BP Ignored Safety Modeling Software To Save Time 203
DMandPenfold writes "BP ignored the advice of safety modeling software in an attempt to save time before the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to a presentation slide (PDF) prepared by US investigators. The slide in question briefly appeared on the Oil Spill Commission's website in error, but was quickly retracted. Advanced cement modeling software, provided by BP's cement contractor Halliburton, had highlighted serious stability concerns with the well."
Criminal (Score:4, Insightful)
I think some people need to spend time in jail if this is proven. A lot of time.
Re:Criminal (Score:4, Insightful)
11 counts of negligent homicide (or manslaughter in other jurisdictions) should be adequate cause for a long jail time.
The question is who is the corporate designated felon. I vote for all the C-level executives in charge at the time, but then I'm ex-Navy, so I have archaic notions about the chain of command.
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The thing about corporate malfeasance of this magnitude, is that it's extremely difficult to nail an individual within the company unless there's evidence specifically fingering him-- which was why Enron was shredding documents against explicit orders from federal investigators not to do so. It's a bit like how high-ranking government officials get nailed-- Nixon would have surely been impeached for at least conspiracy and obstruction of justice because of the tapes he took of his office (the irony of his p
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11 counts of negligent homicide (or manslaughter in other jurisdictions) should be adequate cause for a long jail time.
That chart hardly seems like damning evidence. You could list 11 safety tradeoffs as the cause of just about any conceivable accident.
Do you run diagnostic checks on the braking system every time you drive a car? Does not doing so save time and increase risk?
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You do know that the law allows holding more than one entity responsible for damages and even finding more than one entity criminally negligent?
A Question of Scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Quality concerns should never be ignored with projects of this scale. Information like this should result in a shutdown of the project until the issue is addressed.
If you are developing a web site, you can get away with defects in quality because of the nature of the web and precompiled code. To correct an issue, all you have to do is deploy code that corrects the problem. There is no impact outside the site itself. If you want to reduce the possibility of things like this happening, you introduce more advanced testing procedures, beta tests with limited numbers of users, and other methods to reduce the potential for a disruption in services.
If you are building an oil rig, the potential risk of disaster has an impact that goes far beyond the capital involved in building the rig itself, and being faithful to the results of quality assessments is essential to avoiding catastrophes like the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Any action failing to meet high quality standards should be considered criminal, as the outcome will have a harm on people / environment / wildlife around the rig.
Reading this powerpoint just makes me angry. BP has been lobbying Congress for a while now to reduce potential penalties they may have to pay, and their marketing arm has been doing a lot of damage control in the public arena. It is very important to hold these people accountable for their actions, since this is the way these people do business.
Re:A Question of Scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, it's penny pinchers: they will do anything to save a few millions, even if it ends up costing a few billions.
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Hey, reminds me of the general attitude towards saving electrical energy.
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Knowing the industry I can tell you few were surprised this accident happened to BP in the US.
Please remember this company is an amalgamation of the veritable cowboys of the old Amoco and the never before beaten penny pinchers of BP in the London City.
Combine this with a company like TransOcean that is (especially outside of the US) known for it's flexible spine and non-stick safety management and the picture is getting clear.
And don't forget Halliburton, a company with serious t
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My understanding is that the modeling software was not of sufficient quality that it could be trusted.
I would like to know more about the way in which the model's prediction of failure was communicated to BP. It would be consistent with common practices in the industry for Haliburton to go on record with a negative report while dismissing its findings off the record and urging a go-ahead behind the scenes. It is more than possible-- it is highly likely-- that Haliburton brought forth this negative report
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Like all of these disasters, there were compounding factors that turned an ordinarily "safe enough but not the safest" decision into an unsafe decision. All three companies made decisions that look pretty damning, but the big ones that pop out to me in the slide are the last two. Transocean basically ran the operation in such a way that they would not know if there was a problem. Even if everything else is done the safest way possible, that's just asking for something to go horribly wrong. To run things
This is seriousely not a suprise (Score:4, Interesting)
This seriousely does not suprise me at all. In a recent issue of Popular Mechanics magazine (October 2010 issue) they had an excellent article on just how bad BP blew it in the gulf of mexico. Everything from turning off and disabling safety systems and alarms, to rushing the drilling process, using wrong materials, ignoring advice and warnings from others that they were going to fast and ignoring safety, and more.
