Showing posts with label Gulf of Mexico. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

BP Is a Corporate Criminal

Jim Hightower at the 2008 Texas Book Festival,...

Published on Wednesday, June 16, 2010 by Creators Syndicate

BP Is a Corporate Criminal

Gosh, how quickly things turn. One day, you're a strutting peacock — the next day, you're just another gasping, oil-covered bird.
In early April, BP was strutting about in full corporate splendor, showing off the $9 billion in profits that it had soaked up in just the first three months of this year. It was also basking in a corporate re-imaging campaign, depicting itself as a clean-energy pioneer and declaring that BP now stood for "Beyond Petroleum."
Since its Gulf of Mexico well blew out on April 20, however, BP has proven to be beyond belief. The wider and deeper that this catastrophe spreads, the more we discover just how oily this giant is.
From the time it was known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and set out to grab and control the rich petroleum reserves owned by what is now Iran, BP has been a recidivist global criminal. In the past three decades, it grew huge by swallowing such competitors as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco and Arco. Along the way, it has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety and environmental records in an industry that is notoriously reckless on both counts.
And now, its rap sheet grows almost daily. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant's current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities. In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing "97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors" came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as "egregious" and "willful." In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.
While its CEO, Tony Hayward, claims that its gulf blowout was simply a tragic accident that no one could've foreseen, internal corporate documents reveal that BP itself had been struggling for nearly a year with its inability to get this well under control.
Also, it had been willfully violating its own safety policies and had flat out lied to regulators about its ability to cope with what's delicately called a major "petroleum release" in the Gulf of Mexico.
"What the hell did we do to deserve this?" Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded. Excuse us, Tony, but you're not the victim here — and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the gulf is a direct product of BP's reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.
"It wasn't our accident," the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an "accident," but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP's executive suite.
"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean," Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP's mess was fast becoming America's worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well "is tiny in relation to the total water volume." This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.
Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would've been put behind bars long ago — if not on death row.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Dangers of Offshore Drilling Mocked

World map with nuclear weapons development sta...

Image via Wikipedia

Published on Saturday, June 12, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
British Petroluem, Imagination, and Nuclear Catastrophe

by David Krieger

Before the catastrophic British Petroleum oil gush in the Gulf of Mexico, there were environmentalists who warned that offshore drilling was fraught with risk - risk of exactly the type of environmental damage that is occurring. They were mocked by people who chanted slogans such as "Drill, baby, drill." Now it is clear that the "Drill, baby, drill" crowd was foolish and greedy. The economic wellbeing of people in and around the Gulf coast has been badly damaged and, for some, destroyed altogether. Aquatic and estuary life, in the Gulf and beyond, has fallen victim to an environmental disaster that was foreseeable with a modicum of vision and imagination.

Albert Einstein reached the conclusion that "Imagination is more important than knowledge." He said that "knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." Let us try applying our imaginations to nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Here are some scenarios:

Scenario 1: Al Qaeda does what most commentators believed to be impossible. They obtain nuclear materials for several nuclear weapons and hire scientists to construct crude nuclear weapons. These weapons are detonated in London, New York and Paris within hours of each other. Millions would lie dead and injured. Around the world stock markets would freefall. Before the terrorist nuclear attacks, the people who warned against such a possibility were mocked.

Scenario 2: Nuclear deterrence fails dramatically, and India and Pakistan engage in a nuclear war over Kashmir. The hundred or so nuclear warheads that detonate on Indian and Pakistani cities leave millions dead and lower global temperatures so as to significantly shrink the size of agricultural areas in which food can be grown. Crop failures leave hundreds of millions more people to starve to death. Before the war, the people who warned against such a possibility were mocked.

Scenario 3: A nuclear war begins with an accidental launch of a nuclear-armed missile by Russia, followed by a retaliatory strike by the US, which brings further retaliation from Russia, leading to still more from the US. Before the accidental launch, few people believed that such a cataclysmic accident and its retaliatory follow up were possible. In its aftermath, the scenario seems far too feasible. People now realize that the failsafe devices to prevent accidental launches could fail, but those who foresaw this danger and warned about it earlier were mocked.

