From the tail end of a piece in the Deseret News, Salt Lake City:

“There is oil in the lake — we all know that,” Styler said. He wants to make sure Pearl’s plans don’t compromise the environment or jetty. “My personal opinion is that it can be done pretty safely.”

The question Pearl will have to answer, Styler added, is whether today’s technology is advanced enough to pull oil from the area that is difficult to reach and process and still make a profit.

Springer noted that another irony is how the state wouldn’t approve a proposal these days to build something like what Smithson created three years before he died in 1973.

Even assuming that opposition to drilling and a pumping platform five miles away from the jetty is the effete, Liberal art-lover’s equivalent of Ted Kennedy’s insistence that those wind mills are going to ruin Nantucket Sound, the other two points are still in play. Are companies like Pearl really going to have to suck the oil out of every caribou-inhabited and art-enhanced corner of the globe before they say, invest in something a little more sustainable (and more profitable in the long run)? And why wouldn’t the state currently authorize a project like Smithson’s? It can’t be completely motivated by a desire to preserve the natural state of the lake, because Pearl’s drilling operations may start in a matter of weeks…