A private company rushed in for profit (Score:3, Insightful)
impossible. that cannot have happened.... because, uncle greenspan said that, corporations could regulate themselves. im agape with surprise.... surely, this must be a one-time incident
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Ignoring your annoying, hard-to-read, all-lowercase style of writing...
Your beloved government edited its oil drilling safety report [slashdot.org] to make it appear as if a six-month drilling ban had been peer-reviewed by experts, and it ignored scientists and misrepresented data [yahoo.com] throughout the ordeal.
The difference between corruption in government and corruption in the free market, however, is that BP actually gets punished. They lose money, reputation, face increased scrutiny, and so on. What happens to the government?
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And in a "free-market", libertarian modeled world, BP would be sued out of existence. Every fisherman, hotel owner, casino owner, Gulf Coast resident & Gulf Coast tourist would line up to take a bite out of BP for damages sustained. BP would be nibbled to death.
Of course, there's several obstacles to that happening:
1) The vast majority of the plaintiffs are too small to fund the legal challenge necessary. It'd be interesting if the States affected could/would go after BP on behalf of their citizens.
2)
Re:A private company rushed in for profit (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it does. From Wal-Mart killing off local businesses and then hiring the newly unemployed people for minimum wage which forces them to subsist on food stamps, to IBM selling counting mahcines to the Nazis so they could keep tally on the Holocaust, to building a pesticide plant in the middle of a city and letting it blow up due to negligence [wikipedia.org], to robber barons treating their factory slaves so badly during the Industrial Revolution that it gave birth to Communism, "free market" has always meant that he who has the gold makes the rules and usually screws everyone else over to get more of it. And always, always do they get away with it.
But hey, Feudalism 2.0 is fun if you're part of the nobility, so I expect it to continue on its way.
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Your two biggest examples are terrible.
First, you should study history, because you are talking about things you obviously don't understand. Communism did not arise out of factory workers revolting, as Marx predicted. Factory workers fought for, and won, the health and safety protections they enjoy today, but went no further. Communism arose entirely out of agrarian societies. Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Korea... none of these countries were industrialized when they adopted Communism. And famously Communi
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Factory workers fought for, and won, the health and safety protections they enjoy today, but went no further. Communism arose entirely out of agrarian societies.
Parent said it gave birth to communism. Communist movement in industrialized Europe was significant. Just because it died off for one reason or another is different issue.
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The unions won a few important concessions, then quit flying the red flag figuring it was good enough. However, if those important concessions keep getting rolled back, those red flags will fly again and soon. That is, the factories quit treating the workers so badly and the communism abated.
Stalin and Mao claimed to be communists, but like many brutal dictators before them, claimed it in name only. To this day, China claims to be a communist country.
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First, you should study history, because you are talking about things you obviously don't understand. Communism did not arise out of factory workers revolting, as Marx predicted. Factory workers fought for, and won, the health and safety protections they enjoy today, but went no further. Communism arose entirely out of agrarian societies. Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Korea... none of these countries were industrialized when they adopted Communism. And famously Communist industrialization killed millions. Tens of millions. Possibly into the hundreds of millions. Capitalist robber barons looked like fucking Santa Claus, in comparison to Stalin and Mao. But yeah, the evils of free market industrialization are obvious when you compare North and South Korea today.
no, YOU should shut the hell up, if you dont know jack shit about history.
communism rose to power in countries where people were EXTREMELY exploited compared to any other part of the world. ALL the countries you named, were countries in which the culture has been repressive for over thousands of years. in the case of russia, there was a repressive culture pattern even in 3000 BC - they were raiding, brutally killing and robbing nearby zones by then.
at the turn of 19th century, the only country where a
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Communism started in Europe, and France, for example, had a communist commune [wikipedia.org] for a while. The main reason why Communism didn't overcome all of Europe is that most countries realized the threat and granted the workers enough rights and a sufficient wage to keep from rebell
Re:A private company rushed in for profit (Score:5, Informative)
If someone really couldn't do better than a Walmart job, then they probably couldn't run a business either.
Many of these people *were* running their own business, until Walmart drove them out of business by selling at close to zero margin until the competition went under.
