BP, Environmentalism and Social Responsibility
BP screwed up and now they have to pay. Nobody doubts they should and everyone knows they will. Only extremely wealthy companies can afford deep sea drilling, making talk of BP seeking bankruptcy to avoid its obligations ludicrous. Industrial accidents happen in industrial societies and unless we want to go back to living in trees we should expect others. We can only learn not to make the same mistakes twice.
There will be much sturm and drang over exactly how many billions BP must ultimately fork over to finance the cleanup and compensate those that were economically harmed, or claimed they were. Thousands of tort lawyers will make careers chasing this booty and, truth be told, a plague of tort lawyers is how the market disciplines companies that cut corners and spew their externalities on others.
BP will not be able to hide behind a 20 year old law limiting an oil spiller's secondary liability to $75M. Let this be a lesson to any industry that thinks it can buy lasting protection from Congress, a fickle partner eager to sell out yesterday's donors for tomorrow's. Watch for ex post facto laws targeting BP along with further industry restrictions, taxes, and moratoriums that punish the innocent along with the guilty.
Much commentary will be spilled as Obama responds to yet another crisis by trashing the rule of law. Announcing on national TV that BP is going to pay into a politically controlled escrow fund before even meeting with the company is a dictatorial fiat that has no foundation in due process.
But the shakedown worked; Hugo Chavez must be green with envy. White House political operatives believe the ends justify the means, and why pass up a chance to buttress their boss's sagging popularity by beating up on BP? Besides, think what Washington can do with an extra $20 billion in walking around money. Look for oyster preservation facilities to pop up in West Virginia.
Sadly, nothing can be done to bring back the lives of the eleven workers killed when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. Loss of life is one consequence of accidents that money can't fix.
As an exercise in social responsibility, imagine that an industry inadvertently killed - one million people. Imagine that they did this every year for twenty five years, making them second only to Mao Zedong as the top mass murderer in history. Should such a group be held accountable? Should the errors leading to those deaths be corrected?
Apparently not if the killer is environmentalism.
Flash back to Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring" and earth mother of the environmental movement. Carson galvanized the consciousness of an increasingly wealthy society growing tired of swimming in its own waste. A clean environment is a valuable luxury good, and credit should be given to those who put their shoulders to the wheel to clean up our air, rivers, and harbors. We live longer, healthier, more pleasant lives thanks to the shift in our value system that forced polluters to clean up after themselves.
Yet giving a blank check to environmentalists has its costs, in this case one to three million preventable deaths a year. That is the unintended consequence of demonizing DDT, the safest and most cost effective means to kill mosquitoes that carry malaria.
Indiscriminate field spraying of DDT was a questionable practice worthy of restriction. Harmless to humans (you can eat it) some scientists believe DDT accumulates in certain birds making their egg shells thin. With or without compelling evidence, most of us are willing to pay a few pennies more for Cornflakes in order to live in a world that has eagles and falcons.
Indoor spraying of DDT, on the other hand, has no discernable environmental impact. For a few pennies a year every hut in African can be made malaria-mosquito free. $5 insecticide-impregnated bed nets can't come close in effectiveness and affordability. No alternative insecticide is as cheap or as safe. That's why the inventor of DDT won the Nobel Prize and why malaria was eradicated from North America.
These facts are widely known yet nothing has been done to ease restrictions on DDT production for indoor use. Devout environmentalists prefer to sacrifice millions of lives rather than admit they were wrong. The economic devastation wreaked on the quarter billion people chronically debilitated by malaria is untold. Misinformation is rife - compare the Wikipedia and Junk Science entries on DDT. The World Health Organization (WHO) finally came around to promoting DDT as an antimalarial but was bullied into recanting.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Congress to hold hearings. The dead and dying are mostly Africans who neither vote in US elections nor have the money to make campaign contributions. If Republicans were at fault the press would blame this shameful callousness on racism. Instead the cries of African governments for relief fall on deaf ears.
Someday this horrible oil spill will be behind us, paid for by the folks who caused it. Yet the malaria tragedy continues with no one held responsible. Apparently errant oil companies make for better villains than errant environmentalists.
