British Petroleum’s Bob Dudley states he is looking forward to getting back to work in the Gulf of Mexico, and in his excellent column, Tyler Hamilton asks some interesting questions about this.

Noting that, so far, BP has stated they will have spent $40 billion dollars on cleanup from their oil spill catastraphuk, he asks what might have happened if they had used safer precautions so the spill never happened and then used that kind of money towards investing in cleaner, renewable energies. The company is not dying, they are again reporting profits and plan to resume dividend payments next year, so obviously they could have taken the financial hit.

My question, if under defanged antitrust laws, this country will allow such companies to grow to such large size that they can afford a $40 billion dollar fuckup, why not create a “you scratch our back” scenario where they are forced by law to invest a percentage of profit in clean energy?

Obviously, they can afford it.

Socialism?

Maybe, or depending on which climate scientists you might ask, it could also be called, survival.

Also, when we allow all smaller oil companies to be absorbed by bigger companies until we are left with one or three behemoths, haven’t we risked choking out any innovation in clean technology that might have been done by some of these smaller companies if they had been left alone to steer their own course?

Yes, some of the larger corporations like Chevron and BP are investing some money in green technology, but the dollar amounts, as Hamilton points out, are steered towards the easiest and least effective already existing technologies instead of going for the brass ring, and these dollar amounts, in relative terms to these corporations’ profits are miniscule at best.

And when asked why they don’t invest more, the companies unilaterally say it is “too risky.”

Too risky?

Ask the people of Alaska, Texas City and the entire Gulf Coast what they think of BP’s acceptable risks. I think they might beg to differ with this company’s qualitative definitions.

Read the article,

Hamilton: A misplaced tolerance for risk

Have a nice day…