rose-tinted glasses
just thinking, in the middle of everything -- selling cars, furniture, saying goodbyes, parenting iola, writing -- about this: it's not BP's fault. Is it? If I were driving a car, while doing my job -- admittedly not a progressive job, and admittedly I should have been riding a bicycle -- and it exploded, killing my beloved passengers and innocent bystanders for miles around I would yes feel guilty and sad for the rest of my life but, no, it would not have been my fault. Previous to this, BP was considered to be foremost in the field (ok, an ugly field, but we all -- literally -- drive it) for corporate social and environmental responsibility. They are committing $20 million dollars to the clean-up, that is 10 times the amount Exxon paid for Valdez, without the slightest hesitation. I think maybe they should still be considered pretty responsible.
Humanity has an enormous problem on its hands. Not just this spill, not just the health of the entire oceans' ecosystems, not just climate change; it's all related. And I think we can tackle it. We're too kind and smart to not be able to.
Humanity has an enormous problem on its hands. Not just this spill, not just the health of the entire oceans' ecosystems, not just climate change; it's all related. And I think we can tackle it. We're too kind and smart to not be able to.
I'm as much of an oil-spill contrarian as anyone, but this is BPs fault. The company skimped on safety, ignored problems as they were developing, and was slow in responding to the spill once it happened. BP was at the top of the big oil companies in terms of environmental responsibility, but that's int terms of preventing spills and reducing CO2 emissions. BP was near the bottom in terms of deadly industrial accidents. And while they have offered up to $20 billion to pay out on related claims, that's only because the company was shaken down by the Obama Administration. (Yes, I'm with Joe Barton that it was a shakedown! I don't think the shakedown merits an apology, though.)
It seems like BP cut corners on safety to make bigger profits. That was a lousy bet, strictly on business terms. Now they'll be paying out billions of dollars to clean up the mess. Wouldn't they have done better by their shareholders to pay for the insurance of having better equipment and emergency-response procedures in place?
In any case, we're lucky that the oil business is so profitable, such that BP has the billions of dollars on hand to pay for cleanup. It would be a much bigger tragedy if the company that caused it had no money to pay out in fines and civil suits. (Think of the California forest fires started by a homeless man: 100 percent of that cost was born by the taxpayers.)
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this is internalizing a negative externality of oil extraction -- risk of major blow out and spill. It's not that the oil biz is so profitable, it's that they're not internalizing the costs till after the damage is done. Yeah it would have been better for everyone to have that foresight, but I bet most in the industry don't.
I drive a small car, and not a Volvo, and my dad thinks that's really irresponsible. It's cheaper. I'm maximizing the profits on my wages by doing something sort of unsafe. I dunno. Maybe it's not useful at all to think in terms of the individual. But there's a level of getting personal about this, vilification, implied intent.
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