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BP CEO Supports a Boycott?
Does BP CEO Tony Hayward want millions of people to take the BP boycott pledge?
Admittedly, it seems unlikely.
Yet, how else can you explain a company CEO who before and during what is now the worst oil spill in U.S. history provokes consumers with comments like this:
1. "We had too many people that were working to save the world." [1]
OK, this is one that actually came before BP's oil gusher, in a speech at Stanford Business School. Hayward explained how in 2007 he took over a company that was in crisis, following the explosion of its Texas refinery that killed 15 workers, a major oil spill in Alaska, a price-fixing case and other serious problems. Part of his diagnosis for the source of the company's problems, strangely, was that "we had too many people that were working to save the world." Not exactly what you might have expected led to problems with refinery safety, oil pipe maintenance and avoiding price conspiracies. (15:24
2. "What the hell did we do to deserve this?" [2]
Yes, Tony Hayward seems to think that BP is the victim of the oil spill catastrophe it created.
"Deserve" in this context is a strange sentiment. But if Hayward had asked what in the hell BP did to cause the disaster, emerging evidence suggests the answers are straightforward: recklessly proceed with extreme deepwater drilling that far exceeds the ability of industry to control problems; fail to invest properly in safety, including in relatively cheap safety equipment; fail to oversee its contractors sufficiently; and order drilling operations to skirt safety measures.
3. "It wasn't our accident. But we are absolutely responsible for the oil, for cleaning it up and that's what we intend to do ... The drilling rig was a Transocean drilling rig, it was their rig and their equipment that failed, run by their people with their processes. But our responsibility is the oil and it is ours to clean it up." [3]
It increasingly seems the case that BP and its contractor Transocean, as well as Halliburton, another contractor working on the rig, all contributed significantly to the disaster through negligence and malfeasance. But Hayward only gets it half right. It's BP's responsibility to clean up the oil, yes, but it was responsible for the rig, too. Even if the mistakes were all Transocean's -- which is not the case -- it is still BP's accident.
4. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." [4]
Yes, and a deadly dose of cyanide is tiny in relationship to a person's overall body mass.
Even more importantly, BP is putting far, far more oil into the Gulf of Mexico than it has admitted. Remember, the company first claimed only 1,000 barrels were leaking a day. Then it increased its estimate five fold, to 5,000 barrels. Now it claims to be capturing 5,000 barrels, while the oil gusher appears to continue almost unabated. Independent scientists say the actual amount could be as much as 95,000 barrels a day, or more. That would be almost 4 million gallons, meaning the BP disaster is spewing an Exxon Valdez equivalent roughly every two and a half days.
5. "I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest." [5]
What is emerging as this disaster unfolds is that scientists have surprisingly little idea how it will play out. But a "very, very modest" impact is very, very unlikely. The risks to the shore and to deepwater sealife, of winding up in Gulf currents, and even of being exacerbated by hurricanes are profound. Even BP's remedial measures, notably the use of mass quantities of chemical dispersants, pose all kinds of uncertain environmental risks.
Tony Hayward doesn't want to admit that BP is responsible for the Gulf disaster, is spinning the disaster, and seems to think BP is a victim.
Tony Hayward needs to hear a message from consumers that they don't see the world as he apparently does. Take the BP Boycott Pledge.
- Posted in
16 Comments so far
Show AllHe and Rand Paul share the same viewpoint: Hey, sometimes accidents happen; you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs; just because things went awry is no reason for the government to crack down on a perfectly fine oil company who is doing all it can to fix things.
So long as this point of view resonates with ANYBODY, we're in deep crude with no clean-up in sight.
For your information: BP is ARCO gasoline sold in the western US.
So this is the fool in charge of cleaning up the mess he made, because he has already proven to be a consummate fool. All three of the outfits responsible for that rig are responsible for the disaster, but even if they did man up and accept responsibility, it wouldn't make any real difference. As John Atcheson says in his piece today, Exxon accepted responsibility for the Valdez disaster in 1989 and it never amounted to any more than a slap on the wrist.
Until we begin to examine what has happened to our broken, suicidal society, at the hands of our political class and the corporate whores who own them all, we can't expect any changes to emerge from this catastrophe. Obama can call a 6 month moratorium on drilling, just in time to squeak by in the next election (he won't), then resume the same destructive habits as before. We have to thoroughly break up this corrupt, incompetent system, or we will all be killed by it. Smash it up and build something that works, for us, not the 1% who are thriving on our powerlessness and suffering, at their hands. Smash up the capitalist imperialist state, or submit to its unending depradations, insults and enslavement.
Please watch this short video about bioremediation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VfypUzx1tI
Then get on the phone and start telling congresspeople about it.
well worth watching
while watching, think about why they aren't using it
Well, I hate to defend the guy, but I do think it's important to point out that we all are tarnished by oil's brush. Nearly everyone I know drives, and just the fact that all of us are writing and corresponding on the Internet means we use electricity. So unless you are one of the few successful people out there who can afford solar and wind power, who lives in a community where you walk to work, and so on, you are part of the problem.
