Who Gets the Blame for the BP Disaster?
a look at consumption, tacit encouragement, and societal acceptance of systemic risk
Posted 2010-05-20 22:07 in business, culture, environment, ethics, human nature, sustainability
The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is set to be one of, if not the biggest, environmental disasters in history. There’s been a lot of talk about about BP’s negligence and how their abject greed and lack of concern for safety precautions led to this problem. While I agree that BP probably did neglect their duties in some ways (evidence does seem to suggest this), and in a lot of ways should be held responsible for their failures, I also think that blaming BP is a very myopic way of looking at the problem and in preventing future disasters.
It’s a longstanding theme— a trope, if you will— within the progressive cultural narrative to blame corporations for all our global and national problems, or at least to finger them as the root cause of all unwanted consumption-related externalities. This view also conveniently avoids having to take serious looks at our own behaviors as individuals and as a society, and how these continually place our country and our environment at risk. When I say this, my point is not to absolve companies of responsibility and to place blame elsewhere. I advocate a holistic view of the entire system— being contemplative about our own roles in the functioning of our society and our complicity in creating it.
Fact: there are serious risks endemic to our energy policy. An error can definitely be blamed on an oil company’s negligence, but simply blaming them does little to stem the damage the disaster creates. As a country, we seem unable or unwilling to face this. Stated another way: there are systemic risks that are inherent in the way our society has chosen to build its infrastructure, and the energy chain we now rely on to achieve the basic functionality of our society.
Blaming BP is a little like going skydiving and having your parachute fail to deploy. Yes, maybe you are right to curse, during your last 30 seconds of life, the skydiving company for their failure to properly prepare the parachute. But as you can quickly see with this example, when you’re falling 120mph towards the hard, cold earth, it’s a bit too late for finger pointing to be productive. What would have been useful to know beforehand was that there is serious risk involved in skydiving to begin with. There will eventually be an accident. No matter what. The statistics might change, but there will at some point be an accident that someone will pay dearly for. And you might be the one affected by that accident. Maybe you should think about that before you go skydiving.
Inadvertent environmental damage. Inadvertent pollution. Inadvertent destruction of natural habitats. Inadvertent damage to ecosystems. Inadvertent killing of important portions of the food chain. These are but a few of the risks we assume with our energy policy. And I would describe this as systemic risk because damage to any one of these spheres could have serious ripple effects in other spheres. A failure of one off-shore oil drilling platform could potentially kill off a vast amount of ocean life. We do not know what degree of damage this might end up being once the effects of this echo throughout the chain. The interplay of factors is complex enough that it’s difficult to predict what kind of collapse we might trigger through one disaster stemming from energy procurement. Realistically, we must come to grips with the idea that things will go wrong from time to time. But to only criticize the companies behind such environmental disasters is to look askance at our own roles in creating the conditions for things like this to happen.
Like it or not, these companies sustain us and our way of life, which is why they are drilling out there in the first place. Unless we are willing to make compromises or wholesale shifts in our consumption as a society, then we’ll continue to have periodic disasters from things like off-shore drilling because things inevitably go wrong every now and then. There is no avoiding this; it’s the nature of a complex system for periodic failures to occur. It’s naive to think that companies simply don’t care about disasters like this; for BP, it’s not only bad PR, but they’re losing billions in profit from all this spilled oil.
Yet, regardless of what happens to the companies, we all suffer for these errors, and maybe in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. One error can be devastating to the entire human race and all life on earth. Yet, we allow companies to engage in activities that expose us to these risks. Why? Because it enables our lifestyle. We could easily prevent them from doing it if we as a society (through our elected officials) agreed that this was not something that was worth risking. But we don’t. We have comfortable lives that we receive as a benefit of allowing the behavior to continue (at least until the inevitable disaster); politicians feel pressure to support risky activities because as a society, we don’t appreciate the level of risk we’re investing ourselves in until it’s too late. Yet, it’s clear that the fewer risky behaviors we encourage or allow as a society, the less number of disasters we’ll have as a whole.