Scenario 4: North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il launches a nuclear attack that destroys US military bases on the Japanese island of Okinawa. He threatens to destroy the Japanese city of Kyoto and Seoul, South Korea unless he receives the development assistance he says was promised to him by the United States. Those who argued throughout the Nuclear Age that continued possession of nuclear weapons by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council would result in nuclear proliferation and the weapons falling into the hands of irrational leaders were mocked.

There are many scenarios possible for the onset of nuclear war and there remain many justifications for nuclear weapons. Leaders of nuclear weapon states argue that these weapons are only for nuclear deterrence, that is, to prevent war by threatening nuclear retaliation. They don't foresee the potential failure of nuclear deterrence, even though they recognize the cataclysmic consequences of failure. They believe that nuclear weapons bolster a country's prestige and give it greater power in the international system. They proudly display their nuclear weapons and test their missile delivery systems. Those who argue that nuclear deterrence could fail catastrophically are mocked.

Political and military leaders have failed to honor the proposition that in every complex system in which humans are involved, system failure is a possibility. They have dismissed the idea of system failure leading to nuclear annihilation. Scientists spoke out about this shortsightedness, but they were mocked. Former high-level policymakers spoke out about the dangers, and they, too, were mocked. Even some former military leaders spoke out against the dangers of reliance on nuclear weapons, and they were mocked. The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who witnessed the horrors of the atomic bombs firsthand, have told their stories in an attempt to awaken people to the danger of nuclear weapons, but their voices are soft and few people in high places have listened to them.

Civil society organizations from throughout the world have called out for a commitment to an urgent plan for the elimination of nuclear weapons, and they also have been mocked. But, like the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they continue to speak out because it is the right thing to do. Nuclear weapons can end life on Earth as we know it. They can destroy civilization. In a major nuclear war, they could bring the human species and most complex forms of life to extinction. Even in a smaller nuclear war or accident, they could destroy cities and countries.

As the oil from the British Petroleum failure in the Gulf of Mexico continues to destroy the ocean and surrounding environment, it is perhaps too late to ask ourselves whether offshore drilling is worth the risk. Clearly it is not. It is still not too late, however, to raise the question of whether continued reliance on nuclear weapons is worth the risk to humanity and to future generations.

David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), an organization that has worked since 1982 to educate and advocate for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Oil Profits Ignore Actual Cost of Oil

Image by SkyTruth via Flickr

Published on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
The Oil Firms' Profits Ignore the Real Costs
The energy industry has long dumped its damage and, like the banks, made scant provision against disaster. Time to pay up

by George Monbiot
Has BP ever made a profit? The question looks daft. The oil company posted profits of $26bn last year. There's no doubt that BP has been pumping money into the pockets of its shareholders. The question is whether this money is what the company says it is. BP calls it profit. I call it the provision the firm should be making against future liabilities.

Despite an angry letter from two US senators and a warning from Barack Obama about spending big money on their shareholders while nickel-and-diming coastal people, despite the fact that it has no idea what its total liabilities in the Gulf of Mexico will be, BP seems to be planning to pay a dividend this year. It's likely to amount to more than $10bn. As the two senators noted, by moving money "off the company's books and into investors' pockets", BP "will make it much more difficult to repay the US government and American communities".

Pollution has been defined as a resource in the wrong place. That's also a pretty good description of the company's profits. The great plumes of money that have been bursting out of the company's accounts every year are not BP's to give away. They consist, in part or in whole, of the externalised costs the company has failed to pay, and which the rest of society must carry.

Does this sound familiar? In the 10 years preceding the crash, the banks posted and disposed of stupendous profits. When their risky ventures failed, they discovered that they hadn't made sufficient provision against future costs, and had to go begging from the state. They had classified their annual surplus as profit and given it to their investors and staff long before it was safe to do so.

