Are jobs more important than health?

Louisiana governor Booby Bobby Jindal published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post today.  Commenting on President Obama's moratorium on deep-water offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he wrote:

This ill-advised and ill-considered moratorium, which a federal judge called "arbitrary" and "capricious," creates a second disaster for our economy, throwing thousands of hardworking folks out of their jobs and causing real damage to many families.

Uh, yeah: "arbitrary."  A decision to do something relatively timid, compared to what really ought to be done, to help ensure that the environmental and social disaster that just actually happened in the Gulf doesn't repeat itself is "arbitrary."

What Jindal's complaint reminds me of is the argument about tobacco and jobs. We know tobacco products kill people, and not just those who actually use them, by the way. But, we can't just stop growing them, because all those tobacco farmers would lose their "traditional way of making a living." Well, you know what: If your "traditional way of making a living" is bad for people and the planet, you should be told to find another way to make a living.

That applies to tobacco farmers, whose "traditional way of making a living" feeds an addiction that makes people sick and dead, and it also applies to people who "make a living" by drilling into deep water to extract oil to feed our other major addiction.

Of course, I'm not saying that either tobacco farmers or oil workers should simply be thrown on the landfill of history. Surely we, the richest country in the world, could simply pay all these folks to not grow tobacco or drill for oil.