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by selling at close to zero margin until the competition went under.
>
You seem to be implying that Walmart was artificially lowering their prices to drive out competition, and then jacking them up to take advantage of their monopoly domination of the market. If so, that is a quite unethical and illegal practice. Would you care to present your evidence that this occurred? It should probably be forwarded to federal investigators as well.
If, however, you are simply complaining that Walmart is driving out competition by universally offering the lowest prices it can, the
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if this is your counter argument to what your parent posted, then shut the hell up next time something comes to your mind, until you formulate a VALID argument.
yeah idiot. (Score:2)
And frankly people shop at Walmart when they're looking for something cheap to fulfil a purpose.
and that cheapness, comes from the act of walmart killing local businesses first by selling with zero profit margins, and then exploiting you in an environment where there is no competition.
a cheapness which is dearly bought.
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Even if you never set foot in a Walmart, your money is flowing to them.
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You know, the Nazis didn't exactly make a secret of what those machines were used for. And since Wal-Mart employees can't feed themselves on their wages, Wal-Mart is basically having you pay their employees from your taxes so they can get bigger profits.
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A problem is in the USofA the laws governing the oil industry are so very different to the laws in other major oil nations, I'm sure you'll be smart enough to figure out in what way they are different and how come :)
Re:A private company rushed in for profit (Score:4, Insightful)
What does one call an alliance between government and the rich designed to screw over every one else while distracting us with useless baubles like "free health care"?
Considering that business hate the health care bill because it now means that people won't be stuck at their job, unable to leave, because they'll lose their insurance, I'm not sure why you decided it was 'useless'.
Granted, it's a huge giveaway to one business, the health insurance industry(1), but it actually directly harms the creeping fascism (Which is the word you were looking for) we've been living under, simply because it decouples insurance and employment.
It's interesting how businesses generally didn't like the bill, except for a few high tech companies and whatnot, despite the fact that providing insurance for workers is becoming a huge cost of doing business, and the inability to compete with other countries is part of that. But they're rather have crippling costs if that means they have wage slaves who, if they leave, risk bankrupcy for any minor sickness, so cannot leave.
Lack of worker mobility has always been a goal of the 'free market'. In their ideal world, everyone would have one job choice and either work there or die. They're just better at hiding this than 100 years ago, where they'd have the police assault people for daring not to work.
1) It's going to be funny to see what happens when republicans, who want to 'repeal the bill', get into office. The health care bill consists of two parts...the wildly popular parts like disallowing pre-existing conditions, allowing everyone to buy insurance...and the corporate parts like requiring everyone to buy insurance.
If they repeal it all, or just the first part, they...take away insurance for kids with cancer. Yeah, that will play well. If they just repeal the later, health insurance companies go bankrupt. (Which is way too nice for them. Health insurance companies should exit history with their CEO's head on a pike as a warning.)
It's going to be interesting, I think I'll go out and help the tea party chant 'repeal the bill' for shits and giggles.
I wish the Democrats were smarter and willing to play chicken, because I feel the Republicans are going to 'try' to repeal the later, and 'fail' because of the Democrats. It would possibly be the funniest goddamn thing to happen in history if the Democrats said 'Hey, good idea', and started to pass it.
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Although the health systems in Europe differ greatly between countries the vast majority of Europeans are flabbergasted about the opposition there seems to be against proper health care in the USofA.
For example here in The Netherlands we have since a couple of years a system whereby all have to insure themselves but you are free to chose an insurer.
The law specifies minimum cover by the insurers so the various commercial (and non-commercial!) insurers are in proper competition to get their
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Although the health systems in Europe differ greatly between countries the vast majority of Europeans are flabbergasted about the opposition there seems to be against proper health care in the USofA.
In American, people are afraid of the government attempting to help them. People riot in the streets because the government wants to tax the rich and corporations, and give them health care.
In Europe, the government is afraid of the people lynching them for not helping them. People riot in the streets becaus
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The healthcare bill was very badly thought out and has a minor side effect that will bite everyone in the ass shortly. You see, the "mandate" for companies to provide healthcare or be fined is toothless - the fine is far too small to be meaningful. So every business from WalMart and McDonalds to the neighborhood donut shop is going to pull the plug on employer-provided healthcare.
