman told the House energy and commerce committee.

BP's US chief Lamar McKay is to give evidence over the Gulf disaster amid damning accusations BP took shortcuts.

How loud and endless has been the praise for capitalist technological innovation. Even Marx was a leading member of this chorus:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

But when you look at the roots of the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico we see that technological change in the capitalist mode of production has severe and dangerous limitations. The things that develop most rapidly in this economic condition tend have direct (rather than indirect) economic results. So, a machine that drills the depths will develop much faster than a machine that might prevent or clean a spill. The pressures to develop the former technology are considerably higher than the pressures to develop the latter. The major oil companies are not prepared to deal with spills because any preparation for the unseen (accidents) is all about cost and nothing to do with profit. Indeed, it's more profitable for them to pay for political policies that remove regulations that lead to preparation expenses. In the capitalist mode of production, the pressures for technological development will always be weak or slow when it comes to something as intangible as prevention.