In the News this Week
BP, Refuses to give figures on the damage done.
Read what the yahoos' team had to say about the issues.
by Bret Michaels Dykes @ Yahoo.com/news
BP executives may now be fretting over the prospect of going to jail on manslaughter charges—but they're not easing up on their aggressive efforts to spin the legacy of last summer's disastrous Gulf oil spill. In its first sustainability report since the Deepwater Horizon explosion triggered the spill last year, BP claims that it leaked more oil in 2006 and 2008 than it did in 2010. Wait, what?!
Yes, right there on the first page of the report, the company lists the amount of oil, CO2 and methane it released into the environment in 2010. However, on closer inspection it turns out that those figures don't include the oil leaked in last summer's Gulf spill. The reason? According to a message from the company in the report's fine print, "no accurate determination" of the extent of the disaster has been made to date. The survey goes on to note that the company decided to omit that embarrassing incident in the Gulf "due to our reluctance to report data that has such a high degree of uncertainty." So they merely chose not to factor in the biggest offshore oil spill in American history.
Now, keep in mind that, in the past year, scores of scientists from across the world have poured over data and reviewed video footage of the flow of oil spewing from BP's busted well on the floor of the Gulf. And by consulting such sources, researchers have offered their own estimates of how much oil entered the Gulf at BP's behest. What's more, a vast range of experts who'd been following the spill closely agreed that the U.S. government's final estimate that BP had released roughly 4.9 million barrels into the Gulf seemed reasonably accurate. BP officials, of course, cried foul and challenged the numbers, just as they did from the first day of the spill onward—they insisted on their own preferred figure of 5,000 barrels per day, which of course made the damage of the spill, and the corporate liability arising from it, seem minimal.
Such low-end estimates were conceived, in the words of Fast Company, to "greenwash" the scale of the spill's impact. And small wonder: BP stands to be fined between $1,100 and $4,300 per barrel of oil leaked under the Clean Water Act. That range hinges on the degree that the courts rule that BP's own negligence prompted the spill.
After seeing our chart in the top right corner of this post shortly when we initially published it, a reader -- New York-based writer Bradley Warshauer -- created a chart showing what a bar graph would look like using the U.S. government's estimate of how much oil BP spilled into the Gulf in 2010, versus the amount it says it spilled in 2006 and 2008. He was kind enough to pass it along so we could embed it below:
BP also devotes several other portions of the report to touting the company's response to the spill. "From the beginning, BP worked to fight the spill and minimize its impact on the environment," one section of the report reads—in glowing language not unlike what surfaced in the PR copy that "BP reporters" produced for the in-house organ Planet BP last summer. "These efforts helped to reduce the amount of oil that reached the shore and environmentally sensitive marsh areas."
BP -- which Tuesday evening announced that it had lost a computer containing the personal information of over 13,000 oil spill claimants --is otherwise keeping mum, however, on just what the company believes might be a more accurate estimate of the quantity of oil, CO2 and methane it spilled into the Gulf environment. The oil giant's representatives did not immediately respond to The Lookout's requests for more information.