And some will have to pay a fine. Considering the fine is less than a tenth of the cost of the healthcare policies that will b
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Your analyze starts off correct, but then goes into crazy-land.
The fact that employers are going to drop insurance coverage doesn't really have jack shit to do with anything at all....they'll just drop it, and that will be it.
There is no way to get from there to 'people won't be able to buy insurance' and 'the government won't be able to cover it'.
I swear, you're living in some weird alternate universes where businesses can cover a specific cost, but neither individuals or the government can do it. What
Seriously... (Score:3, Funny)
Some at BP needs to do Pound-me-in-the-ass prison (Score:2)
Some at BP needs to do Pound-me-in-the-ass prison time.
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Some at BP needs to do Pound-me-in-the-ass prison time.
The fact that you and many others condone prison justice in the form of the very acts that cause people to go to prison is a brilliant example of how sad our society has become.
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Don't kid yourself. IF (and it's a big if) any BP execs go to prison, it won't be the supermax, it'll be the one that's more like a suburban elementary school with uniforms. Decent but not great food, a strict rule not to wander past that hedge, clean environment, free health care, gym membership and a nice TV, etc.
They don't send poor people who rob the liquor store there because they don't want to encourage robbing the liquor store.
If you really want to punish the execs, make them live like the people the
Being reasonable (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure that BP did cut a lot of corners that they really should not have, and that this lead to the Deepwater Horizon accident.
On the other hand however there will always be 'more that could have been done' in absolutely every situation, by anybody. There's a fine line between taking into account genuine concerns, and listening to every crank or someone with something to sell peddling expensive solutions to minor risks. Nothing is ever entirely risk-free, and there will ALWAYS be more tests, more safely equipment, more drills etc etc that could have been implemented.
In summary, there's a difference between saying, for example in the event of a car wreck "the driver shouldn't have been drinking" (a genuine concern) and "the driver should have taken weekly driving exams, fitted 2ft of foam rubber to the front of his car, and drove everywhere at 10mph max" (the 'more' that could doubtless have been done). I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's worth bearing in mind.
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Note here that most experts are say8ing BP was closer to turning up a bottle of jack while doing 90 in a school zone than they were to the foam rubber and creeping end of the spectrum.
Of course, as the size of the potential damage increases, the ability to mitigate an accident goes down, and the ability to properly remediate the damage goes down, the appropriate level of caution goes up. In this case, they really had no idea what to do if a blow out happened (that's why they had to try and fail several time
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Just search BP safety on google for a heap of reports from various credentialed experts.
Accidents like this are almost never one simple thing that was done wrong. In practically all such accidents across industries it's a long series of poor procedure, bad documentation, cut corners, simple human error, and ignored warning signs that finally culminate in a big accident. For each thing that contributed, you can honestly claim "if not for X, it wouldn't have been a problem".
Dig a bit deeper and you'll find co
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The key issue isn't "there was more that could be done." They key issue is that "they did even less than what the normally do."
If you are taking on a high-risk project, and you do even less preparation than you typically do for a low-risk project, you can be proved negligent. If you "just" did what you normally do, then you might have "only" lacked foresight.
Depends on whose ox is getting gored (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it fascinating that people were willing to blame Halliburton (and Dick Cheney who hasn't been its CEO for 10 years) when they had computer modeling software for the cement that pointed out problems. I wonder if these same people are going to dismiss this fact as junk science while blindly accepting computer models of weather forecasts for the next 100 years all because they prefer one flavor of politics over another.
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Well if you have a hate-on or love-on for whatever your handlers tell you, then yes. You'll blame Bush, Cheney, and openly state that global warming is all mans fault.
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Or blame Obama, Pelosi, and state that man had nothing to do with global warming.
Cuts both ways.
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Except that the current admin, really likes to use the previous administration as a punching bag for everything that goes wrong. Because they can. But even pundits are long since tired of that method of politics.
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I wonder if these same people are going to dismiss this fact as junk science while blindly accepting computer models of weather forecasts for the next 100 years all because they prefer one flavor of politics over another.
What does belief in anthropogenic global warming have to do with politics? Whether you prefer left-wing or right-wing economics as a solution to a global crisis, politics should define your response to a problem, not the problem itself.
