From the BBC:
Exxon Mobil has won the right to appeal against $2.5bn in damages relating to a 1989 Alaskan oil spill. The US Supreme Court said it would hear the appeal against damages due to victims of the Valdez oil spill.
The case has dragged on since 1994, with US oil giant Exxon fighting to reduce the amount, which the company has called excessive. Lawyers for the victims, some of whom are now dead, said that the damages award was "barely more than three weeks of Exxon’s net profit". In 2006, Exxon reported the highest ever net annual profit for a US business at $39.5bn.
Read the full story here.
Even though I seriousy doubt it’s the case, I live in hope that the court is hearing this case to actually consider raising the damages, not lowering them. But I fear that’s wishful thinking, and as a large oil company that owns Bush, Exxon will end up having the supreme court rubber-stamp their reduction in fines, and somehow adding an air of legitimacy to their story.
Their defense at the time was to disassociate. Sure the captain was pissed out of his skull on vodka, but just because he was an Exxon employee didn’t mean that made it Exxon’s fault. Back in those days, when the Supreme Court actually stood for justice, it pointed out what an utter load of bollocks that defense was, and handed down what was at the time the biggest fine of its kind in history - to match the incident, which itself was the biggest pollution by a single incident of its kind in history (even if it wasn’t the most oil ever released, its location - right in a wildlife habitat - made it the worst in terms of impact).
In those days the huge oil corporations were making ever bigger tankers so that they could save a few dollars each trip by transporting ever larger amounts of crude. They were also building ships that resembled nothing more than huge tanks with a propeller and a rudder at one end. These tankers had a single hull which, if punctured, hemorrhaged oil like a human might hemorrhage blood from a major artery. As a direct result of this particular incident, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 which among other things required oil companies to have emergency accident plans but more significantly required that new tankers have double hulls, to vastly lessen any oil released by damage to the vessel, and eliminate it altogether in minor damage cases that only punctured the outer hull.
Incidently, the Exxon Valdez itself, still sails today. It’s been renamed the Mediterranean but still sails for Exxon under their SeaRiver Maritime company flag. Although many people remember the name Valdez, Not so many realise the ship involved in that incident is still carrying oil, even though it now does have a double hull.
But Exxon have NEVER accepted that the damages were fair. They’ve appealed and appealed and appealed - even on one occasion having the damages against them raised. Initially they were fined five billion dollars, which they managed to cut in half to the current two point five billion dollars which is the subject of this latest appeal.
So how much do they want it cut to? Well, they’ve said $25M is a "fair amount" DO ME A FAVOUR! Let’s look at that for a minute. 25 million dollars.
In 2006 they announced a profit of 39.5 billion for the year. Let’s divide that by 365 for the days. 29,500,000,000 (yes, that IS a lot of naughts, and is how you write 29.5 billion) divided by 365 equals 80,821,917 a day - yes, that’s 80 million, 821 thousand 917 dollars A DAY they made in 2006. Let’s divide that by 24 for the hours in day. $3,367,579 or 3.3 million an hour is what they made in 2006. So 25 million is is just under 8 hours of profit.
8 hours of profit for the deaths of, at best estimates, 250,000–500,000 seabirds, 2,800–5,000 sea otters, approximately 12 river otters, 300 harbour seals, 250 bald eagles, and 22 orcas, as well as billions of salmon and herring eggs.
And the worst part of it? They’ll probably get away with it. It’s enough to make you give up on humankind. It’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.