Last week I wrote here that BP’s $54 billion payout for damages and restoration from the 2010 Gulf oil spill just wasn’t really enough — both because of the ongoing environmental damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil that continues to wash up on our beaches and because dollars trumped real accountability. You won’t hear that critique too much from public officials, who are...
BP just keeps stepping in it — this time I mean almost literally. The British oil giant is desperately trying to get out front of the 5th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy with a series of exculpatory moves, includes a website that tries weakly to contradict the damning flood of scientific research about the ongoing environmental problems in the Gulf of Mexico. This week, BP took...
BP, with a huge assist from the popular Beltway-insider website Politico, stirred up the muddy waters of the Deepwater Horizon spill aftermath this week when it published a corporate-love-letter-disguised-as-news entitled, “No, BP Didn’t Ruin the Gulf.” Anyone expecting humility from a firm whose court-certified wanton negligence killed 11 people and seriously polluted...
If you follow environmental issues, you know and understand this basic fact of American life: Poor communities — especially those populated by people of color — are much, much more likely to get dumped on than places where affluent folks live. If you show me a lead smelter, a trash incinerator or a hazardous-waste dump, there’s an excellent chance that the people living on the...
Earlier this week, I presented the first part of some research showing that more than four years after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe — at a moment in which BP is mounting a furious and at times a bit ridiculous PR campaign to show that everything is back to normal — in fact the Gulf of Mexico is still very, very sick. I noted the non-stop assault on our beaches of tar balls and...
On April 15, 2014, with the fourth anniversary of the massive Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just days away, British Petroleum – the rig’s operator — issued a press release that caught many people off-guard. BP announced that its “active cleanup” of oil pollution in the Gulf had officially ended. The statement by the British energy giant did not say that...
When is it ever going to stop? I’m talking about BP’s oil pollution, which continues to bombard our beautiful beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, and continues to make our marine life ill. Don’t forget that it’s now been 50 long months since BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up off the coast of Louisiana, killed 11 people, and began the long process of...
BP continues to tell the public that its 2010 oil spill is receding into the pages of history, that the cleanup is essentially over and that the devastation caused by the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon is now behind us. But the evidence tells a different story. From western Louisiana all the way to Florida, tar balls and even larger oily blobs called tar mats continue to assault the white...
A lot of people are talking about a story that aired Sunday night on the popular CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” about BP and the 2010 Gulf oil spill. In essence, the story was an opportunity for executives from the oil giant to repeat the same old whine that I’ve written about here recently — that they never expected so many billions of dollars in claims from residents and...
Sunday will mark the 4th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, which started the massive oil spill that has harmed the Gulf to this day. Anniversaries are a difficult thing. I can only imagine the pain that the family and friends of the 11 rig workers who were killed, not to mention the scores of Gulf cleanup workers who became ill, must feel this of year. At the same time...
