This is our fault.
This is our fault. As I sit, drinking my diet coke from a plastic cup, listening to traffic going by, and pondering the lawsuits going on about the oil spill in the gulf, blaming BP, Halliburton, etc. When are we as a society going to accept it’s our own damn fault? They wouldn’t be drilling for oil if we were not asking for more, more, more… Even the BP shareholders are suing BP for the loss in the stock!
If we are going to live in our society today, as we have made it, this is one of the ugly costs. The gulf fisherman are upset … but what powers their boats? Those aren’t sailboats out there! People are upset about their vacation spots and wildlife preserves- how do they get to that vacation or observe that wildlife? How are you reading this right now? Those electrons don’t move themselves! If you dive into your 401(k) or mutual fund, I’m sure you have investments that involve oil in some way.
Litigation won’t solve it, though it will probably make whole lot of money for a whole lot of lawyers. And a fraction of any settlement money goes to actually cleaning up. BP probably can’t pay for the entire cost of the cleanup and various lost revenues without bankrupting the company (and even then it would be left incomplete). Are we going to go after the current and past shareholders? After all, they made money off of BP before it all went to hell. Do we really want to sue ourselves?
BP has pledged to pay. We’ve also gotta pledge to pay, quit whining, start cleaning, and if we don’t want to see something like this happen again, use the oil infrastructure we’ve built to help us move to something that doesn’t just keep pushing the costs down the line.