The idea of a BP boycott is meaningless. Oil companies sell their product on the open market--other 'gas stations' buy oil from wholesalers. 'Gas stations' are owner-operator franchises. If you boycott, you only put a local businessman out of business, and unemployment rises.
The naivete of most of us astounds me. People talk hopefully about electric cars. Electric plants, which would supply the power to these cars, burn coal, oil, or run on nuclear power. Transmission lines are notorious for their inefficiency--something like 50% of electricity is lost when transmitted over long distance power lines, as much of it is on our planet. Both coal and oil of course impact climate change, and nuclear has long term disposal problems, to say the least. So electric cars won't mean diddly.
We need to abandon the automobile and a furthering of our ecological catastrophe. There is no such thing as a 'clean' fuel-efficient car. If you think there is, I have a bridge I want to sell you. You know, the one that Sarah would have built, that one to Nowhere.
Wake up. Don't just read Orwell and Marx, learn about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Try and understand that there are no 'magical' technologies.
That laptop you are reading this on is made of petroleum and its lithium ion battery is a scarce resource about to become even scarcer because of electric cars.
That makes you part of the problem.
Whenever we use energy, we create pollution. Unless, that is, we build a human-scale society, community based, where nearly everyone walks to work, and we try to achieve a zero carbon footprint systemically. Vacationers could use trains, sailing ships, horse-drawn carriages, or rely on human powered bicycles. Planes and cars would be scratched as a means of transport.
We don't need to boycott BP, even though it will give us the good old American leftist illusion--a trait descended from the Puritans--that WE don't have bloody hands. The truth is,a boycott is pretty meaningless. What we need to do is nationalize ALL the energy companies in the US--and these resources could gradually go the way of the dinosaur from whence they came.
The continued war of Us vs. Them, however, will do nothing to stop the continued ecocide and resource wars which accompany OUR hydrocarbon based economy. So even if WE feel good, the planet will be a dead one and OUR feelings won't have stopped it. These gestures will do nothing to change the system.
What Einstein said about the Bomb is equally true of the Car: "Everything changed except our way of thinking."
You're right, there are no magical technologies, and I think many remain under this delusion, whether left, right or center. When you say, "What we need to do is nationalize ALL the energy companies in the US--and these resources could gradually go the way of the dinosaur from whence they came," I fully agree, too. But the injunction to stop driving cars, stop using electricity, stop relying on petroleum products (computers and about 10,000,000 other things), so that we have a zero carbon footprint is more naive than the naivete you point out about boycotting BP.
Thirty years ago I was on a big kick to eliminate television, for all the usual leftist reasons, and for a while was quite the crusader. Many people agreed with my arguments and went on watching just as much TV as ever. Now we are supersaturated in the medium. Not that we weren't then, but it's a thousand times worse today. The same is true of the internal combustion engine, putting aside your cynicism for electric cars. We drive probably 50 times more than we did 30 years ago, and we were strangling on traffic, pollution and all the abominable side effects even then. Now it's reached plague proportions, and people keep driving more and more, everywhere all the time.
Boycotting BP is meaningless, as you say, but so is expecting everyone to give up cars, plane travel, or any other high-carbon energy use, even if we all get PhD's in The Second Law of Thermodynamics, go back to E.F. Schumacher instead of Marx, and grow our own gardens (like I do). The BP debacle should serve as an ultamatim to move us completely away from fossil fuel dependency and spur us toward developing non-carbon based energy sources, like wind and solar. But we've been hearing that refrain for 40 years, and NOTHING has been done.
Everyone says, "Wake Up, America!" about every damn thing under the sun, but the fact is, we're captive of these highly inefficient, polluting, finally idiotic technologies because we have no say in the matter. We don't have a democracy, we have a plutocracy/kleptocracy fully designed and orchestrated by an oligarchy the rest of us never even encounter at any time in our lives. They OWN the systems of energy we have no choice but use--unless we are fortunate enough to live close enough to where we work that we can walk or ride a bike. That's not many of us. The vast majority have no choice but drive, because scarcely anywhere do we have public transportation sufficient to meet the needs. That too is all by design. But yes, we need to change all this, but we needed to do that 40-50 years ago. Now, with 30+ years of deregulation and Republican rightwing anarchism, we have the Gulf of Mexico turned into an enormous body of crude oil about to make its way to the Atlantic, polluting everything in its path. We are killing the oceans with our addiction to oil, but the entire insane society in which this is happening is structured to accept nothing less.
Absolutely.
But like the poison of slavery, nothing less than the eventual abolition will solve the problem.
I want to tell you that I drove across 50 miles of Interstate 70 through Kansas ten years ago, and saw the earth bulldozed 12 lanes across for those 50 miles--and then I really understood the absolute scar on our Earth this damned chariot bequeaths us.
