Post about "oil spill"

[An open letter response to Kevin Phelan, Sr. Vice President, Sales & Marketing, BP Products North America]

Thank you for writing to me about how your company is doing everything possible to stop the leak and protect the shoreline. I had a feeling you’d be writing me; I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to get around to it.

I pass several BP stations regularly here in South Florida. I’ve noticed there’s rarely a car or truck in them, and the tone of your letter tells me that you’ve noticed that too. Maybe the number crunchers in your department believed that things would blow over. Maybe you figured we were so pissed off it was prudent to wait. Or maybe you just don’t give a damn.

My money’s on “don’t give a damn,” because your letter is just another attempt to hide behind yet another group of people whom your negligence and reckless disregard is slowly destroying. I’m talking about the “vast majority of [BP] stations [that are] locally owned and operated and employ more than 50,000 people across the United States.”

I do feel sorry for these folks, but I also wonder why they believed in you when your history as an oil company is one disaster after another, and the investigations into those disasters reveal that you knew better but preferred to try and save a buck. A close look at the refinery fire in Texas City or the tundra along the Trans-Alaska pipeline should have predicted what happened on the Deepwater Horizon.

If your independent gas station owners had been taking care of business themselves, they could have already done what thousands of Citgo independent resellers did when their brand became tarnished by its association with Venezuela. They rebranded their stations with a logo that helped sales rather than hurt them.

Yes, Mr. Phelan, I have a BP credit card, but don’t count on my support. I haven’t bought more than a tankful of gas from your stations in several years, and that probably won’t be changing at least as long as you keep hiding behind hollow words on form letters trying to drum up sympathy for people you’ve hurt. They didn’t hurt your brand: you did.

You know how to solve this, because you’ve promised to mend your ways each time you’ve been caught. You can start gushing money in the gulf like your hapless well; you can start selling gas to your resellers at tremendous discounts; you can really put safety first, even though that delays production in ways you once thought unacceptable.

All these things will be a magnificent departure from what everyone expects from you; the story will tell itself, and you won’t need to send weasel-worded letters to your customers.

Nearly forty years ago, I participated in an energy summit. I was young, inexperienced, hadn’t found my voice, and my job was merely to be a journalist at the most base level; to record and catalog what was said. I could have done more, but what I heard intimidated me. It was the first time I realized there are some problems that can’t be solved, so I organized my tapes, turned them in with a comprehensive index, and said nothing.

The summit was held at the beautiful Ventana Inn at Big Sur. Its participants included executives of oil companies, the Sierra Club, public policy institutes and regulators. The concept was we all sit down and have a freewheeling discussion about the problems. What we discovered was we all pretty much agreed on what the problems were; and that there was no politically viable solution. So we all did what I did: nothing.

We could solve this problem tomorrow with something as simple as a $2/gallon tax on gasoline. The primary function of this tax would be to reduce consumption, so revenue would be far from a straight line computed from current consumption. We would still, however, raise a shitpot full of money.

This money could be plowed back into paying the people whose livelihoods were taken away by the spill to clean it up, and to promote new methods of energy production. We’d still hound BP into bankruptcy, but any revenue we’d get from them in fines or damages could be plowed into green energy technology too, or go back into the economy in the form of debt reduction.

But the public outrage over millions of gallons of oil in the gulf would quickly turn to public anger at the imposers of the tax. There would be rumors of corruption; that the money was lining the pockets of the energy companies. The energy companies themselves would scream bloody murder and sue everybody in sight to stop it. Cheap energy long-term alternatives are unwanted competition, artificially inflated short-term prices simply cut into their bottom line.

Most socially responsible liberals would be outraged over the terrible effects on the poor. This solution is a progressive tax run wild because it makes energy inefficient systems worthless and within the reach of the poor, which amplifies the inequity.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama had a vision of energy independence that has been worn away by the refusal by the right to pass a truly robust recovery package; one that not only bails us out, but helps us build a future. Until we do that, until we do something truly dramatic, we will simply repeat past mistakes.

Withdrawing from an addiction is painful, and until we are willing to walk through the pain, we will keep electing politicians who either promise cheap energy or promise alternatives but who know or learn the American people simply aren’t interested in solving the base problem.

That problem isn’t the oil in the gulf, that’s the symptom. It’s our denial of our cheap-energy addiction that put that damn hole in the sea floor in the first place without any Plan B to plug it.