Comment by jsbisviewtiful
9 hours ago
It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again.
9 hours ago
It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again.
No, they are definitely terrified about it happening again. Deepwater Horizon cost BP nearly $70 billion total in direct financial payouts, including $20 billion in fines. $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. This is an enormous amount of money, even for a large corporation such as BP. BP suspended their dividend because of the spill.
That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
Just about every week there’s news of some kind of ecosystem damage by another negligent company that streams into my RSS feed.
Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
The problem is sometimes the lessoned learned is don’t be responsible.
So no longer own oil tankers and instead each ship is owned by its own LLC so just that piece goes down and the liability gets capped to its insurance contract.
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It's not really your argument, but to be clear nobody is actually claiming the US followed Israel into war with Iran because of oil.
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I don't condone corporate negligence or violations of environmental protection laws, but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization. We're going to have an impact.
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What’s exhausting is shifting the goal posts. BP should be held up as a great example where the responsibility transferred onto the shareholders.
“Oh, but there are other bad actors doing things” is not a counterpoint. That’s the same as claiming a government can’t work by pointing to a different failed policy every time someone points how how a policy failure was corrected.
It wasn't enormous enough in fines, since they're still in business and capable of doing it again, and again surviving such fines.
Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.
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Don't worry. BP is sorry[1] for the spill. That should be enough, right?
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u0EL_u4nvw
Didn’t you hear? They (gasp) had to suspend the dividend.
> $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP.
That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).
I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach.
Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
The stock price fell by 50ish percent, and they've spent 16 years recovering.
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BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.
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Did anyone go to jail? Was anyone executed? Was BP dissolved?
Not enough stakeholders are terrified enough.
If the upside is profit and the maximum downside is losing money, corporations will happily rape the Earth.
The system is working as designed.
Even if we executed everone involved the lesson would have been to segregate responsibility and find a fall guy
BP is a European company. You know what the cost would have been for ExxonMobil? Pocket change. See multiple spills in Alaska for examples.
BP's revenue in the last 30 years is over $6.5 trillion. Other than the bad press and some lost coins, they don't really give a shit.
It makes my head spin trying to think about it and then when I successfully give it a good think I get depressed and sometimes a bit hysterical.
The psychopaths are ruining the world.
Would people stop burning oil if there weren't people out there concerned with profit?
I very much doubt it. For consumers it is all about cost. Heating in winter with Natural Gas is 1/3 the price of electricity and much cheaper than Oil.
To get people off of fossil fuels, remove oil subsidizes and tax fossil fuels a lot. Otherwise moving to renewals will take a very long time.
And yes, we can put up solar panels on your house, but that cost $ which people do not have. Solar Panels should be subsidized in an easy manner for people to get funds for installation.
Yes. Not immediately—firstly, because the finite speed of light in a vacuum precludes simultaneity—but eventually, when relieved of rent-seeking intermediaries, we'd be free to invest in sustainable infrastructure.
We are already massively investing into renewable energy... to the tune of about $1trillion since 2020 in the US. In 2024, 95%+ of all new electricity capacity was solar/wind/batteries.
Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.
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The most galling/depressing thing to me is that our population is so overwhelming that if even just 1% of us are bad actors, that's still so many that catastrophes like this (environmental and otherwise) become mathematically inevitable.
It isn't so much that 1% can even do this though. What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale? We cannot pull the sufficient levers. We don't have authority. We don't have actual power.
But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.
> What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale?
Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.
Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.
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"It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again."
Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).
You said something interesting: "... modern life requires accidents like this."
This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.
Is it? Because at the very least, modern life involves the mass production of plastics, mining of various minerals, and the use of copious amounts of energy. That last one is only kind of solved (as long as everything works and nothing breaks), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that there is any feasible substitute for the first two.
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How would we know such a society is possible? There's zero proof of that to date. Errors and inevitable catastrophes are part of the cost of a highly complex technically advanced society run by humans.
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Scale matters. When you have the scale that we do, you will have accidents because of the sheer number and the lack of oversight due to cost pressures. These accidents aren't going anywhere. They have been around since industrial times and will continue to be so. Please tell me how you would ensure 0 accidents - the world would be interested to know since it hasn't been discovered yet. Now please explain who's position is baseless.
Not with humans.
Wow, lots of people disagreeing with the comment without stating why. Pretty meta when you consider the cognitive dissonance aspect haha.
Uncomfortable truths and all that.