BP, Calamity, and Hypocrisy

The ongoing saga of the BP oil spill has generated an enormous amount of nonsense at practically every level. The media has made the story its central news item for weeks, and now the White House is piling on. None of the spewing forth helps at all. Most of it simply highlights our astonishing ability to ignore simple truths.

That BP was drilling in the deep open ocean should be a wake up call for all those who are in oil dependence denial. Our insatiable desire to consume every last drop of the planet’s oil reserves has driven the big oil companies into ever more risky corners of the earth in order to meet that demand. It should come as no surprise therefore when things go wrong. As we search further into the deep the more likely something will go wrong. Worse, in those parts of the world, when something goes wrong, it is likely to go seriously wrong. Fixing an oil leak 5,000 feet down is a horrendously difficult challenge to engineering. That it takes weeks, or even months, instead of hours can be no surprise to any but the most ignorant of us.

My bet would be that these kind of accidents will become more frequent. That is until we ease off our addiction to oil.

The extraordinary and vindictive name calling now being showered down onto BP is also reflective of our supposed environmental sensitivity. We are being overwhelmed with horrible photos of dying sea birds and stories of destroyed fishing locations. Neither of these are new phenomena. The disaster that is the Nigerian oil field is testimony to the awful consequences that our pursuit of oil has on a routine basis. That none of us care too much about that environmental catastrophe is a massive indictment of our parochialism and our weak attachment to global environmental stewardship. We, in the US, only care about our own shores. We care not one wit about the people of Nigeria who have been suffering for decades as we suck our precious oil from their homeland. Apparently destroying the African environment isn’t something that our heroic Congress needs to get worked up over.

Further, the indignant calls for retribution against BP are simply a way of avoiding the more hurtful fact that lax oversight is as much to blame as lax corporate governance. How many more examples of weakened government regulation does the American public need before it overthrows the Reaganite call for the elimination of government regulation? We cannot blame BP for playing within the extraordinarily loose rules. We made those rules. We did. We the people. We have resolutely and repeatedly elected governments whose mantra has been to strip government of its ability to create and enforce exactly the sort of rules that might – only might – have helped avoid this disaster. So we trash government and then throw a hissy fit when our government strains, and fails, to react to a crisis.

Spoiled children are more sober than the American voting public is when it comes to the hypocrisy inherent within the Reaganite project.

There are just so many ways to spell out self-indulgence. When you add in a goodly dose of outright ignorance the brew is both toxic and counter productive.

I abhor the mess that is now the Gulf coastline. But I also abhor the voting history of the states whose shores are now spoiled. They have provided much of the anti-government energy. They have yet again reaped the whirlwind they have sewn.

If a plank of the right wing in politics is responsibility, as it appears to be worldwide, then it should live by that code. The southern states whose shores are now tarred should look inwardly: the examples of Katrina and now this BP oil spill should surely force a reconsideration of the anti-government mantra so necessary to get elected down there.

I do not hold my breath on that one.

Nor do I hold out hope that the left wing ‘big business bashers’ will connect the dots and support proper corporate governance reform. It is one thing to bash all things big business, it is another to channel that energy into constructive dialog with business. I find it depressing that some people have accused BP of lagging in its reaction as if that lagging was deliberate. It simply cannot be. The enormous financial damage this spill is doing to BP is sufficient motivation for BP to work tirelessly to find a solution. It is absurd to think otherwise. You have to suspend all theories of human logic to arrive at a suitable place in which BP is embroiled in conspiracy and deliberate foot dragging.

Nonetheless we read that rubbish in the blogosphere. No wonder that the public is confused.

As for my fellow Britons who are currently wrapping themselves in American style nationalistic fervor as they rush to defend ‘poor old BP’: yes I understand that BP represents a huge part of the pension fund assets of a large number of British retirees. Those pension funds are sucking wind currently. But so what? Just because the assets are owned by retired folks does not absolve them of the fiduciary responsibility to exert oversight of the companies whose stock they own. We cannot have one form of capitalism for young folks and another for the retirees. If your retirement is dependent upon cash flowing from a big corporation like BP you had better make sure it is managed and run properly. Such is private enterprise. Get used to it. It is absurd for British politicians to get into a lather over American hysterics just because the collapse in BP’s stock price may hurt some British retirees. If Exxon had dumped a ton of oil on Brighton beach I suspect that even the most committed pro-busines Tory would be calling for suitable retribution. Hypocrisy is not a uniquely American quality.

The fact of the matter is that most, if not all, our largest corporations are massive bureaucracies whose senior most managers have little day to day knowledge of what goes on. The BP fudging and evasion of public transparency is endemic throughout all our big businesses. The efforts of the big banks to deny their collapse two years ago is emblematic of the same disease. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy whether it privately or publicly owned. Both are notoriously slow to react to crises. Both evade. Both avoid responsibility for their actions. Both dissemble. Both hide behind legalese and fiscal trickery. Both are iniquitous to democracy. Yet we need them both. We live in a technologically complex world that needs minute and intensely specific rules based management. That calls for specialists and bureaucrats. Deep sea oil drilling is just such a technology.

That these bureaucracies function beyond our direct control and appear to dither whenever a crisis erupts is simply a fact of current bureaucratic society. While we may yearn for the simpler days, but that simplicity has long been banished by the enormous complication of modern living.

Within that complexity stuff happens. Not all of it good.

Meanwhile a calamity has happened and we are appalled at the very visible consequences. Hopefully the other oil companies are paying close attention and preparing for the day when they face the same kind of accident. Hopefully our pension fund managers are getting ready to invade corporate board rooms and take responsibility for the governance of those retiree assets. Hopefully our governments are writing new and stringent rules to reduce the risk of future catastrophes. Hopefully they are ramping up their hiring of suitably trained government inspectors to visit those deep sea rigs. And hopefully we all are trying to use less oil so we don’t have to invade every inch of natural wilderness to keep that motor running.

Oh well.

I can hope. But I won’t hold my breath. It’s much easier just to sue someone and collect a gratuitous lump sum than it is to take responsibility for one’s actions.

Expect more spills.