But if your preferred political-economic model can't cope with a particular crisis scenario, and has to resort to denying that that crisis could ever occur... then perhaps that model isn't as robust as its supporters would like to think?
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Well if you used common sense, unlike the people who flagged me as a troll. You would have figured out that the majority of wingnuts will use this regardless, especially if they enjoy drinking the kool-aid. But sadly, you're just as much out in la-la land, as people who are up in arms thinking I'm hating on their crush.
One of The Strangest Aspect of this Story (Score:4, Interesting)
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Except the slide clearly shows that Halliburton decided not to reevaluate the faulty cement slurry nor did they wait for the foam stability tests, which would have showed the foam was not stable enough.
Some good guys.
The extra centralizers were a "just to be safe" measure, it's the cement slurry that failed.
The real problem here, though, was Transocean. I imagine everything would have gone as intended (even with the bad cement and insufficient centralizers) had Transocean been watching the process as caref
Time for alternatives NOW! (Score:2, Interesting)
The conversation will soon turn to alternative energy. I just say this documentary which I think will be interesting to others:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/158468/fuel?c=News-and-Information/Documentary-and-Biography [hulu.com]
Some tidbits:
1) Model Ts ran on ethanol well into prohibition. Ford had designed it so farmers could grow their own fuel. A major backer of prohibition was J. P. Morgan head of Standard Oil. Prohibition killed the alchohol powered model Ts.
2) The Deisel engine was designed to run on vegetable oil.
BP's long record (Score:2)
Re:Seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Because boycotting BP hurts people that weren't involved in any decision making and doesn't really hurt the ones responsible.
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Unfortunately, BP gas stations are mostly franchises. I believe that they pay an annual fee to use the brand name. BP still gets their money unless the gas station goes bankrupt. Because there isn't much excess refining capacity in the US, BP could still sell their gas to the other stations. A boycott would hurt BP's public image, but wouldn't cost them much money.
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Because the franchises are selling everybody's gas, not just BP's. The price of wholesale will be unaffected, and that's what BP gets for its gas, no matter who buys it. If the price goes down it means the gas stations had to sell at a loss - they paid one price to BP and now have to sell for a lower price. BP has already received its money and is completely unaffected. If BP stations never bought a drop of BP gas again, BP still wouldn't lose a dime, because all the other non-BP stations would be buyin
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Franchises play an incredibly minor part in BP's revenue. It is nearly impossible for consumers to damage a company whose product is a commodity, short of organizing a boycott of that commodity in its entirety (and hence, every other company who produces/markets that commodity).
While I'm not saying a gasoline boycott is out of the question, a consumer-lead campaign to financially punish BP would have to be far larger in scope than BP itself. There are, of course, other BP subsidiaries that produce non-commo
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By fired you mean given millions of dollars and asked not to come back to work. That sounds like a real hardship.
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It's been a while since executive "performance bonuses" were actually connected to performance. If fired, they will receive more money than most people make in a lifetime and one of their cronies will make sure to have a seat pulled out and dusted off for them elsewhere.
Re:they made their bed (Score:2, Insightful)
They choose to work for bastards, they get what they deserve.
Seriously, do we overlook what Nazis did in WWII just because they werent the ones doing the gassing?
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Yes, the Nazis who didn't commit war crimes are generally not prosecuted.
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Your answer is overly simplistic and ignores history. If East Germany hadn't been set up as a Soviet puppet state, the allies might well have gone further, but there was a Cold War, and an rei-ndustrialized, reinvigorated West Germany was prioritized over imprisoning 90,000 Nazis and restricting the work of 1.7 million others. wikipedia's entry on Denazification [wikipedia.org]
Of course, the Nazi party was disbanded, and what assets it had were used for other purposes. Perhaps BP should suffer the same fate. Stockholders w
Re:Seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say BP hurt it's employees. But the real reason there are no boycott campaigns is that people don't make big moral decisions when the SUV is nearing E. Some dont care, others probably think all oil companies are likely as bad, but I'd guess the majority just want a tank of gas.
Re:Seriously (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, FWIW, here in Alabama, a lot of people *have* been boycotting BP. A number of gas stations here in Birmingham have changed from BP to some other brand because their business dropped off precipitously after the spill. (Anecdotal evidence alert, no hard evidence, just what I've noticed while driving around.)
