BP

Another thought. Maybe BP could fund a super PAC and do a riff on Colbert's "Corporations are people and Mitt is evil" ads.

You could cast Obama as an axe murderer and Pelosi as a baby snatcher, both hell bent on hurting poor innocent BP...

BP only had themselves to blame. Before the Gulf it was spills from a pipeline in Alaska or blowing up their employees in Texas City.

Of course the politicians are going to jump on them. It makes for good theater. Also as most here will recall Obama had recently approved more offshore exploration so the timing of the spill was horrible.

So from where I sit, BP could have renamed themselves AP and moved their headquarters to Fargo ND and the outrage would have been just as severe.

I realized that I could substitute 2011 for 2010, TEPCO for BP, radioactive waste for oil, and US for Japan, and paragraphs 2 to 4 could be perfectly readable as an account following Fukushima...

BP is hated not because they are oil companies, but because the methods they used to clean up the oil did not only work, but it is killing off the gulf coast. It is only a matter of time before the masses realize exactly how toxic oil is and the chemicals used to clean it up is. It will not be a pretty day when this realization dawns.

Do Americans really hate BP? I do not see how statements made at the height of the crisis equate to Americans (or even Democrats) hating BP today.

I could be wrong on this, but I think BP's PR campaign (they run tons of TV commercials here) combined with the lack of continued bad news from the spill, leaves most Americans with the sense they did a good job cleaning up their mess.

Pl

Did I read this sentence correctly or is it just lousy writing:

"While the outrage may have been genuine, and frankly justified given BP’s miserable safety record in America, the problem it created was that less than two months after the accident, $89 billion had been wiped off BP’s value—far in excess of all but the direst forecasts of the costs of the spill."

1. This is an economics based magazine. The MARKET took $89B off the MARKET value of BP. That's traded values based on the aggregate decisions by lots of traders, many of them sophisticated, many of them very large.
2. If "outrage" drove the market to reduce BP's value, then so be it: that means the outrage was justified. Lots of things generate fake outrage that doesn't amount to much and isn't reflected to such a huge degree in a real measure of value.
3. Are you kidding or is that sentence bad writing? Why is it a problem that BP lost a huge amount of market value? That should be incentive, a very strong incentive, for that company and others like it to not spill vast amounts of oil in the water. How is that bad? That is what the market is supposed to do.

It directly employs 23,000 people, and if one adds in the jobs in its US supply chain, nearly a quarter of a million Americans depend on BP for employment.

"Keep America Strong! Buy a gas guzzler."

(just a tad of humor)

Regards

"Given that almost a third of BP’s employees are in America, the xenophobic political kicking was a little over the top."

The last I checked, BP took no responsibility for the disaster, but blamed it all on Haliburton and others.

In the meantime, there a lots of other oil companies which would love to do more of the same kind of work BP does, and with lots better safety records.

In short, no one REALLY needs BP...

Hmph. BP doesn't mention that it's not the upstream business that provides the jobs (i.e. oil extraction) but the downstream businesses - refining, chemicals, and others, that it brought from it's acquisition of Amoco that have historically provided and will provide the vast majority of its jobs in the US. By comparison, upstream extraction employs few people precisely because of the harsh and remote nature of much upstream work. You're not going to bring in a lot of people when you're paying quadruple the wages to stick them in a frozen wasteland.

If that's BP's best try at political leverage, then I feel very sorry for them. As doug374 also mentions, the oil and gas boom will come with BP or without it.

87%

There's just one thing. 87% is a projection based on current trends and expected political outcomes.

It doesn't have to be that way. A greater commitment to alternative methods of harnessing energy at the global, national, state, and local levels could alter that projection. And talk about more high-tech jobs.

If Dwight Howard wants people to stop fouling him, he can start hitting his free throws. If BP wants people to hate them less, they can work towards a better safety record. After all, the distain for BP didn't just appear out of thin air; they earned it.

I'm just going to second both Dougs, and leave it at that.

I would add that after the spill happened, BP's response was exemplary. They didn't waste any time pointing fingers at the other companies, they just took responsibility and started cleaning up the spilled oil. And they didn't spare expense or effort - I seem to remember that at one point they had chartered 12,000 boats to help with the clean-up. They really did not deserve the level of hatred directed at them.

@thomas verghese
BP is different from other oil companies in one way - it is British. When the spill happened in 2010 there were four companies that could have been responsible - BP which owned and operated the well; Transocean, whose drilling rig was the scene of the accident; Halliburton, which made the cement that failed to seal the well; and Cameron International, whose blow-out preventer did not in fact prevent a blow-out. Three American companies, one British company. At the time, there was no way to know which company or companies was primarily responsible for the tragedy. (Eighteen months of investigation later, Cameron seems to be cleared, and the jury is still out on the other three.) Guess which one got all the public hatred. Yes, the British company. The outpouring of hatred and rage directed solely at BP was remarkably xenophobic, and did a lot of damage to America's reputation in the UK.

Well, both parties have their favorite whipping boys. With the Democrats it's oil companies, and with the Republicans it's France.

This article indulges on the logical fallacy at the heart of to-big-to-fail institutions: That if they exist, they provide jobs; therefore, if they do not exist, these jobs will not be provided.

In reality, if America truly will getting 87% of its energy from oil-based sources 20 years from now, then firms will exist to extract those resources, as it will remain profitable. These firms will inevitably employ as many people as it requires to extract these resources, just as BP would. It therefore matters not one bit whether BP exists in 20 years, or whether it is broken up and sold off, possibly because of its abysmal safety record.

The only issue that matters is that the US strike the correct balance between providing sufficient incentives for firms to extract oil and sufficient deterrents for those firms to not externalize their costs. BP's survival is immaterial to everyone except BPs shareholders and creditors.

BP recklessly cut a lot of corners drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and should have paid up heavily. That said, their executive team rolled over tummy up and peed on themselves as soon as Obama and other left-wing politicians started snarling. The leaders at a firm like Exxon probably wouldn't have caved so far.

"If America wants BP to generate more wealth, it needs to hate BP a little less."

Americans don't hate BP. Many of them are somewhat ignorant about the realities and tradeoffs of energy production, but it is the far left and hard-core environmentalists that hate BP.

BP is the one who needs to learn that appeasing the hard left will never reduce their hatred of oil companies.

I could be wrong, but it seems that BP is easily substitutable with any other number of Oil companies.

I had almost forgotten how enthusiastically the administration jumped on the new despised. That was pretty embarrassing. Who will not kick the ugly dog?

. . . BP’s miserable safety record in America

Dare one hope that Mr Dudley gave any indication of how (or whether) he plans to address that part of BP's problem? If BP wants to be hated a little less, it needs to deal with the root cause of the problem.