Currently the cap for all damages is $75 million, to be paid by BP. This, as you might imagine, is far lower than either the estimated dollar value of the damages or the amount of money it will take to clean up the spill. Some outraged people think that we should raise that cap into the tens of billions. This sounds good, until you realize that some things are just unfixable. This oil spill (more like a geyser) is pretty much unfixable at any cost. It’s just too late.
It’s for that reason, I think we shouldn’t increase the cap. If anything, I think we should lower it. Why? Having a huge cap will offer us psychological relief that we can keep allowing industries to do things that impose great risks to our society and planet. The larger this cap is, the more we feel like we will have someone to blame and someone who is “responsible” for fixing the problem. But like I said earlier, some things simply are not fixable. A money-back guarantee from a skydiving company isn’t going to do you much good when when you’re falling out of an airplane without a functioning parachute.
If we believe this disaster to be an exemplar of the kind of risk we are not willing to accept as a byproduct of off-shore oil drilling, then we should never have allowed this kind of drilling to be authorized in the first place. If we have low caps on similarly risky pursuits in the future, we’ll probably think a lot harder about what we allow to go on. Getting someone to fork over money for cleanup is the easy part. Actually undoing damage that a disaster on this scale causes is another, largely intractable problem that we’ll suffer the consequences for for a good long time. Lowering the cap forces us, from the very beginning, to think about what we’re doing when we authorize something. That’s what having no insurance policy forces you to do; you have to evaluate things based on an uncolored view of the risks because you are the one who is going to suffer the consequences. This is a realistic proposition because in the case of environmental disaster, we are all affected; a closed system like planet Earth is at jeopardy in its entirety when just one of the checks in a network of environmental checks and balances is threatened. It’s just easy to forget it when you can bill someone else for the problems.
If we think from the beginning about the costs we all have to deal with instead of the costs “some company” has to deal with, we’ll be a lot more careful in the future. If there is a future.
If you want the public to accept responsibility for producing its own energy, that requires a public apparatus to do so. So you are saying to nationalize energy, thus bankrupting BP? Sounds good. The quickest way to do this is to lift the cap so that BP’s assets can be seized by the government and liquidated/transferred to the public sector.
— HAYDOOD · Jun 22, 12:21 am · #
I disagree with the premise that the public will need to “produce its own energy” in order to follow my suggestion, and I disagree that nationalizing energy is the answer. We can authorize private companies to create energy and to capitalize from energy production. But we need to make efforts to understand the concept of systemic risk before allowing them to begin. There is a lot of money to be made from energy production; but there is also risk that needs to be assessed.
— Rahul · Jun 28, 05:13 pm · #
If you want the public to shoulder more thoughtfulness and responsibility, then the public must be made to think of themselves as part-owners of the energy economy — putting things in the hands of private companies shifts the burden — now we don’t have to think about it until something catastrophic happens.
it is no coincidence that we do not tally the dead of private contractors such as blackwater and their abuses along with ones committed by the US military proper. Out of sight-out of mind.
— HAYDOOD · Jun 30, 03:33 pm · #
I see no reason to believe that ownership is a necessary condition for concern. People care about the Dave Matthews band even though they don’t own them. A lot of people apparently care about what happens with GM even though they don’t own GM shares or know anyone in the employ of GM. Thoughtfulness and concern seems to be a by-product of knowing how issues might affect them somewhere down the line, and showing it in a vivid and easily understood manner. BP has done that quite well with this disaster.
— Rahul · Jul 21, 03:37 pm · #
“People care about the Dave Matthews band even though they don’t own them.”
THEY BOUGHT THE CDs AND BOBBLEHEADS, DIDN’T THEY?
WHAAAAT WOULD YOUUUU SAYYYY o/~
— HAYDOOD · Jul 27, 08:11 pm · #
“THEY BOUGHT THE CDs AND BOBBLEHEADS, DIDN’T THEY?”
Minor nitpick! It’s not hard to find instances of people very concerned about things that don’t really affect them in the here and now. A lot people who feel strongly enough about US invasions of other countries have almost no dogs in the fight except that they are US taxpayers. Ironically, the people most concerned about their taxes aren’t typically the same ones concerned about these wars.
— Rahul · Jul 28, 02:09 pm · #