As for boycotting BP ... well, a lot of people figure the buck had to stop somewhere. To me, it's indisputable that BP made some terrible decisions. The fact that (sadly) they had already determined that the well wasn't economically viable, and BP was planning just to cap it and leave it for the time being, is irrelevant.
I'm a good free market conservative, but I do believe in responsible behavior on the part of those companies that enjoy the benefits of it. If someone were to open a large manufacturing plant in Central Alabama, we'd welcome the jobs . .. .. but we would NOT welcome them cutting corners and poisoning the streams, for example. Stereotypes aside, we ain't ENTIRELY stupid here. :)
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I'm a good free market conservative, but I do believe in responsible behavior on the part of those companies that enjoy the benefits of it. If someone were to open a large manufacturing plant in Central Alabama, we'd welcome the jobs . .. .. but we would NOT welcome them cutting corners and poisoning the streams, for example.
And there's the nut of the issue when it comes to the market and regulation. You don't need regulation where you can count on people's self-interest to do the right thing. You do need it where you can count on their short-sightedness and greed to overwhelm even their self-interest.
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That's the sort of attitude the people running companies want you to buy into. Let's look at the facts:
1) No one forces anyone to work for BP
2) BP has already hurt a large number of people who had no part in the decision process
3) If BP had committed these acts, a boycott of BP would not be needed. It is BPs actions that is creating the situation. We are just taking a sane and sensible course of action.
4) Doing nothing just perpetuates a criminal enterprise
Doing nothing is sort of like not turning in a mobs
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I subscribe to the trickle up theory of boycotting.
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I guess BP are just too slick to handle, and they do have a pretty well oiled Lobby and PR machine.
But personally, I would not mind seeing BP taking a severe beating in the marketplace, as fines apparently have a hard time making the point.
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they do have a pretty well oiled Lobby and PR machine.
Almost as well oiled as the Mexican Gulf!
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Probably you just haven't looked. There has been a massive boycott here in Florida: one [baynews9.com], two [baynews9.com], three [baynews9.com]. BTW -- If you're going to boycott BP, you need to boycott all of BP's brands [alexanderhiggins.com], too.
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How does one boycott BP? Some markets have no alternatives. Me, I've never seen a BP-branded fueling station in my life, but I've probably burned lots of fuel that went through BP's hands. The oil marketplace has a gordian interchange of resources that defy any attempt of unravelling what came from where. If you really want to boycott BP oil,,you have to swear off oil entirely.
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What? Are you implying that politicians let campaign donations color their decision making? Why I would never have dreamed of that happening!
Re:And this is a surprise? (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, let's see, replace the income of the fishermen, the lost income of Gulf coast resorts, subsidize the cost of seafood for all since it got more expensive due to reduced fishing, etc.
Then, of course there's completing the cleanup of what can be cleaned up. We don't have the technology to extract all that oil from the water (yes, oil naturally seeps into the water, but the oil from the blowout is a significant increase in that amount). That will just about cover the actual damages.
Of course, the standard
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Re:Easy peasy (Score:5, Informative)
BP gas stations are independently owned and operated... and they don't necessarily sell BP gas. Furthermore, even if every BP station were to shut down tomorrow, BP would still be able to sell their gas to every other gas station, none of which are locked into buying their gas from a single provider.
In short, boycotting BP won't do anything but hurt locally owned gas stations that had nothing to do with the spill.
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BP gas stations are independently owned and operated... and they don't necessarily sell BP gas.
Then it should be relatively cheap for them to re-brand. Not free, but they made a mistake when choosing a brand to operate under, and a mistake costing just some money is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Or if BP can tell them not to change brand, then they're not really independent, are they?
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So what's the point of the boycott? The station (not owned by BP) has to spend money to change their advertising, then they continue to buy just as much petrol from BP and BP gets just as much money as before.
I don't think BP supports or just allows a chain of BP brand stations just for fun, or as some kind of charity...
Hurting the brand hurts the owner of the brand, especially so if the brand name is the company name.
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5% royalty fees on their profits. The stations typically only make about 5c per gallon (after credit card costs) on the gas, so say wholesale is $2.15 (the price last week), taxes are about 40c per gallon, which gives a final retail of about $2.60. Final price varies by location but this is average. So if a BP station is selling 100,000 gallons of gas a month (a little low, but nice and round), BP is pulling in $215,000 per month while the station owner is getting $5,000.
