Oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico a big problem for BP
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A little while back, the Obama administration approved offshore drilling along the U.S. coast.
Less than a week later, an explosion ripped a hole in BP’s underwater pipeline endangering large amounts of marine life and Louisiana fishing industries.
Luckily, there is something we all can do: boycott BP by not buying their product. This puts the power in the hands of the consumer, and if consumers do not buy BP gas, BP will either go out of business or change their practices.
Every day, 210,000 gallons — the equivalent of 30 tankers over three weeks — of oil spread into the Gulf.
Progress has been made with the cleanup though, thanks to unemployed Louisiana fishermen providing a solid base for labor. Way to put them to work, BP.
It seems there is a basic part of this operation that has slipped my mind. What could that be? Let me see. Oh, yeah! Stop the oil leak. For more than three weeks, oil has been seeping into the Gulf.
In this day and age, major energy companies do not think about the consequences of their actions or solutions to disaster scenarios.
Thanks to this kind of brain fart, we are stuck with lowering a big box over the burst pipeline after three weeks of problem-solving discussions. And it ended in failure anyways. Surprise, surprise.
But why bother pursuing better solutions to oil spills? At worst, they’ll lose a couple billion dollars in damages, which is nothing compared to the overall worth of the company.
BP will clean up the mess to the extent they see fit — the Exxon Valdez incident left 26,000 gallons in Alaska’s soil — and move on.
The problem is incentive. If BP can drop 5 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and pay a relatively small amount for their mistake, why should they change policy?
Policy only changes with consumer action. If the consumer does not buy a company’s product, bankruptcy or re-evaluation of procedure follows. So next time you need to fill up your tank, steer clear of the Brits.
Don’t forget the responsibility that we bear as well. We’ve known since the Industrial Revolution that America’s big businesses cannot be trusted with the welfare of the nation. That’s why we began to impose regulatory controls a century ago. Deregulation is what led to the collapse of the financial industry, and Bush staffing the MMS full of oil, gas and logging cronies is what has led to billions in uncollected royalties and lax regulatory supervision that allows things like the Deepwater Horizon spill. Not drilling anymore isn’t really an option. If we wanted to live in a world where we didn’t have to drill in the Gulf, we’d have gotten serious about alternative energy ten years ago. So we have to drill, but that doesn’t mean accidents have to happen. It means we have to get more serious about smart regulations, and penalties that aren’t a slap on the wrist. Companies need to realize that penalties aren’t bee stings, they’re crippling. Otherwise, why bother having them?
Adam
June 18, 2010 @ 3:17 pm