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Transocean should have called their drilling rig Deepwater Hubris, not Deepwater Horizon, because hubris is the primary cause of this ongoing environmental disaster. In fact, the main lesson to be learned from this is that hubris is always dangerous, but hubris a mile below the surface of the sea is disastrous.

Hubris is defined as supreme overconfidence, even arrogance, especially as it relates to one’s ability or competence. This description can be applied to everyone involved in this environmental debacle, from BP executives to Transocean rig managers, to the hapless men and women of the Minerals Management Service, whose sloth, complacency  and incompetent give new meaning to the cliche, “Good enough for government work.”

It defies belief that BP, behind schedule and over budget, would seek to cap the well with untried methods, using equipment that violated its own company safety standards. It is hard to conceive of why Transocean employees, after insisting to BP executives that their instructions were hazardous and wouldn’t work, would go ahead and follow them. The only part that actually makes sense is that government regulators, once informed that BP was having trouble controlling the well, would sign off on delaying the mandatory blowout preventer tests for two weeks.

Hindsight certainly has its merits, but it is hard to believe how complacent everybody involved was in dealing with an activity fraught with hazard, and carrying unfathomable consequences in the event of failure. The fact is, nobody considered failure an option. We’ve heard so much about the amazing improvements in drilling technology over the years, and it is beyond dispute. The idea of drilling a two-mile deep well, starting from a point a mile below the surface of the sea is mind-boggling. It is an amazing feat of engineering.

What no one ever talked about was the fact that there have been absolutely no advances made in procedures to cap an underwater gusher. None. The strategies employed by BP are the same as those attempted during the Iztoq gusher more than 30 years ago. They didn’t work then, and, until recently, they hadn’t worked this time. And that is shocking. The hubris that allowed every principal player to convince him or herself that the technological advances had rendered remediation superfluous is the reason the Gulf Coast is coated with oil today.

While I am not accustomed to endorsing President Barack Obama’s decisions, I must agree with the six-month moratorium he imposed on deepwater drilling. If anything, it didn’t go far enough. Rather than just a six-month period, deepwater drilling should be banned unless and until oil companies, drillers and other interested parties can come up with an effective, foolproof and verifiable means of capping a well. They need to consider worst case scenarios, and come up with solutions. The solutions must be demonstrated, through computer modeling and practical drills, to be effective, not most of the time, but every time.

These disasters may only come about every 30 years or so, but if it takes 30 years to recover from one, that leaves no grounds for complacency. The fact is, the world is going to be fueling its economy with oil for the foreseeable future, and oil companies are going to have to find it in progressively more inhospitable environments. Accidents will continue to happen, it’s only human nature, so it only makes sense to have the means to clean them up on hand and ready to go. To do otherwise opens the door to Nemesis.