Best case scenario (assuming all
Re:Easy peasy (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's not as if gas stations buying BP gas somehow takes away my ability to find out the source of the gas I'm trying to buy. And I've heard that margins for local gas stations are paper thin. I'm sure more than a few custome
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All of your local gas stations get their gas from the same place. It doesn't matter what brand the label on the pump says.
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The gasoline may come from the same small group of refineries (because environazi regulations has blocked new refineries for decades) but you don't think it matters if BP isn't the middle man jn the deal? Somebody earns profits from the distribution process. I'd just as soon it not be BP, not just because of the spill, but BP has a very long history of unethical business practices (google "castrol syntec" for good info on BP's legalizing fraud).
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True that. The branded stations have to buy their brand's gas, but the big oil companies buy, sell, and trade oil between each other all the time. In fact, most oil ventures are partnerships among the big names, and a given gallon of gasoline is almost always owned by more than one company.
I.E. that refinery down the road may be BP owned, but the oil it is refining is probably 40% Exxon, 30% Shell, and 30% BP, or some variation in the percentages and ownership of the gas.
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Gasoline transported by pipeline carries a mixed-producer product. All stations that buy from the same bulk terminal are buying the same gasoline, and that gasoline is a mixture of product from every refinery that transports using that particular pipeline (which, for the larger pipelines, is almost all of the major names). The only thing the filling station can tell you is which bulk terminal they purchase from, not which producer their gasoline was actually refined at.
Asking where the gas came from is more
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How would you know?
The truck says Bob's Petroleum Products on the side. Bob drives over to the Badger Pipeline terminal to fill up. Where in this process it is known that the crude oil came from a BP-owned well?
Sorry, the information just isn't available.
Today the other problem is that the pipeline terminal may be connected directly to a refinery that is owned and operated by BP. Therefore in that region there isn't anything but gasoline from BP, period.
Unless you want to start pedaling to the grocery st
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That's not entirely true. You could avoid Castrol products, as they're owned by BP. Unfortunately I don't think their commercial sales are nearly as important as their industrial ones. Ah well.
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They don't make any products you can purchase? Really?
http://www.castrol.com/castrol/genericsection.do?categoryId=82915811&contentId=6006712 [castrol.com]
In order for any boycott to be effective you would have to boycott them for a full quarter - not do what some people did when they "bocotted" Mobil back in the day by delaying filling up by a few days.
Hell, I haven't knowingly purchased any BP products ever since the lawsuits redefined what was allowed to be called "synthetic motor oil" - their business practices ha
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It's worse than that - there is a very high likelihood that any non-branded gas station is selling BP gas at any given time, and you have no way of knowing which are or aren't. Furthermore, less than half of BP's crude is sold as gasoline or diesel. The rest goes into other petroleum products, like plastic. Your water bottle or grocery bag may not say "BP" on the side, but chances are BP crude was used to make it.
It is virtually impossible to boycott BP. All you can do is put local small business owners
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BP has a consumer solar division, sells LPG directly to individuals, has a consumer lubricants division, and produces a vast array of petrochemical products for business use (and in quantities far smaller than "supertanker").
Not that I believe a boycott will do much to a company that derives their income primarily from producing a product that is traded as a commodity, but the above comment was too asinine to pass up.
http://www.bp.com/productsservices.do?categoryId=37&contentId=2007985 [bp.com]
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A "responsible company"? In the oil business?
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"Simply boycott BP. If enough people do it, they will be bought by a responsible company."
In what fucking alternate universe does a company being sold mean that the buyer will be "responsible"???
Put down the glass pipe.
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Actually its more like saying that Ford should be responsible for the faulty oil filters when the oil filter pours oil out the seals. Just like saying BP should be held responsible when they install a blow out valve and it.. umm pours oil out its seals.
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I have a nit to pick about that.
Ford recommended severely under-inflating the tires for ride comfort. Unless the Firestone tires prove defective when properly inflated, how can you blame Firestone for Ford's willful negligence?
Saying Firestone was at fault because the courts said so is like saying Castrol Syntec is actually synthetic oil not based on dino oil because the courts