Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
I'm sure this will come as an enormous shock to those who are completely oblivious to reality. British Petroleum, while posting record profits, also spent record amounts of its own money on lobbying to weaken environmental and safety regulations and keep the taxpayer subsidy spigot open over the last couple years. Antonia Juhasz reports some of the astonishing figures in The Guardian:
BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States. Its 2009 revenues of $327bn are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence US policy and regulatory oversight.In 2009, the company spent nearly $16m on lobbying the federal government, ranking it among the 20 highest spenders that year, and shattering its own previous record of $10.4m set in 2008. In 2008, it also spent more than $530,000 on federal elections, placing it among the oil industry's top 10 political spenders.
And then there's the pattern of ignoring safety regulations that led to an explosion at one of their refineries a few years ago:
This money has bought BP great access and, many would argue, leniency. "I personally believe that BP, with its corporate culture of greed over profits, murdered my parents," Eva Rowe testified before Congress in 2007. The Congress was investigating the worst workplace accident in the US in more than 15 years, a massive explosion at BP's Texas City Refinery in March 2005 that killed 15 workers, including Rowe's parents, and injured 180.The US Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency, investigated the blast and released a devastating indictment of BP. "The Texas City disaster was caused by organisational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP corporation," the 2007 report found. "The combination of cost-cutting, production pressures and failure to invest caused a progressive deterioration of safety at the refinery."
While experiencing its highest profits in its corporate history, BP implemented budget cuts of 25% in 1999 and 2005 at each of its five US refineries. The safety board found a pervasive "complacency towards serious safety risks" at all of them.
And the kind of deep water drilling going on makes disasters like this one more and more likely:
BP and the entire oil industry have lobbied aggressively to open new US waters to offshore drilling and expand the access they already had. For decades, the vast majority of drilling from the US Gulf took place on simple scaffolds in 30ft to 200ft of water. In the past 10 years, the number of rigs drilling in depths of greater than 1,000ft (deep wells) has risen dramatically, as have ultra-deep wells, those greater than 5,000ft. The trend is problematic for many reasons, including that drilling of water depths greater than 500ft releases methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the contribution to global warming.Many of the shallower fields have dried up, and the industry has become ever more flush with cash (in 2009, for the first time in history, seven of the 10 largest corporations in the world were oil companies) and more desperate for oil. As a result, the companies - led by BP, the largest producer of oil in the US Gulf - are breaking all records, pushing ever deeper - and well past the point of technological know-how and safety.
In September 2009, BP drilled the deepest well ever at its Tiber field in the US Gulf at a depth of more than 35,000ft (farther down than Mount Everest is up). When it exploded, BP's Deepwater Horizon Drilling rig was drilling at just over 18,000ft deep. Anyone in the business will tell you that drilling at such depths is incredibly risky, even with the most conscientious oversight. As the Chevron Corporation writes on its website, "Navigating uncertain weather conditions, freezing water and crushing pressure, deepwater drilling is one of the most technologically challenging ways of finding and extracting oil." In the words of Micky Driver, a Chevron spokesman: "It's lots of money, it's lots of equipment, and it's a total crapshoot."
Politics
Comments
Ed, I'm sorry but this can't be true about BP. Beyond Petroleum couldn't possibly lobby our government to weaken environmental and safety regulations. Why would a company that puts out environmentally friendly ads on TV lobby to weaken the very things it supports! You need to answer that Sir!
Posted by: Goldbrick4 | May 7, 2010 9:30 AM
Man, any more posts like this and I'll have to stop using my BP credit card with the awesome rebates. The guilt is getting to me. I'm so mad at BP.
Posted by: CW | May 7, 2010 9:43 AM
Yeah, I think I'm gonna boycott BP too. My Ford Focus recommends the usage of BP gasoline on the filler cap, I wonder how much that cost them?
Posted by: Doug Little | May 7, 2010 9:50 AM
...Lance to the white courtesy phone. Phone call from REALITY for Lance. Lance to the white courtesy phone...
Posted by: Woody Tanaka | May 7, 2010 10:11 AM
Woody, I think that could take awhile, his reality adjustment is going to be a long, confusing and difficult process.
Posted by: Doug Little | May 7, 2010 10:25 AM
The name of the company is BP. Not British Petroleum.
The quotations from Chevron are merely saying it's a high risk venture for the company. Your context was that this was known to be highly risky for everyone else.
