Who will pay for this disaster?
BP(Beyond Petroleum) or its known old name British Petrol is the 4th biggest company in the world with 367 billion USD revenue, 21.1 billion USD profit. BP has 97,600 employees and their headquarters is in London.
BP doesn't only consist of petrol stations that we can always see on the side of the roads. BP Group is also the owner of well-known world brands such as BP, Aral, Astro, Castrol etc. but more importantly they are doing large scale operations such as finding, extracting oil, moving the oil that they find on earth with a large scale projects such as the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline and refining oil in the huge refineries that they own. These activities make BP the 4th biggest company of the world.
So, is this giant petroleum corporation really environmentally friendly as they promote it in their website or an evil company that is consuming world resources and harming earth?
BP has lot's of oil searching and extracting platforms around the world. One of them is in the Gulf of Mexico. This platform executed by Transocean under BP supervision. On April 20th, an explosion started massive ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, now considered the largest offshore spill in U.S. history. The explosion killed 11 platform workers and injured 17 others. Since then BP hasn't been able to close the hole in the blowout preventer valves to stop the oil spillage in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil is still leaking to the sea for more than a month and according to some news, BP might not be able to stop the leaking by August 2010.
In a permit submitted May 13, 2010, BP estimated a worst case spill of 240,000 barrels (10,000,000 US gallons; 38,000,000 litres) per day for each of the two relief wells that are being drilled in an attempt to stop the uncontrolled release.
Obviously this environment disaster affects a lot of people and speices that lives at the Gulf of Mexico. The most important question is how will BP pay for this or is there enough money to pay worth of destroying a specie in that region? I personally want BP to be punished with an astronomic fine and collapse. It might be a good lesson for all other petroleum companies to understand there are a consequence's to harming the earth.
Punishing BP is not as simple as laying down a massive fine that bankrupts the company for several reasons.
1/ If you bankrupt a company then that company is now forgoing the debts and obligations it owes to hundreds of other people along the line who have are not contributing towards the "evil" operations of the company.
2/ The main people losing out on this now bankrupt company are the shareholders, who almost wholeheartedly have done nothing wrong here, these are the people who will lose almost all of their money, yet have done nothing wrong. One must also consider the type of investors in large multinational companies, the mom and dad investors the pension plans, can it be fair for these people to lose their money?
3/ The employees all 97,000 of them. What can we say to them now without jobs? That they have all been doing “evil” things to destroy our planet? Not all of them are high well paid executives, their loss of income will have a very heartbreaking outcome for them and their families
4/ The supplies of BP, let’s think about the knock on effect of the word’s 4th biggest company collapsing, the taxes it pays, all of BPs expenses got paid to someone and all of this business is now gone
It should be the people who have responsibility, and who have made bad or wrong decisions who are held accountable because these are the people who have in fact caused the problem we now see today.