BP Lashes Out at Journalists and "Opportunistic" Environmentalists
An oiled bird on Louisiana's East Grand Terre Island after
the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
News of this morning's federal court decision
against BP broke as I was aboard a 40-foot
oyster boat in the Louisiana delta, just off
the coast of Empire, a suburb of New Orleans.
The reaction: stunned silence. Then a bit of
optimism.
"This is huge," said John Tesvich, chair of the
Louisiana Oyster Task Force, his industry's
main lobby group in the state.
"They are going to have to pay a lot more."
Standing on his boat, the "Croatian Pride,"
en route to survey oyster farms, he added:
"We want to see justice. We hope that this
money goes to helping cure some of the
environmental issues in this state."
On Thursday, a federal judge in New Orleans
found that the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster—
in which the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded,
killing 11 people and spilling millions of barrels
of oil into the Gulf—was caused by BP's "willful
misconduct" and "gross negligence."
Tesvich says he's seen a drastic decline in his
company's oyster production since then—company
profits down 15 to 20 percent and oyster yields
slashed by 30 percent. He says he's suspicious that
this new decision will force the kind of action from
local politicians needed to clean up the Gulf
once-and-for-all. The politicians in Louisiana,
he says, "haven't been the best environmental stewards."
BP's own reaction to the news has been fast and
pointed. "BP strongly disagrees with the decision,
" the company said in a statement on Thursday,
published to its website. "BP believes that an impartial
view of the record does not support the erroneous
conclusion reached by the District Court."
The company said it would immediately appeal the decision.
"It's clear that the apocalypse forecast did not come to pass," said a BP official.
With the fourth anniversary of
the busted well's final sealing
coming up in a couple weeks,
BP has been pushing back
aggressively against the
company's critics.
On Wednesday night—just hours before the court's
ruling—Geoff Morrell, the company's vice president
of US communications, spoke in New Orleans at the
Society of Environmental Journalists conference,
and blamed the media and activists for BP's rough ride.
The company's efforts to clean up the spill have been
obscured, he said, by the ill-intentioned efforts of
"opportunistic" environmentalists, shoddy science,
and the sloppy work of environmental journalists
(much to the chagrin of his audience, hundreds of
environmental journalists).
"It's clear that the apocalypse forecast did not come
to pass," he said. "The environmental impacts of the
spill were not as far-reaching or long-lasting as many
predicted."
Back in 2010, BP's then-CEO Tony Hayward lamented—
a month after the explosion—that he wanted his "life back."
He didn't find much sympathy at the time. Within
a couple months, he resigned out of the spotlight
(with a $930,000 petroleum parachute). But his flub
didn't retire so easily, and it became emblematic of
BP's astonishing capacity for tone-deafness,
something Morrell seemed intent on continuing
Wednesday.
Morrell said that while "impolitic" remarks had been
made by BP officials in the past, the spill's aftermath
has been "tough on all of us."
I can only imagine.
I can faithfully report that no rotten tomatoes were
hurled during Morrell's talk, and grumbles and
cynical chuckles were kept to a polite murmur.
But the response on Twitter was more free-flowing:
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