The evening of December 2nd was quiet and normal in the Indian state of Madha Pradesh. The dawn on December 3rd found almost 3,800 dead and half a million poisoned due to negligence at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in the state's capitol of Bhopal.
Twenty five years on the arrest warrant for then CEO Warren Anderson goes unserved. Criminal and civil cases continue to wind their way through courts in India and the United States.
Justice delayed is justice denied; Anderson has slipped from sight and may already have died of old age, while the victims of Union Carbide of all ages live with the misery brought by relentless, irresponsible pursuit of profits.
It will be interesting, and all too predictable to watch British Petroleum play this very same game as they poison the fish, birds, and whales, along with those who inhabit the states that surround the Gulf of Mexico.
British Petroleum has committed two crimes from what I can see. The first is the negligent handling of the wells being drilled at the extreme edge of the envelope. If we needed nine months to squelch a runaway well in two hundred feet of water how can we expect them to operate safely almost a mile beneath the waves? The cold, dark, and pressure are forbidding. Everything done for a five thousand foot well costs twenty five times as much as a two hundred foot well and takes commensurately longer to accomplish. The instant something goes wrong it's like a Mars probe having troubles – uncharted territory has been entered.
The second crime is the use of the Corexit 9500 dispersant. This is criminal for a couple of reasons. The first is a typical move for white collar criminals – concealment of the total flow because of the $4,300 per barrel civil penalties that they could face. The second is that their concealment is probably poisoning the fishermen who are forced to take service doing clean up duties because of the mess British Petroleum and their associates made in the first place.
Boycotts aren't going to work here. Oil is a fungible commodity and so are all of the products derived from it. When there are global sanctions against an oil producer things shift around a bit in terms of where oil is delivered, they take a small hit, and it's business as usual. We need some federal action on this mess and I'm not talking about our corporate media's wet dream of sticking Barack Obama with the responsibility for this mess.
This isn't Barack Obama's Katrina. It's British Petroleum's Bhopal.
I see criminal negligence first and then a criminal conspiracy that chose to poison humans and animals rather than facing the financial consequences of their own behavior. Their executives? Prison time. Their assets? Worthless – put it into receivership until it pays for the harm it's done. The stock and bondholders for the other IOCs will become very particular about what's done on their rigs. The industry's procedures? Each and every platform needs a federal inspector, recruited from the industry so they know how things ought to be done, but utterly insulated from the sort of corruption that infests the Minerals Management Service.
Peak oil. Go and Google this phrase. It may have already passed in the summer of 2008, it may not arrive until the summer of 2012, but it's a geological certainty and we're already burned through fifty years when we knew it was coming. If we wait until it's obvious to even the dumbest, most reactionary voter we'll be in its clutches with no way out.
The time for us to collar this reckless, toxic, unwise industry is now. Nationalize, operate, direct the profit to things that make sense in a world where liquid fuels will only grow increasingly dear.