Last week the British government bumped into another consequence of failing to take future costs into account. Chris Huhne, the new secretary of state for energy and climate change, revealed that nuclear decommissioning liabilities will cost the government £4bn more than it was expecting to pay over the next three years. This will cancel out two-thirds of the vicious cuts the government has announced and swallow most of his department's budget. As Huhne pointed out: "It is a classic example of short-termism. I cannot think of a better example of a failure to take a decision in the short run costing the taxpayer a hell of a lot more in the long run."

The decommissioning costs imposed on society by nuclear power will be dwarfed by those that are imposed by the fossil fuel industry. They include, but are not confined to, the money that will have to be spent on adapting to climate change. The United Nations estimates this cost at $50bn–$170bn a year, but a report last year by British scientists suggested that this is around three times too low, as it counts only a small proportion of likely impacts.

The UN has hired the consultancy Trucost to estimate the costs dumped on the environment by the world's 3,000 biggest public companies. It doesn't report until October, but earlier this year the Guardian published the interim results. Trucost had estimated the damage these companies inflicted on the environment in 2008 at $2.2 trillion, equivalent to one third of their profits for that year. This too is likely to be an underestimate, as the draft report did not try to value the long-term costs of any issue except climate change. Nor did it count the wider social costs of environmental change.

A paper by the New Economics Foundation in 2006 used government estimates of the cost of carbon emissions to calculate the liabilities of Shell and BP. It found that while the two companies had just posted profits of £25bn, they had incurred costs in the same year of £46.5bn. The oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well is scarcely more damaging, and its eventual impacts scarcely more expensive, than the oil that is captured by neighbouring rigs then processed and burnt as intended.

The total costs imposed by the oil companies, which include the loss of human lives and the extinction of species, cannot be accounted. But even if they could, you shouldn't expect the companies to carry them. They might be incapable of capping their leaks; they are adept at capping their liabilities. The Deepwater Horizon rig, which is owned by Transocean, is registered in the Marshall Islands. Most oil companies pull the same trick: they register their rigs and ships in small countries with weak governments and no international reach. These nations are, in other words, incapable of regulating them.

Flags of convenience signify more than the place of registration: they're an unmistakable sign that responsibilities are being offloaded. If powerful governments were serious about tackling pollution, the first thing they would do would be to force oil companies to register their property in the places where their major interests lie.

US lawyers are drooling over the prospect of what one of them called "the largest tort we've had in this country". Some financial analysts are predicting the death of BP, as the fines and compensation it will have to pay outweigh its earnings. I don't believe a word of it.

ExxonMobil was initially fined $5bn for the Exxon Valdez disaster, in 1989. But its record-breaking profits allowed it to pay record-breaking legal fees: after 19 years of argument it got the fine reduced to $507m. That's equivalent to the profit it made every 10 days last year. Yesterday, after 25 years of deliberations, an Indian court triumphantly convicted Union Carbide India Ltd of causing death by negligence through the Bhopal catastrophe. There was just one catch: Union Carbide India Ltd ceased to exist many years ago. It wound itself up to avoid this outcome, and its liabilities vanished in a puff of poisoned gas.

BP's insurers will take a hit, as will the pension funds which invested so heavily in it; but, though some people are proposing costs of $40bn or even $60bn, I will bet the price of a barrel of crude that the company is still in business 10 years from now. Everything else – the ecosystems it blights, the fishing and tourist industries, a habitable climate – might collapse around it, but BP, like the banks, will be deemed too big to fail. Other people will pick up the costs.

There is an alternative, but it is unlikely to materialise. Just as Norway has treated its oil money not as profit but as provision against a tougher future, so the governments in whose territories oil companies work should force them to pay into a decommissioning fund. The levy should reflect the costs that economists are able to calculate, plus a contingency for those we can't yet foresee.

This would outrage the oil firms, as it would render many of them unprofitable. But there's a simple answer to that: the money currently defined as profit is nothing of the kind.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. Visit his website at www.monbiot.com

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Media Tars Obama With Katrina Brush

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Jason Linkins
jason@huffingtonpost.com

The 'Obama's Katrina' Meme Myopia

Oh, hey! Apparently, this massive oil spill in the Gulf Coast is now somehow "Obama's Katrina?" That's the tatty little bit of agitprop that Matt Drudge -- who I'm not entirely sure ever talked about "Bush's Katrina" -- is regurgitating into the mouths of pliable media organs. It all sort of makes sense, if your thinking is: "Gulf Coast" plus "bad thing happening" plus ("government response" minus "secret magic powers they are supposed to have over the elements") multiplied by "Whatever, it's a slow news day otherwise" equals "Katrina ZOMG!"