Posted by: william e emba | May 7, 2010 10:51 AM
We should take this cooly, calmly, and with full legal deliberation. The result of that legal deliberation -- all the lawsuits that will pile up against BP for the damage it has done -- will likely result in the liquidation of the company and the complete loss of all the equity of the stockholders. This is how the market works. It is ultimately the stockholders' responsibility to insure that the company is adhering to prudent business policies. Of course, they will claim that BP management failed to properly disclose its activities, and they will therefore sue management. The end results will be as follows:
1. BP stockholders losing all their equity, worth many billions of dollars.
2. BP executives losing much of their wealth
3. The public stuck with high environmental costs that BP can't remunerate
4. Lawyers getting huge amounts of money litigating this thing for a decade or two.
Posted by: Chris Crawford | May 7, 2010 11:02 AM
I can only speak for myself and the handful of oil & gas professionals I know, but BP has never had a good reputation even in Drill, Baby, Drill country.
The sheer amount of manpower and safeguards involved in oil & gas engineering alone are staggering.
Their playing this off as a simple human error in operations or design is flat-out unbelievable. The average Gulf operation has about twenty layers of safeguards--BP pulled a Massey here. For a drilling operation to go this bad, there had to be about a million failures in design, implementation, and SOP. One little mistake doesn't create this big a mess. Yeah, it was deep-water drilling, but what that means is they should've added on a couple dozen engineering and operations safety procedures, and... Obviously, they didn't.
Posted by: melomel | May 7, 2010 11:18 AM
Your context was that this was known to be highly risky for everyone else.
And Ed's "context" is perfectly true, given that one of the obvious and longstanding risks of oil extraction has always been leakage of oil in sufficient quantities to cause damage to the surrounding environment and to those who make their livings from same.
Posted by: Raging Bee | May 7, 2010 11:19 AM
Their playing this off as a simple human error in operations or design is flat-out unbelievable.
Are you kidding? It's standard procedure for that lot: our owners and CEO's are perfect, our technology is the bestest, our safety procedures are beyond reproach...so if something goes wrong, blame ONLY a minor bureaucrat (DAMN those pencil-pushers, they're the enemy of good strong bidnessmen!) or technician (DAMN those working-class malcontents, it's so hard to get good help these days!) who happened to be close to the specific process that went wrong. NEVER blame the people with power and money because that's just too much trouble, get the hint, kids?
Oh, and find some way to pin it on illegal aliens...
Posted by: Raging Bee | May 7, 2010 11:29 AM
It stands for "Buoyant Petroleum."
Posted by: Scott Hanley | May 7, 2010 1:22 PM
Whatever the name of the company is, BP is downright immoral in my humble opinion. How does BP try to brand itself as an environmentally friendly corporation and then turn around and lobby the government to weaken environmental regulations. I hope that this spill, after it is cleaned up does cause BP to go out of business. British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum, BP, whatever its name is a bad company. End of my rant.
Posted by: Goldbrick4 | May 7, 2010 2:08 PM
Raging Bee "Oh, and find some way to pin it on illegal aliens..."
"You see, this is why we have to police our borders. These damn wetbacks, sneakin' in to our international waters, goin' on the welfare, bumping good American workers out of the line, stealin' our jerbs, then workin' uncompetently and spillin' all that oil!"
"This just proves that Government just...can't...work. It's time for tax cuts and deregulation!"
"U S A! U S A!"
"Etc!"
Goldbrick4 "Whatever the name of the company is, BP is downright immoral in my humble opinion."
Not immoral. Amoral. A corporation contains people, but the overall organism lacks a conscience. It's not "right and wrong", it's "more profit over less profit". Profit over conscience. A pretty good motto, actually.
"How does BP try to brand itself as an environmentally friendly corporation and then turn around and lobby the government to weaken environmental regulations."
They do the same thing almost every other corporation does. You wouldn't want them to feel left out at the trough, do you?
"I hope that this spill, after it is cleaned up does cause BP to go out of business."
Like Exxon?
Posted by: Modusoperandi | May 7, 2010 4:32 PM
And the biggest recipient was our current President:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html
Posted by: secular square | May 7, 2010 7:08 PM
@Raging Bee #9
The context of "crapshoot" that the Chevron rep was speaking in was of the financial risks to the company if the well doesn't produce. He was saying deep water drilling is a large financial gamble.
