Cries of outrage, and demands for compensation, are raining down from the President and virtually every U.S. politician. BP's stock price also continues to get hammered, and has already lost far more in market cap (+$100 billion) than its actual costs or possible liabilities projected by the most pessimistic analyst.
There are now demands that BP suspend its dividend until the mess is cleared despite the fact that it easily has the financial means to pay it.
And yet, when viewed from the British side, our reaction smacks of being hypocritical, to say the least.
Chevron, for example, is embroiled in a huge environment disaster in South America, where locals say that hundreds have been sickened or died from toxic waste.
This U.K. columnist notes another example: the Union Carbide disaster in India. Here's an excerpt:
While Barack Obama is lambasting BP for spreading muck in the Gulf of Mexico, he should perhaps pencil in a date with the people of Bhopal when he visits India later this year. While 11 men lost their lives on BP's watch and the shrimps get coated with black stuff, the chemicals that killed thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984 are still leaching into the ground water a quarter of a century after a poisonous, milky-white cloud settled over the city.
The compensation – some $470m – paid out by Union Carbide, the US owner of the plant and now part of Dow Chemical, was just the cash it received from its insurers to compensate the victims, a process that took 17 years. But it's one rule for them and another for anybody else.
This is not to defend BP (how can you?) but to note that the U.S. is getting close to overplaying its moral righteous hand.Obama hasn't learned lessons of Bhopal | Randeep Ramesh | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
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