Firstly, what’s happening in the Gulf is an environmental disaster. Man's eagerness to maximise profits trumping risk to the environment. On that we're all mostly agreed. Another 9/11 as President Obama equated it to, today? Well, that's debatable but there's no doubt people are angry and it may affect attitudes on the country's domestic attitiude. Quite right too.
Oil and water don’t mix and when they do it’s never a good thing. When they don’t mix on the scale they are (aren’t) at the moment, it’s even more significant. While BP’s chairman Tony Hayward may well have been technically right in his analysis about the less dramatic ratio of sea to actual oil over-all, Hayward did himself nor his company any favours by stating he
‘wanted this to be over so he could get his life back’ in the middle of a crisis that started with significant ACTUAL loss of life. That’s like a politician bemoaning the state of the traffic in the city on the way to catch his private plane to his third home - it maybe not be technically wrong, but it’s hardly likely to garner one iota of sympathy in proper context. A chairman must not only help run a company but is often the public face of it and in most ways Hayward has proven himself to have all the grace of an oil-soaked sea-bird so often seen on the nightly news.
However, as the beaches and faces darken, the finger-pointing begins in earnest and there’s some points that seemingly do need highlighting more than they have.
BP, as the lead company, may well shoulder some of the blame, but with no clear formal investigation over exactly who IS to blame, it’s wholly inappropriate at this point to ONLY hold BP solely responsible. As pointed out in UK newspapers - eager to be patriotic, maybe, but still factually correct - the rig in question is actually owned and managed by Transocean (an American company), the sub-contractor responsible for securing it was Halliburton (an American company) and the piece of equipment that most believed ultimately failed - the blow-out preventer - and failed to stop the disaster was manufactured by Cameron International (you’ve guessed it - American). At this point, BP’s name is at the forefront of every news report and there seems to have been problems with oversight, but most US news networks have barely mentioned the other companies that must surely be investigated for equal negligence or complicity as well.
Equally let’s stop calling this company British Petroleum. As a modern international conglomerate, it hasn’t gone by that moniker for a decade and at this point has an equal amount of US and UK members on the board with a huge amount of American shareholders. Despite the ‘British’ part of the name originally, it’s now arguably just as American as it is European. Perhaps it’s time to embrace that aspect in the same way that the New York Post marvellously claimed (hopefully with irony) that US BEATS UK 1-1, on its sporty front page a few days ago.
BP has been criticised for not handing out compensation fast enough, which may well be justified criticism but it has initiated such procedures without being asked and the amounts - when actually delivered - are not insubstantial. In some cases this clearly hasn’t been fast enough, in other cases some locals were more than satisfied with the amount.
But before anyone gets too heavy-handed and paranoid and instinctively patriotic, Obama’s recent tone is largely for his domestic market and to placate the people who were/are saying he hasn’t done enough. However, he HAS been critical of the other companies involved, even if it’s not been that widely reported in that same market. Equally, it seems silly to label this as Obama’s ‘Katrina’. In this oil-spill case Obama waited for advice, allowed the supposedly responsible parties to hopefully start behaving pro-actively, allowed BP to try a number of tactics that all failed before he started ‘kicking ass’ and saying that the situation was ballooning too far and needed more affirmative action rather than just talk and ill-fated efforts. As any politician will tell you, progress isn’t always really measured publicly, but lack of progress certainly is. In the case of Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans, it seemed that administration was ineffectual in doing anything AT ALL to begin with - to the extent that they said they weren’t helping people because they couldn’t reach them, four days AFTER the ABC and other networks started flying their own guys in and reporting live from the stadium where many survivors had gathered. The Katrina controversy grew out of a President seemingly out of touch and praising organisations like FEMA who failed to respond quickly enough… the oil spill situation is rather born out of the many unsuccessful attempts to cure an escalating problem - rather than merely ignoring it completely. That’s not to say serious criticism of the response can’t be made, but it’s a different complaint and context.
I never thought I’d stand up for an oil company in ANY way and I still believe that the inherent dangers are often glossed over by companies wanting to make money and who are reduced to finger-pointing when things DO go wrong. And this isn’t meant to be a defence of BP (who clearly seem inept on several levels and the evidence keeps a'rolling in), it's merely a plea for a wider, broader context before the blame card is finally thrown in any one direction. When anyone is found to be truly and provably negligent for such disasters and subsequent loss of life and damage, they must accept the responsibilities that they are well paid for and be prosecuted under the full weight of the law and made to puniatively pay for that as well as making things right on a practical level. If BP are ultimately the guilty party, throw the book at them, but doing so too early merely makes the other oil companies hover like vultures.
And in a week when it was revealed that Union Carbide Corporation’s former chairman Warren Anderson, has *refused* to even co-operate, never mind stand trial for what appears to be a complicit role in the company’s Bophal disaster in 1984 (the Indian chemical disaster that killed many and affected the health of over 100,000 people) and is happy to be roam free in the US without any fear of extradition… the blame game and the acceptance of accountability issues seem as unpredictably blunt, opportunistic and buoyant as ever…
Troubled waters, indeed. This time pouring more oil may not help.
