As a Brit, I’m a bit fed up being blamed for the oil spill in the Gulf.
Let’s get down to the realities of the situation for a change.
America is far and away the biggest consumer of oil in the world.
Per capita consumption of energy in the US is nearly five times higher than the global average, and despite progressive off-shoring of energy-intensive industry, there's little sign of it easing.
American lifestyles burn an awful lot of energy.
I’m make no moral judgment on this; it's just the way it is.
But whereas US consumption of oil is around 21 million barrels a day, domestic production is just 6 million.
The bottom line is that American demand for secure, domestically produced oil requires drilling in ever more inhospitable, dangerous and environmentally sensitive areas that tests the boundaries of established technologies. "Energy independence", free from reliance on foreign supplies, is one of the holy grails of American policymakers.
Yet, as the Gulf oil spill has demonstrated - it comes at a price.
We'll have to await the official inquiry to find out precisely what went wrong; early indications are that there were indeed serious lapses, both at the operational and regulatory level.
All the same, it is hard to find an oil industry executive who doesn't mutter grimly, "there but for the grace of god go I". This was an accident waiting to happen.
The curiosity is that both the oil industry and Americans in general were so unprepared for it.
"How come no one saw it coming?" our Queen asked of the economics profession in response to the most serious economic contraction since the 1930s.
The same question might today be asked of catastrophe in the Gulf.
Money was hosed at the problem, ineffectually to begin with; the industry is demonised; the regulators are lambasted for failing to ensure a safe ship; and then there is a largely counterproductive, populist crackdown, most of it expensively directed at the symptoms rather than the underlying causes.
Already, President Obama has halted further deep-water development – this less than two months after sanctioning a new swathe of offshore acreage to address energy security concerns.
Unfortunately, energy production works on the water bed principle.
Squeeze it down in one area and demand ensures that it merely rises up somewhere else.
If greater shale development is the answer to America's energy security needs, it seems scarcely less likely to be environmentally benign than deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
The damage is merely transferred from the beaches of Louisiana to the mountains of West Virginia.