When an Indian court handed down sentences to eight individuals for their roles in the Bhopal chemical disaster that occurred 26 years ago, it barely even registered as news for many Americans. Yet it should serve as a painful reminder that even once an environmental disaster such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is finally over, its effects can last for decades afterward. According to The New York Times account, 425 tons of toxic material remain at the Bhopal site to be cleaned up by whatever entity takes responsibility for it first. Moreover, the livelihoods of those affected by the accident--some 578,000 according to government records--remain severely impaired over a quarter century after the tragedy.
Everyone hopes that in 2036 we won't be reading stories like this about BP and the Deepwater oil spill, but we should nonetheless accept the reality that this disaster isn't going away any time soon.
With that understanding, there are groups of individuals that are attempting to boycott BP in order to lash back and hold the company accountable. The sad truth is that they aren't hurting the larger company, but instead the small business owner who is simply making a living running a gas station. The government /could/ hold BP accountable in some way, and that might alleviate the aforementioned problem, but in all reality, it wasn't BP's fault.
ReplyDeleteStill, BP is a doing a terrible job of responding to the disaster and being transparent about its history and policies. Their environmental response and public relations are equally terrible. And how can you say that it wasn't BP's fault? BP had 760 safety violations in the past 3 years, compared to Exxon and Shell who have had 1 and 3 respectively. BP did not take all of the precautions it could have.
ReplyDeleteTo clarify my point, the cause of the failures was not only because of those violations. Yes, BP has not been up to snuff, but the corporation is not quite as directly responsible for what occured as people are making it out to be. Responsibilities were distributed and multiple people failed. Corporate policy wasn't the only factor by any means. Unfortunately, we always want to know the bottom line of who is to blame, so the finger has to get pointed back somewhere, in this case BP.
ReplyDeleteAlso, BP is dealing with, among other issues, a PR nightmare and one of the greatest engineering challenges in recent history. While there certainly is more they could be doing, they've handled the situation better than might have been expected.
I actually wasn't aware of those numbers you shared, so thank you. I'm sorry if I sounded insensitive to the situation with that last line. I meant that there is a lot more at play, and blame can't be so freely assigned.
While BP certainly deserves to be punished for its abysmal safety record, part of me thinks that the station boycotts are off the mark. Oil drilling is an inherently risky undertaking and it seems to me that despite this disaster the overall American demand for oil is unlikely to decrease. So unless people decide to boycott all oil and gas products, I don't think the underlying problem will be dealt with. Rather, the only truly appropriate response to the spill is for Americans to demand swift and effective legislative action to move the country away from a dependence on risky fossil fuels and toward cleaner and safer sources of energy such as solar and wind. Unfortunately, since American politics is currently mired in such utter dysfunction it appears that this is even less likely to happen now than it was before the spill.
ReplyDelete