Even though it resulted in the largest environmental disaster in US history
Subjective. There are environmental disasters on US soil that have created longer-lasting consequences and resulted in more people evacuated than this one. Also US history stretches back to 1776, which encompasses a lot of time. To date, i'd say Mt. Tambora in 1816 is a bigger "environmental disaster" than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Let's call it "The largest Oil spill on US Soil in living memory."
Wait, that one is wrong too...The problem here is that corporations are given rights granted to individuals. What gives a corporation the right to free speech? Why should they have any right at all to give funds to a US politician
But here's the kicker you who are calling for crucification are forgetting, the US government sits on a hill in a swamp! There are slippery slopes everywhere. Let's take the above example, my statement that Corporations do not deserve Free speech.
A Newspaper is a corporate entity. If it does not have free speech as an entity, you could claim anything you disagree with isn't about "freedom of press", but about the free speech of the corporate entity. This is also true for other media outlets. We are currently at a certain elevation on the hill. You propose we jog down a few feet and stop? What makes you certain we stop? And why, since we went down once before , wouldn't we go down again when we were annoyed with something else?
Let's view the other angle. BP stands for "BRITISH petroleum". They have no requirement to be anywhere near the US. I don't know how people here feel, but I knew exactly what my previous employer had in connection to BP.
Land Services Inc. was my previous employer. They do rights issues for pipelines and power lines and stuff. They did such rights for several pipeline companies that shipped fluids across the united states. BP was one of their customers.
So BP pays this other company to ship petroleum products across the USA. This company uses this money to expand it's infrastructure. In expanding it's infrastructure, it hires all kinds of contractors to deal with a variety of issues. You are talking about HUNDREDS of jobs just to distribute the oil. This doesn't count the thousands for processing it, selling it, or second-use that wouldn't exist without it. This is the "Car companies are too big to fail" argument. You kill it off, you cost thousands of jobs. You start executing executives, you have a situation where executives would rather go elsewhere. We aren't just talking about BP either. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of different people. Nobody would want to head any operations in the USA. Small businesses would be afraid to grow much bigger because it then puts them in a situation where they could be KILLED because of a fuckup by a employee.
Do you guys honestly believe the CEO of BP was sitting down while they proposed the Deepwater Horizon platform going "Well, let's use sub-standard materials here in this section! It'll save us a fortune!"
Likely several engineers came to him with mumbo-jumbo he didn't understand at all and he asked "Is there a way to get it under budget?" and they said yes.
As engineers, our code of ethics, our No. 1 canon, is to put public health and safety first. It's really, really hard to do that in the real world.
From what I've seen from emails and messages, it was standard communications about any kind of problematic issue. Take, for example, this:
This is the e-mail that is supposedly warning of the disaster six days before it occurred. It was a statement that this well wasn't coming out perfectly to plan, but still within the parameters they designed it for. So, should Brian P. Morel be killed? He was on the construction team. I assure you that he knew about anything that was sub-standard.
The problem occurred because we are using techniques designed mostly for shallow-water drilling in deep water. How can you communicate to executives that this is even an issue? Tell it to a 6 year old on the street and it probably wouldn't raise any alarm bells with them unless you let them know that something like this can occur.
So we have a few choices. Start a bunch of executions of people no more informed than a 6 year old, Execute the people who had to make the best of the situation like Brian P. Morel, or accept that history is a continued chain of major messups that has to be examined and memorized and used to prevent similar disasters, and just make BP pay for the research that will result in the next company -not- destroying our natural world.
20 BILLION is a lot of money. It will keep many citizens employed for a long time. This spill has already furthered our understanding of deep water operations. If it is insufficient, we should certainly continue to make BP pay to fix the problem. 20 Billion is more than the USA spends on environmental cleanup as it is. In fact, it's about twice what the USA spends for the entire nation per year.
Exactly how do you propose to dole out executions?
My city was responsible for some major environmental disasters itself.(Actually, that creek is practically in my backyard.)
So, let's execute the CSU board! Some nice guys in it, but meh. We gotta start the precedent somewhere if we wanna get BP!
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Topic: There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea - One Year Later (Read 110457 times)