Profiles in Scumbaggery: BP

Okay, I will admit that this post is a lot like kicking a guy when he’s down; it’s also a lot like shooting fish in a barrel or making “Nixon” jokes. But as I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t actually have all that much condemnation for British Petroleum regarding the disaster in the Gulf. The fact is, if we had demanded proper environmental accountability from our national government at ANY time in the past fifty years, none of this would be going on, and if we’d made even the most casual efforts at improving fuel economy and energy conservation during the last forty years the price of oil would never have gone high enough to make deep-water drilling economically viable in the first place. The blame for the current disaster has a lot more to do with people who want to leave all of their lights on in empty rooms and use a 7,740-pound SUV to transport one person and one briefcase to and from work everyday than it does with an opportunistic corporation exploiting lax regulations and laughable enforcement in order to make obscene profits. The company’s treatment of their clean-up personnel and insults to our intelligence are another matter, however…


First, you have the issue of BP insisting that the people it is employing to clean up spill-related problems on the ground not wear hazardous materials gear, because it looks bad. It’s hard to keep maintaining that nothing terribly alarming is going on when you have people dressed in white coveralls and respirators (level 2 or 3 hazmat gear, depending on what they’re using) on camera. But if you spend any time in the petroleum business you rapidly find out just how toxic this crap is; I had the Level 1 hazmat training at Unocal, and the stuff in crude oil (let alone gasoline) would turn your hair white it you knew about it. It’s toxic, carcinogenic crap that can literally corrupt the DNA in your genes if you’re not careful with it, and BP is pressuring otherwise innocent people to risk exposure to it simply because it might be bad for their image…

Then there’s the whole business about lying to the press. There have been a lot of stories about this, but here’s one from Yahoo! News in case you need another one. This kind of thing was bad enough when Halliburton did it in Iraq; what BP is doing here is happening on American soil and doesn’t even have the excuse of military security or “encouraging our enemies.” Until such time as the affected beaches declared a State or Federal disaster area and placed under martial law, all that is going on here is a private company preventing members of the public from gaining access to public lands. In other words, they’ve got people giving pious statements for the press about openness and transparency and accountability, while at the same time using hired muscle to restrict information and intimidate anyone who challenges their version of events…

Would any other oil company have behaved better under these circumstances? It’s hard to say for certain; Exxon’s response to the Valdez disaster was blasted by environmentalists and libertarians alike, but I don’t remember anything quite as scummy as what we’re seeing in the Gulf this week. On the other hand, it’s many years later, and things that would have been considered unendurable violations of our civil liberties and way of life even a few decades ago have now become commonplace. Perhaps what we’re seeing along the Gulf Coast is simply the new normal; the level of outrageous and unethical behavior that will become the standard for life in the 21st Century…

In which case it’s time to start investing in interstellar spacecraft, because if this level of scumbaggery becomes the standard, this planet’s days are numbered…