It was akin to Ezekiel's vision. The fertile crescent becomes a desert from which the bones rise, because the rhythm of the people is in the wheels. But I don't think it needs to be like this.
I agree we are at the mercy of the kleptocratic elites, but we need to wrest control from these elites. Yes, I have been beating this same stupid drum for forty years, but the more things change the more they remain the same, and my son will beat that drum, and his son if he has one, too.
I am a historian, that is how history changes.
Or history will change us, and perhaps this catastrophe is one of many that will wrench us into changing behavior. I know you may doubt that, but that too is a legacy of the hydrocarbon economy: that we are hopeless.
I want to hope that we will change before the climate, dead oceans, nuclear war, or natural catastrophes do. I think there is still a chance that these catastrophes may serve as catalysts for change, but perhaps you are right, I'm just another Dodo.
What we need to become is a different society in which we plan new organic communities that link together with much smaller carbon footprints. I know it's pie in the sky but I prefer the idea of progress and love Aesop's tortoise, although the two are contradictory in our postindustrial world.
Maybe what we need is a new religion that brings us together in love and community instead of hate and division, but I don't know how we do that.
As far as our endless distractibility I think we need to begin to return to a more civic and less individuated culture, so that we share common rooms and engage with each other in person rather than relying on myspace and google to provide the dialogue we are having now.
Sioux Rose
Inspired post.
I'm with you. If you're a Dodo, I'm another, since I've felt like one for about 40 years. But I do totally agree with all you've said. Hell, I've said the same things for . . . 40 years. The new religion you mention is something I used to take very seriously, except I think it shouldn't have anything to do with Religion. Much of our collective problem stems from too much religion. Except in its original meaning, which was "binding together," religion has been the worst poison of our species. Instead of binding us together it has served to create insane divisions, where now those kleptocratic elites have all the power and we have ... churches. Or mosques or synogogues. It's belief systems that have been murdering us for centuries. I once had some of those visions too. And the cars just keep coming, and the TVs keep blaring and flickering, and not many seem to be noticing the horror of it all piling up around us.
Amen, my friend, I recognize my own thoughts in what you write.
Maybe we will all go the way of the Dodo--let's hope before we take all the other species with us.
It's like my friend Charly said during the Stone Age about a running argument he had with a pal.
His pal said the world would end in a nuclear holocaust.
Charly told his friend he was being too optimistic.
Charly declared himself a pessimist who thought the same old shit would go on forever.
Jonathan Swift, where are you now that we need you?
Thomas Paine, please phone home.
you know many many of us who drive every day vote and volunteer for better renewables and electric cars...
hell here in montana from the east side of the rockies on to the dakotas we could have a million wind generators going charging those electric cars....
but that moron war criminal bush gave out tax breaks to people if they bought a car that weighed over 6,000 lbs...
only the biggest expeditions and hummers etc are that big....
tax breaks for electric cars?
good luck.....
bail out the banksters in an amount that would have PAID OFF EVERY MORTGAGE in america and hardly a nickle for the common man....
but today our current war criminal in chief now says nuclear power (where over 1/3 of the 105 current nuke plants are LEAKING!) is green and clean coal(an oxymoron if there ever was one) is green....
has this fucking idiot seen any pix of mountaintop removal? or the sludge that's released when these hokey ass dams let loose?
fuckin VAMPIRES have taken over our economy!
where's corey feldman and the crew from "lost boys" when we need it!
Of course, boycott BP.
One can reduce one's electricity usage. In Los Angeles I have signed up for green electricity from LA Department of Water and Power and get electricity from renewable sources. I also live in an all-electric apartment.
Also, i visited Costa Rice last August, and they have 95% of their power from renewable sources--mostly from hydroelectric dams. Our environmental movement doesn't really push hard for a comprehensive energy policy in the U.S. We should through environmental organizations have a mass movement that wants huge changes in our energy policy nationwide. In Texas, Montana, the Dakotas etc they can have wind generators for electricity. In Los Angeles and a lot of the Southwest studies have shown that solar panels on rooftops can give almost all of the electricity needed for the home or building. We need to develop our will to make change.
ARCO, we will not buy your gas,
our patience has been spent!
To BP's plundered opulence,
this message will be sent.
And to the Earth, your loss is plain...
ruined sea and nation.
BP,that karma works on your
destruction! Our elation.
The oil industry it is clear now to me, has been let loose. The Bigger you are the looser were the regulatory requirements.
Before we jump on Obama (I am not a fan of his watching his geopolitics and finance reform) lets just remember that the Oil Men Bush Co. and Cheney (HAL) were running the show for a LONG 8 years that helped to bring this innovative country to its Knees !!!!!
For those that think that the gov. should take over the operation I say stop and think. Day to day the gov. has its head in Finance and War, and has experts in these areas. They do not have the expertise to drill or put out wells. The Oil Industry has this, hence BP.