Offshore Drilling's Amazing Safety Record

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121581714417147413.html

When I read the title I was extremely surprised to find what it was about. Usually all oil articles oppose drilling in U.S. waters, but I finally found a different point of view. There was an oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969 and a group sprang up to defend their ocean from another spill such as this one. The group called themselves GOO! (Get Oil Out!) one of the first organized groups to oppose drilling in the ocean. GOO! still exists today, but they have changed their ways extremely. GOO! now supports ideas of offshore drilling all the way. It is hard to imagine how and why an organization that started in order to oppose exactly what they have decided to support. This article opened my eyes to yet another view on solving U.S. oil dependency. Although it is not the usual it is every bit as insightful. Drilling off shore has an almost perfect safety record of 99.999%, it's hard to argue with a fact like that. Oil spills of a larger amount are rare and lesser ones are more common but even those can be rare. This small amount of damaging spills is a result of improved technology that decreases accidents greatly, the trade has almost been perfected. NASA and the Smithsonian conducted a study together and found that most of the oil that we find on our beaches today, like the tar we find on our feet after walking on the beach, are cased by natural oil seeps from the oil deposits underwater. The ocean leaks over 60 million gallons of oil a year and the tiniest source of oil leakage in the ocean was found to be drilling at 15 million gallons. Oil pollution into the ocean has another large contributor that is not drilling. This contributor is ships they were leaking over 130 million gallons of oil into the ocean, but no ban on them has yet been suggested.
The extremely high gas prices have accounted for much the new support in offshore drilling, but the defense on the subject is rising and collecting supporters that way too.

Questions:

1. Did the clearly established view by the author at the end of the article affect those who read the article? (It was a bit of a slam.)

2. The fact that not many articles like this one can be found makes me wonder, why exactly are they so scarce and who is making it this way, is it a control of media or a lunatics view point being thrown down?

3. If there is so much oil seeping from the ground would it in fact stop the seeping if drilling were to happen, like when a cow needs to be milked every day?

4. How was it decided that an organization bent so much on opposing drilling completely conformed when this seeping has only been discovered and publicized recently, was it being hidden from the public or is there another reason for their conformation?

5. If the environmental defects that were predicted by environmentalists have not come to be then why has action not been taken to move forward, are there other reasons why?