| June 20th, 2010 |
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So, as my bloodless brother Chas pointed out yesterday, most folks realise that boycotting BP petrol stations doesn't hurt BP so much as hurt the independent operators who run the petrol stations.
Nonetheless, when I really needed to get petrol yesterday, I couldn't quite bring myself to stop at BP - even though my four and a half litres (for my 125cc scooter and its tiny tank) isn't exactly going to register.
We all have our quirks.
This does, however, bring me to a topic I've been meaning to post about: the oil spill, the "White House shakedown", and why Obama, for all the ways he's not doing entirely well at living up to all his promises, is still the best US president in my lifetime.
See, the thing that brought arguably the greatest ecological catastrophe in human history into being was that BP executives figured that it was going to be more profitable to cut corners on safety and let risks go.
The reason this was so is that there's a long history, in most countries, of letting corporate misbehaviour go with never more than a slap on the wrist, maybe a fine that is, to them, trivial.
When this happened, BP needed to pay. Not just to punish BP, but to establish a precedent that if an oil company screws up, like BP did, then it will, in fact, cost them more than being careful would have - preferably, far more.
I was surprised, and curiously relieved when I heard that BP were going to be hit this hard. It's not just going to cut into their profits, they aren't going to have profits this year. Their stock price has tumbled, their shareholders are probably pissed, and all this could have been prevented.
Hopefully, that's incentive for all the companies who drill for oil to take an immediate and thorough look at their own safety procedures, because they don't want to be in the position BP are in right now. I can't see where Obama made any concessions to BP in that meeting - they're paying twenty billion dollars, and they also have to pay for the cleanup, and that sum is not capped, and does not cover any liability for civil actions by affected parties.
As far as I can see, any bargaining that the White House may have offered, a sop to "negotiation" rather than "telling them how it is going to be" seems to have been along the lines of "and we won't have you arrested for manslaughter and every other crime we can attach to you" or maybe just "and we won't have you killed".
But that, you see, is why that Republican congressman doesn't like that this happened. He's in the pocket of the oil companies, and the thing with it is that this precedent *is* going to cut - marginally, and appropriately - into oil company profits, because it just got too expensive to be careless.
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