I'm watching a bunch of guys in hardhats on the teevee at this very moment working hard at managing the oil spill, and am reliably informed that the proper authorities have been busy trying to contain the damage. And, look, there's no doubt, in all the world, that TARFU in the Gulf of Mexico. And I think we can all remember that time when President Barack Obama said, "Despite the fact that I mocked and opposed offshore drilling as a candidate, let's ignore all that and drill the oceans, like crazy, for oil." And not long ago, Obama insisted that offshore drilling had become all kinds of safe, so what's to worry about.

So, yeah: oopsie-daisy! The unfolding calamity occurring today can, should and hopefully will drastically alter those aforementioned policy proposals, and they certainly make the White House look foolish for having gone all in on offshore drilling a month ago. But there are two major factors that prevent me from suggesting that what's going on is comparable to the Hurricane Katrina response: 1) I was alive during Hurricane Katrina and was paying attention to what was going on, and 2) I am, at this point, unwilling to do what is necessary to alter my knowledge of those events by battering my skull repeatedly with a ball peen hammer.

See, there are many ways in which the comparisons to Katrina just break down. And first and foremost among distinctions, as noted by Media Matters today, was the little fact that BP, in the wake of the explosion that started this whole disaster, vastly underestimated the magnitude of the problem they had on their hands, all while assuring everyone that they could handle it.

For days, as an oil spill spread in the Gulf of Mexico, BP assured the government the plume was manageable, not catastrophic. Federal authorities were content to let the company handle the mess while keeping an eye on the operation.

But then government scientists realized the leak was five times larger than they had been led to believe, and days of lulling statistics and reassuring words gave way Thursday to an all-hands-on-deck emergency response. Now questions are sure to be raised about a self-policing system that trusted a commercial operator to take care of its own mishap even as it grew into a menace imperiling Gulf Coast nature and livelihoods from Florida to Texas.

The pivot point had come Wednesday night, at a news conference at an oil research center in the tiny community of Robert, La. That's when the nation learned the earlier estimates were way off, and an additional leak had been found.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama set in motion a larger federal mobilization, pledging to deploy "every single available resource" to the area and ordering his disaster and environmental leaders to get down there in person. Only a few days after the Coast Guard assured the country there was "ample time" to protect the coast if oil came ashore, warnings from the government were newly alarming.

Story continues below

Contrast that, if you will, to the rather clear message that the NOAA was sending out in advance of Hurricane Katrina:

...EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE KATRINA CONTINUES TO APPROACH THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA...

...DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED...

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

And on and on it goes, warning of collapsing buildings and airborne debris and "water shortages" that "will make human suffering by modern standards." In short, the relevant authority in charge of assessing what was going wrong wasn't stupidly shining everybody on.

That first quote, by the way, is from the AP, and it contains in its reporting a rather startling and obvious contrast to the Katrina response, namely that whole part where there was a "federal mobilization" and a pledge to "deploy 'every single available resource'" and the ordering of officials to get their asses down to the region "in person." (Which is, at this very minute happening!)

If you recall, the Katrina response mainly involved local officials in the Gulf Coast making harried pleas for help when none came, because the president at the time was strumming his gee-tar while his man at FEMA, Michael Brown was bitching through aides that he wasn't being given enough time to chillax at Baton Rouge restaurants, and could maybe people stop bothering him with the news of people dying?

ThinkProgress, very conscientiously, wrote all of this down, on the Internet, precisely so people wouldn't make these sorts of dumb-assed comparisons to the current disaster response. It would be a pretty handy tool for the media to use if they'd like to gain a little perspective. But then, I sort of thought that being alive in 2005 and in possession of fully functioning cognitive abilities would have been sufficient.

Local Bias

Wednesday, June 16, 2010