Should BP be cleaning up the oil spill?

[nancylebov]

There's an simple elegance to "It's your mess, you clean it up", but does it make sense when the mess was apparently caused by extreme failure to take care?

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I think you may have just defined "criminal negligence", so...I would say yes.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The question I'm trying to raise is whether they're competent to do a decent job of cleaning up, and if not, should they be paying for someone else to clean it up?

Part of it is whether you believe that a company with what sounds like a really bad culture just needs a sharp shock to become more meticulous.

[sethg]

Regardless of whose employees end up doing the actual cleanup, BP should be stuck with the bill. If their best defense against liability is something along the lines of “we had no idea our contractors would be so incompetent”, then they (and their competitors) need an incentive to vet their contractors more carefully in the future.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

To the best of my knowledge BP is not even *trying* to do the physical cleanup themselves -- contractors have been hired to do that. (At least one of those contractors is a personal friend.) The contracting firms specialize in dealing with such messes. I totally agree that BP should be stuck with the bill... but I'm at a loss to figure out how to keep them from simply passing it on to consumers.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Sadly, there's really not anyone else who's any more competent.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

You ask? They were going to pocket the profits, they need to foot the bill for things going wrong. You can't have responsibility when everything is going well and nothing to do with it when they aren't.

IF they had taken every possible precaution, worked hard on developing further measures as well as having more safety procedures in place than seemed necessary, and something bad happens, I would say that the state needs to take some of the hit, because we all profit from the product.

Not likely to happen, though.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I mentioned in comments that I was referring to the physical act of cleaning up, not whether they should pay for it.