The US had it within its power to enforce better safety procedures. It did not do it. Instead it chose a contractor (BP) with a known bad safety record. What do you expect?
Hence my feeling that insurance/risk coverage premiums will skyrocket for natural resource extraction until regulatory compliance enforcement is addressed and made, you know, effective. Simple things, like not allowing companies to drill if, you know, the designs they are showing you don't conform to best practices and they clearly don't have adequate measures for emergency preparedness.
In any case, nationalizing something as clunky as oil extraction - as FuzzyKen supports - will result in economic turbulence as the public is forced to bear a sudden massive spike in the operational costs of the government. This might either come in a massive issuance of bonds for the sake of raising money to cover operations, or in a higher tax rate.
Suppose it is nationalized, and suppose the goal is permanent control, or a semi-governmental board that controls operations. Interest rates on Treasury Bonds would surely jump because we already have a sizeable budget deficit that just got much much larger. Would Obama dare to raise taxes on the middle class to subsidize US Oil Co? Would he raise taxes yet again on the highest group and bypass the middle class. Would he raise taxes on both? Any of the three measures would lend further support to the Tea Party movement, eroding support for his own party. You would probably see a libertarian revolt, with Ayn Rand canonized and Atlas Shrugged elevated to Bible status within months.
Then there is a question of who would be running the company? Who would the board be composed of? Answer: mostly the same crew as before. Obama brought in Wall Streeters to the Dept. of Treasury, he'll bring in oil men to run the oil company - makes sense from a pragmatic point of view. But in doing so, he recreates the same principal-agent dilemma he had sought to avoid when nationalizing in the first place. In effect, nationalizing oil will simply institutionalize (and legitimize politically) the cartel who created and ran Big Oil in the first place.
As for countries that have nationalized big oil...the track record in terms of economic/environmental benefit has been spotty at best. Venezuela has nationalized not only oil, but food import, and Chavez has had to fight corruption and the massive inflation that has resulted from bottlenecks to food distribution that inefficient operations have caused. Food is literally rotting, untouched, in the ports. And you remember the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc? Pretty much everything was nationalized, and the entire region started to implode economically from the late 70's until the system's final collapse in the early 90's.
