This blew up killing the entire crew thirty seconds after this picture was taken, for want of a $50 safety valve BP didn't want to pay forI read an article about gigantic oil incompetents BP on
Foreign Policy and it would be fair to say it was 'enlightening', not to mention enraging. Apparently BP have spent hundreds of millions of dollars re-branding themselves as the cleanest of petrol companies, even saying that BP no longer stood for British Petroleum but instead for 'Beyond Petrol'. Ignoring how simperingly sad that tagline is (was), it is also patently untrue. BP having been steadily reducing their input into renewable energy over the last few years, and have spent far more advertising being green than on actually being green. The mega spillage in the Gulf of Mexico seemed pretty inevitable, and when you read that a $500,000 dollar device (which is probably how much the BP chief exec spends on lunch each day) could have prevented it, a device which nations as dubious as Brazil make mandatory but the USA do not, it makes my temper go up like a gas flare.
Add to this that the company has apparently been fined $485,000,000 in the last five years in the US alone for failing to comply with safety regulations. The cost is more than environmental, 11 BP workers died in the Gulf of Mexico explosion and another 15 died in an incident on a BP Texas oil refinery. Putting the morals of the argument aside (as I am sure BP regularly do), it doesn't even make financial sense, the cost of increasing safety measures would be a fraction of the fines they've had to pay. It seems even in the 21st Century that the oil companies are still run by self motivated, cigar toting, early 20th century 'capitalists', for whom concern for their workers is non existent and even the long-term health of the company is unimportant in the face of saving a quick buck.
