For a man who freely admits his job is on the line and who does not admit that the oil spill is so serious it could cripple his giant company, BP’s boss Tony Hayward continues to place his well-heeled foot firmly in his mouth.
A day or two ago he makes the following pronouncement:
“Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact will be very, very modest.”
And then yesterday US federal authorities double the size of the no-fishing zone to 19 per cent of the Gulf of Mexico. A major area of global ocean is thus oil polluted to the tune of one fifth. Mr Hayward thinks this is very, very modest?
He’s gone further – much further, even suggesting on British TV at one point that they would look back on this in years to come as an exemplary way of handling a major oil disaster.
Interesting, since BP lobbied Capital Hill to the tune of $16m last year, in part to minimise the need for exacting safety and environmental safeguards on deep-drill oil wells. His company minimised the supposed impact from the start. His company said a spill from this rig would be “very unlikely”. His company then set about blaming everyone it could except itself: notably Transocean the Deepwater Horizon contractors.
And on and on it went. Finally, with no wriggle room left and a Washington forgetting the US nation had ever said “drill baby, drill”, Mr Hayward finally said BP were “absolutely responsible” for this disaster.
That the slicks have not come ashore does not, according to marine biologists, mitigate the poisoning of a fifth of a major ocean area. With tar balls now washing up along the southern fringes of Florida at Key West (in another nature reserve) the concern is that large oceanic circular currents will spin the spill right out of the Gulf into the Atlantic.
And all this as nobody – least of all BP it seems – knows how much oil is spewing from the wrecked well 5,000 feet down. In fact only today has BP been forced by Washington finally to release pictures of the leaks themselves. Talk about the pictures BP didn’t want you to see.
So the process goes on, all the while BP having to be brought kicking and screaming to face responsibility and then be candid about the mess they have created. There comes a time in the PR cycle where damage limitation merely increases damage sustained at corporate level. BP passed this point long, long ago and have never yet realised if the remarkable stance of their boss is anything at all to go by.
At presidential level and in Congress not a working week goes by without the company being slated again from an array of Democrats long hostile to deep drilling. For so long voices in the wilderness during the Republican Dill-Baby era, these backwoodsmen and women are coming out their clearing very noisily just now.
First in the firing line after BP itself is the Minerals Management Service (MMS) – the federal body charged with overseeing safe deep-drilling (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms). BP having been flayed on the Hill – now these guys are fighting for their jobs. Knives well and truly out from Congress they want to know what kind of scrutiny was laid down when the drills began to go deep off the US. And those questions will not die away. One major figure’s already gone early into retirement – expect more to follow.
There will be some, many out there who will blame it all on media hysteria and say Mr Hayward is right. They say this will all turn out to be another MMR vaccine scare, bird flu scare, swine flu scare, BSE scare and the list goes on. It’s valid up to a point.
Up to a point – but not up to Deepwater Horizon. We know this spill exceeds Exxon Valdez. We know vast amounts of crude are being released into the sea just at the breeding season for marine and birdlife. We know nothing on this scale has happened. We know the company concerned has tried to duck it. We know that BP is feeling its way in terms of trying to cope with the disaster.
And we also know this could never have happened in, say, Brazilian or Norwegian oilfields where they do have more stringent environmental safeguards.
But has it really changed much in the manic drive for ever deeper oil? Well not really. True, Gov Arnie in California has blocked a recent attempt to drill of his state for the first time in 40 years.
But then again Shell filed yesterday for permission to drill deep in the Arctic oceans, and did so still with a green light from the Obama administration which seems to want it all ways at once.
Shell boss said yesterday that the company would only drill there if it thought it could be done “safely and responsibly”. Just the kind of thing BP was saying down in the Gulf when the rigs hit black gold down south.
Same old, same old.