I was thinking about what that lawyer said about the Gulf victims of Deepwater Horizon. You know, how, based upon what he observed when he spent a decade seeking judgments against Exxon Valdez, that they were basically (as he so delicately described it) "f*cked.".
As you can well imagine (being a compatriot on this progressive (-->socialist-->communist-->fascist-->scientific) website), I started thanking my lucky stars that someone in the federal government had a proper respect for the feral and soulless machinations of our corporatist masters. Thank goodness, I thought to myself, at last we have a federal government that understands the putrid perfidy of international conglomerates like BP, and won't let them get away with their standard and predictable perversion of the legal system. Thank goodness, someone had the foresight to insist on obtaining objective, independent measurements of the oil flow BEFORE the removal of the riser...
Phew!! Good thing too because later on, when this matter passes into the courts, if this had not been done, then BP could claim that the leak was less than 15k barrels BEFORE the riser was cut..."Nobody could have foreseen that the cutting of the riser would have resulted in an increase in the flow to the 100K we eventually discovered. Our studies at the time predicted a worst-case scenario of only 20%...".
So... a little math: Assume a civil fine of $4300/barrel. For the 40 odd days BEFORE the rise was cut, we have disparate figures of either:
40*15k*4300=$2.58 billion
or...
40*100K*4300=$17.20 billion.
Wow, that's almost $15 billion in fines that almost got away! Thank goodness that someone besides a Joe Blow like myself was on top of this sucker like white on rice from Day1 'cause that would have been a travesty...