No, they are definitely terrified about it happening again. Deepwater Horizon cost BP nearly $70 billion total in direct financial payouts, including $20 billion in fines. $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. This is an enormous amount of money, even for a large corporation such as BP. BP suspended their dividend because of the spill.
That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
Just about every week there’s news of some kind of ecosystem damage by another negligent company that streams into my RSS feed.
Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
The problem is sometimes the lessoned learned is don’t be responsible.
So no longer own oil tankers and instead each ship is owned by its own LLC so just that piece goes down and the liability gets capped to its insurance contract.
I don't condone corporate negligence or violations of environmental protection laws, but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization. We're going to have an impact.
> but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization
Well in this case the consequence is "we are destroying the conditions of our own survival". Open question is whether an advanced industrial civilisation can survive at all.
That is literally every organism
Literally, yeah. The carbon footprint of the advanced industrial activity of ants is scary, we are trying to convince them to slow down with their aviation.
Our scale is unique. Literally everything written in that description applies to ants, fungi, etc. too
That sure sounds like the definition of "condone."
If you compare our impact per capita and per dollar of GDP it’s much less today than 50 years ago. There’s just more dollars and more capita.
We are getting better at this. Time will tell if we are getting better at it fast enough. Ask someone in 2126.
And no I don’t think we will be dead, but if we do too much damage the world may be severely degraded and they might be quite angry at previous generations for basically leaving them with the bill.
Yes but we could have a significantly less one though. We're extremely wasteful and plan ahead poorly for minimizing the environmental impact, which becomes a partisan political issue instead of just doing our best to live in a healthy environment.
Did anyone go to jail? Was anyone executed? Was BP dissolved?
Not enough stakeholders are terrified enough.
If the upside is profit and the maximum downside is losing money, corporations will happily rape the Earth.
The system is working as designed.
It wasn't enormous enough in fines, since they're still in business and capable of doing it again, and again surviving such fines.
Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.
The behavior that leads to the issue is individual consumers driving cars. Outlawing this would nuke demand for fossil fuels which encourages risky well drilling. But since 99% of Americans drive they tend to get very unhappy about the prospect of banning the vroom vroom. This is a real and challenging political problem. We can't get around it by pretending that corporations drill for fun.
There is no oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast. There is plenty of oil there, they just care about different things. I agree it would be good to get rid gas cars, but you can't just outlaw them-- for practical and legal reasons. Maybe have the price of every environmental harm added to each gallon and let people adjust their habits accordingly?
I’d take it a step further. Most people don’t drive by choice, but because of the zoning and regulations that create sprawling suburbs meaning almost no one can live without a car. Can’t get to work, can’t get groceries, can’t get the kids to day care without a car.
Edit: want to add the sprawl also makes efficient mass public transportation nearly impossible.
In places with absolutely no zoning whatsoever, people still drive cars, motorcycles, mopeds, etc.
People like fast, on-demand transportation they're in control of. The answer is electric vehicles.
Cars make themselves not-fast by their sheer inefficiency unless huge amounts of taxpayer money is continually poured to the infrastructure. What’s incredible is that cars have been getting even larger, an example of astonishingly perverse incentive structures.
From my experience in the third world with quite poor infrastructure (e.g. unpaved roads, lack of traffic control devices anyone respects etc.), cars and motorcycles are still everywhere.
Some places like Ethiopia have simply switched to EVs by encouraging their import and discouraging import of non-EVs. Now, most vehicles there are EVs.
So can I work from home then instead?
> $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP.
That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).
I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach.
Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.
> BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster
If you checked the share price via Google Finance, it's off by 2x. The share price on April 19, 2010 (a day before the disaster) was $59.48, not >$100. Google Finance is erroneously reporting the price.
Is it close or adjusted close?
The stock price fell by 50ish percent, and they've spent 16 years recovering.
Yet, our ecosystem likely never will. I wonder which is more important to not let fail.
BP's revenue in the last 30 years is over $6.5 trillion. Other than the bad press and some lost coins, they don't really give a shit.