Like many other people here, I was disheartened, but not surprised that Lisa Murkowski (R-BP) is blocking S.3305 which would raise the liability limit from a mere $75 million to a more appropriate $10 billion. Now personally, I sometimes have trouble comprehending numbers when they get that huge, so I thought I'd help myself by breaking it down mathematically.
According to their filings, BP made $8,200,000,000 in profits in Q1 2010.
That's a pretty big number, let's see if we can break it down.
A quarter is 3 months, so let's say 90 days. 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes, to an hour, 24 hours to a day, 90 days to a quarter. That is 7,776,000 seconds in a quarter. Oh great, now we have 2 big numbers. Let's see if we can make them smaller.
$8,200,000,000 divided by 7,776,000 seconds...that equals $10,545.27 in profit every second. Not too shabby, but $75,000,000 still sounds like a lot, so how much is that in terms of seconds?
$75,000,000 (liability cap) / $10,545.27 (profit per second) = 7112 seconds
So with the power of mathematics, it will take BP only 118 minutes of profit to pay off their liability for the spill thanks to the 28.5 seconds of profit it took to bribe contribute to Murkowski so she could block S.3305.