Why though? Why are we so afraid of accountability? Because this is what people point to when trying to deny things are true: ThErE iS NO EviDeNce, sHoW Me THe StUdY, etc. etc.
> Available evidence rules out natural phenomena as likely drivers, suggesting a large-scale pollution event and its associated mitigation measures most likely precipitated the declines...That the declines began shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill points to that event as the most parsimonious explanation. These findings suggest that despite its immense size the deep-pelagic biome is vulnerable to human-induced disturbance and possesses limited resilience to facilitate recovery.
This means "the oil spill caused the declines". That is what this means in English.
This behavior, being skeptical and precise, is the very thing that makes scientists more trustworthy than the average Joe with his motivated reasoning.
I'm confident that the people working on this would have made the causal claim if they had been able to collect enough data to support it. They may well be working on gathering data to support the causal claim right now.
Scientists should not change the scientific method so morons can continue to ignore or cherrypick their studies.
Humans don’t operate at a scientific level in our day to day.
Politicians need to make decisions about the economy with little to no data, and the legal system convicts people at a much lower standard than that science requires us to meet.
And we run our lives at an incredibly lower standard than what science needs to maintain.
It’s fairly easy to see that the Deep Horizon incident should have easily met any of those non science standards (it may have possibly fallen short of the legal standard), to actually enact changes in terms of regulations, or punishment.
Unfortunately, on one side you have an indifferent public that largely depends on activists that it maligns to protect its interests, and on the other side you have billion dollar industries that can buy out the decision makers.
Nuclear power threatens oil companies.
We used to talk about replacing transportation fuels and low-carbon shipping (global energy). Now we talk about personal responsibility and rooftop solar (residential electricity). You can find oil company PR slide decks explaining why and how. Greenwashing worked, pushing the renewable ‘debate’ worked. We missed the windows on critical infrastructure change, and seemingly enjoy an unstable chunk of desert dictating global energy, inflation & food prices. <shrug>
For long distance heavy transport, alternative fuels or battery-electric is not feasible yet.
The transition will take decades.
No? The companies are largely free from consequence?
Maybe our system is a bit broken.
Its kind of deceptive to talk about nearing an all time high without mentioning that the current all time high was 2 decades ago.
My point is merely that reasonable people can disagree if there was a suitable consequence to the event. Sure they're out 140 billion, but to a company like this that's not as grand as it sounds and not at all fatal. You provided your view, I am providing mine, which is that they did not suffer sufficiently.
That was 1989, 37 years ago.
After years of appeals that the $5 Billion they were ordered to pay was excessive, they paid a whopping $507 Million in 2009.
The implication was they could have contained it at the surface, sucked it up and treated it to remove oil from the water.
That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
BP stock was at $110 the month before the disaster and is at $49 now, 16 years later. If your argument is that paying most of their market cap in fines and leaving the share price at basically permanent irrecoverable levels isn't sufficient deterrent, I don't find it compelling.
That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).
I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.
Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.
We’re plopping down enormous grid scale batteries like it’s Sim City.
Electricity in the middle of the day is free!
Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).
This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.