So you claim that BP deliberately killed 15 or 16 people in the refinery explosion and deliberately allowed their pipelines to corrode so that they could maintain share price.
You are a business genius.
poured 2 days worth of oil into the Arctic
Don't let the facts get in your way.
Firstly, I did not suggest that BP killed 15 people to maintain its share price, but I DID suggest that these examples were indicative of a culture of ignoring problems and looking for cheap answers at BP. I could also point to the previous accidents at BP’s Texas City refinery (poor maintenance) and the way it has previously persecuted whistle blowers who try to highlight safety concerns (described by a US Federal judge as “reminiscent of Nazi Germany”!)
I personally favor the view that the cause of the problem was negligent incompetence rather than conspiracy, but it just will not wash to pretend that BP comes out of innocent. BP has not run a smart pig through that pipe to check the corrosion for 14 years. They only ran one this month - months after the pipe ruptured in March - because the Alaskan State ordered them to. If this had been done in March, after the spill they would have had the materials in place by now to replace the pipe and work would have been completed this year.
I DID suggested that the timing of the pipe closure is convenient for BP, as the shut down now falls right in the middle of peak seasonal demand, and a Middle East crisis. When the earnings this year are reported, and executive bonuses calculated, they will be larger in both cases than last time. Meanwhile, BP’s share price remains squarely in the middle of its 12 month range.
By contrast with the Trans Alaska Pipeline is checked every 12-18 months. Is it made out of some other substance? Does it carry something other than the same oil that BP’s pipe carries? No. So why does BP not run Smart Pigs in its pipeline? Because it’s cheaper to run the ultrasound, then argue the findings are inconclusive and that nothing needs doing. It certainly isn’t smart, but then the culture at BP, as suggested by their string of accidents, suggests that cheap is better than smart at BP.
As for the comment about ‘2 days’ worth of oil, BP have been quoted almost everywhere as saying that they pump around 120,000 barrels of oil per day through that pipeline (about another 180,000 from Exxon Mobil and others also pass through it), so a spill of 250,000 constitutes about 2 days worth of oil as far as BP is concerned. As long as 2+2 still equals 4 in this world, I was actually understating BP’s earlier failings.
You also cannot deny that ARCO in California will benefit from jacked up gas prices.
Not only were you wrong about the volumes spilled, but you need to understand that you can go to any WalMart parking lot in the country, on any given day, and find more spilled oil there than has been spilled in 98% of the spills on the North Slope of Alaska. The operators there are working under very tight restrictions.
Even very small amounts of contaminants spilled receive attention. The vehicles operated there are required to have drip pans placed under them, when parked and running or not, to catch any drips off the engine, radiator, or exhaust. And quite a few of the larger trucks have drips pans placed permanently to catch anything even while driving. Do you personally make that effort to save the environment?
Any oil that reaches the tundra is recovered. All of it. The oil that couldn't be recovered on the surface is recovered by digging up the soil and remediating it. Strict testing requirements are in place and the oil companies, along with the Alaska Dept of Environmental Conservation conduct follow-up tests to ensure no contamination of the tundra remains.
So for all the oil BP has "poured into the Arctic", there is none still there.