BP OIL SPILL AND ACCOUNTABILITY

On the eve of BP’s catastrophe, its man-made disaster that killed eleven of its workers and numerous innocent animals, bankrupting thousands of businesses on the Gulf of Mexico, the Minerals Management Service, the agency that supposedly regulates and manages oil companies’ leases of our natural resources, was sitting on its hands.  The technology necessary for drilling a mile below sea level didn’t have the right safety protocols to prevent the spill. What was the MMS doing?  In September 2010, Julia Whitty from the investigative journal Mother Jones published an article about BP’s horrific cover up, with all the truths being kept from the general public.  MMS just let BP continue “…gambling at the border of controlled engineering, to be the deepest and cheapest driller of them all,” said Whitty.

After all they’ve caused, is BP taking responsibility?  No, it is covering up its mistakes. In fear of being sued, they decide to pay the victims whose lives they so very much disadvantaged with the BP Compensation Fund. That is it.  They simply don’t care about anything but their reputation. For example, they were and still are dispersing Corexit, a lethal dispersant onto the oil covered waters, fully knowing that the oil that was spilt, plus the dispersed Corexit, is the absolute worst combination possible for the environment.  Obviously the environment will thank BP after this. Even after all this BP still finds time to (according to Whitty) “round down” the numbers of the amount of hemorrhaging oil, and above all, “buy the silence of scientists with lucrative pay and confidentiality clauses”.

The Clean Water Act states that BP must pay $1,100 dollars for every barrel of oil that they spilled. But, because of their use of Corexit and other dispersants, the real size of the spill will forever be unknown, because only a meager amount of oil washes up on shore, “guaranteeing that BP’s liability will be vastly underestimated” (Whitty).

To better understand what consequences for these types of actions should be, we should look to the Canadian Oil Company, Syncrude. Syncrude is the largest oil sands project operator and in April 2008, was fined $2.92 million for killing 1,603 ducks because it had failed to put up warnings for the birds. This incident is on a far smaller scale than the BP Oil Spill, but the amount of money paid has been much more appropriate. Syncrude had to pay for harming nature, as should BP.  The Alberta court decision was fair, and laws protecting nature should ensure BP pays for its crimes. Syncrude was charged about $1,900 per duck.

A staff writer, Patrik Jonsson, of the global news organization, Christian Science Monitor, wrote an article in June of 2010 about the many deaths of the unfortunate animals in the Gulf of Mexico. While the number of animals killed in the BP oil spill is not known, Jonsson reports that there have been an estimated 1,000 slain seagulls.  “One fifth of the entire Juvenile Atlantic Bluefin Tuna population [has been decimated] as of August, the numbers rising substantially every day,” says Mathew McDermott of the environmental website, Tree Hugger. How much should BP pay? In the 10/21/10 edition of USA Today online, the Natural Resources Defense Council said that they thought BP would have to pay billions. Many of the killed birds and sea life were endangered, and the cost for harming or killing endangered animals can be up to $50,000 per creature.

Can you be numb to this fact: BP has resorted to purposely killing innocent animals to preserve what’s left of their reputation!  “Endangered sea turtles and other marine creatures are being corralled into 500 square-mile ‘burn fields’ and burnt alive in operations intended to contain oil from BP’s ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico”, said Suzanne Goldenberg, a U.S. correspondent of London’s Guardian newspaper.

It isn’t only major oil companies that have nature harming ways. Everywhere you look, you can see people tossing their used napkins and empty bottles out the window of his or her car, or onto the sidewalk just a few measly feet away from a small sign, stating “no littering”.  Sometimes you come across streets cluttered with litter and nobody on that street bothers to pick anything up, when just the other day they boasted to their companions about how they were becoming so eco-friendly.

Henry David Thoreau once said, “Thank God man cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth”.  But that was then: in modern times, more than a century later, even the average person can and does fly — but with the help of gas-guzzling, waste-leaving aircraft.  Google has hormone-free chicken in its cafeterias, a free shuttle for employees to take, and an employee incentive plan to walk, bike and use public transportation.  This would seem to be model behavior for an environmentally conscious company.  However they own and frequently use a $60 million “party plane”, which is three times as heavy (and three times as energy consuming) as a conventional executive aircraft, decked out with dining rooms, bedrooms and even customized showers.

Do you do enough to help out their environment? Can we as global citizens afford to be hypocritical any more?  How could we work together to eradicate the state of hypocrisy we’re in right now?

Several sources including the Environmental Protection Agency helped Oberlin College publish an article about recycling. While 56% of the paper used in 2007 in the United States was recycled, many Americans aren’t going any further. For example, Americans could be filling 21 million bags with the amount of food they throw into landfill.

Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham with their Cap and Trade policy that supposedly will help the environment are proving to be top-drawer environmental hypocrites. Their policy just lets big companies cover up their just-as-big environmental footprints. The Cap and Trade Policy basically will let the companies have the same carbon footprints, but they can do things such as fund a rainforest to “offset” the footprint.  Corporations can trade their offsets, and Wall Street traders are lining up to bet on these offsets as new types of derivatives!  When will the madness stop?

Supporters of this bill include several companies, such as the Environmental Defense Counsel and the National Resource Defense Counsel, which seems contradicting. Congress has allotted two billion carbon tons to be traded as part of this bill.  Two billion tons is about 30% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions!  But there are countries who oppose this idea fundamentally and morally, like Bolivia. Bolivia’s president Evo Morales has spoken out against Cap and Trade but so far has not been heard as loudly as he deserves to be.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson says in his essay, Nature: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore… the city of God”: if nature was only around once in every century, we would be more appreciative of it, but because it is always able to be seen, we see it as a given. Nature is no longer viewed as something we deserve, but something we take for granted. People like Kerry and Lieberman think that ecology and stewardship can be translated into advantages for the business world, but if they observed more closely, or if they listened more closely, they would understand nature’s true meaning. They would understand that nature’s laws trump man’s laws.

Making empty complaints won’t help our planet.

I am handing you, the reader, a questionnaire, to compel you to understand your civic and environmental duties, and to make you stop and think about what you’re doing for the environment.  What ARE you doing and does your conscience approve of your behavior and outlook? Please complete the questionnaire and return it to me.  You may keep this informative essay to better understand the current state of the environment.  I will use your responses in an upcoming presentation about the effects of my inquiries.

QUESTIONNAIRE

1. What do you do think you should do in everyday life that is beneficial to the environment? (List)

2. What do you do in everyday life (and be honest) that effects the environment negatively? (List)

3. Do you contradict yourself in what you should do and what you do?

4. Does your conscience become affected when you do things that you shouldn’t, environmentally-wise?

5. How much effort would you put into changing those habits? Are you open to change?

6. How much do you know about the BP Oil Spill?

7. What are your opinions on their cleanup program?

8. Have you been on the BP website where it states all the ways it is improving the scene near the spill?

9. Should the government have done more about the spill rather than letting BP “handle it” themselves?

10. Should BP have to pay compensation? How much is appropriate for all they’ve caused?

11. Do you think that major corporations should be allowed to hide their footprints?

12. Have you heard about the Cap and Trade Policy?  What are your opinions about it?

13. Have you heard the opposition to Cap and Trade?

14. Is making money more of a priority than preserving the environment to you?  What is it, do you think, to politicians?

15. (To be answered after you have read the essay) Has this essay affected you? Will you react differently to hypocrisy and nature abuse now?

16. BP is murdering animals that were affected by the spill to cover up and dispose of their damage: does this surprise you?