The implied context of "crapshoot" the paragraph he was quoted in was of the potential risks for environmental disasters. The author was implying that the rep believes deep drilling is likely to cause many environmental disasters. I'm 99% certain the rep wasn't saying that, so this is one of those examples of quoting someone out of context that we all hate. Except when it makes people we disagree with look bad, of course.
Posted by: KevinS | May 7, 2010 8:29 PM
Woody Tanaka
OK, even I laughed at that.
Hey, I hate the oil companies as much as the next guy. (Gas prices just topped $3.00/gallon at my local BP station.)
I only defended them against the idea that they wouldn't install a relatively inexpensive blow-out prevention system when it costs less than one days operating expenses.
Not to cement my image as oil company stooge but I will say that the source, The Guardian, hasn't been known as an especially unbiased source when it comes to business/environmental issues.
That said, fuck BP if they are stupid enough to skimp on safety systems to save a penny. I will have to wait for non-Gaurdian confirmation of the information though.
Posted by: Lance | May 7, 2010 8:59 PM
Re Lancelot @ #16
The Guardian is considerably more reliable then Mr. Lancelots' favorite sources of information, the fascist news channel, the Wall Street Journal, and the London Times. I suspect that Mr. Lancelot knows as much about the oil business as he knows about climate change, namely nothing.
Posted by: SLC | May 7, 2010 9:26 PM
The Wall Street Journal has been reporting almost daily that the subject rig didn't include the redundant shut-off switch with a remote activator. However to DaveL's point which I think he made in a different thread, no article has laid out a convincing argument it would have mattered in this case, including the WSJ.
Posted by: Michael Heath | May 7, 2010 9:27 PM
Michael Heath,
Yeah, from what I've read the acoustic switch would have just relayed the same signal to the BOP (blow out protector) as the dead man switch that was installed on the rig. It appears that the mechanism isn't even responding to direct manipulation by remote control submarines.
Posted by: Lance | May 7, 2010 9:45 PM
Ah, SLC, always a reasonable and rational reply.
Posted by: Lance | May 7, 2010 9:51 PM
I will join the minority that found the Guardian article to be weak.
Three factual statements in the first quoted section are not triggering my outrage meter.
1. BP is the 3rd largest corporation in the US.
2. BP is in the top twenty of lobbying spenders.
3. BP is in the top ten oil industry spenders in federal elections.
These statements were used as support for the claim that BP "spends aggressively to influence US policy and regulatory oversight." My interpretation of the data is that BP spends cautiously and below the norm for corporations.
A corporation that is the fiftieth largest but is in the top twenty of spenders would be aggressively spending. BP spending in the top two would be aggressively spending. BP spending only enough to get in the top twenty is slacking.
Posted by: Sean | May 7, 2010 10:06 PM
(Gas prices just topped $3.00/gallon at my local BP station.)
Big fucking deal. Remember when gas prices topped $4 a gallon, and everyone just meekly went along with it 'cause we didn't want to rock the boat and risk losing our "cheap and plentiful" supply of fuel, and NO ONE in the ruling party had anything to say about it? So much for "cheap and plentiful," eh?
Posted by: RAging Bee | May 7, 2010 11:50 PM
Re Lancelot @ #20
Yawn.
Posted by: SLC | May 8, 2010 9:15 AM
My claim was that the Chevron quotation wasn't admitting to what Ed said it was admitting to.
Posted by: william e emba | May 9, 2010 11:47 AM
On the issue of what the BP execs knew about the blow out preventers, a little different perspective.
A corporation is a legal fiction entity. In doing business, the goal of that entity is to generate profits and try to stay afloat. Every decision is made in an effort to maximize profits, and is theoretically an educated guess. However, the reality is that some of the guesses are going to be wrong.
An entity does not have a mind or a conscience similar to that of a human. Even though humans run corporations, corporations are separate and apart from humans, somewhere between a human and an inanimate object.
Whereas a human will occasionally make a judgment call against his or her personal interest in pursuit of other goals, rarely will an entity do so because it is not really its money. It is the money or interests of others, the shareholders at risk, not the decision makers. It makes for a different dynamic.
As a result, fines, penalties, and lawsuits have to be figured into the economic mix as necessary evils. An entity will try to minimize them, or delay them if possible, but they know that they are always just around the corner. It's the nature of dealing with an entity when you're engaged, and then walking away from it and trying to live a human life. A human being does not generally approach life in this fashion.
Corporations are not human. They can't be. It's an inherent conflict of interest.
Posted by: Reggie Greene / The Logistician | May 14, 2010 11:08 AM