Deepwater Horizon: BP’s Civil Fines Could be 10 Times Larger than Record Criminal Penalty

BP’s Civil Fines Could be 10 Times Larger than Record Criminal Penalty

The $4.5 billion oil giant BP has agreed to pay out for criminal misconduct related to the Deepwater Horizon spill is too small to change the company’s business model. Yet more and bigger payments are likely to come.

Document Actions

by Signe Predmore

posted Nov 20, 2012

BP workers attempt to clean a beach in Pensacola Beach, Fla., in June 2010. 

Photo by Cheryl Casey / Shutterstock.com

The BP Deepwater Horizon settlement of $4.5 billion announced Thursday may be the highest criminal fine in U.S. history, but some citizen advocates and environmentalists still say it’s not enough. The 2010 oil spill along the Gulf Coast was the largest single environmental and industrial disaster in the United States and the responsible party is a corporation with one of the worst safety and environmental records on the books.
Compared with its massive profits ($25.7 billion in 2011, according to the BP’s website), the fine is not likely to result in any change in business as usual for the company.

The fine can be paid out over five years and is well within the company’s abilities to manage financially.

“This settlement contains nothing that addresses the institutional problems of BP and its callous treatment of its employees and the environment,” said Tyler Slocum, Director of the Energy Program at consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. The fine can be paid out over five years and is well within the company’s abilities to manage financially.

Slocum says federal sanctions against BP would more effectively deter the kind of negligence that resulted in the Deepwater spill. Sanctions could include preventing BP from earning money via federal contract and forbidding them from leasing federal land. Though it is now a admitted felon, the company remains the largest fuel contractor for the Department of Defense and will earn more through those contracts in the next year than it will pay out in the current settlement.

Jacqueline Savitz, deputy vice president of international ocean advocacy group Oceana, pointed to a lack of progress in legislative protections against the dangers of offshore drilling. “Nothing in this settlement, and no law passed since the spill, prevents the next major offshore spill from happening,” she said in a press release dated November 15.

While many say more remains to be done to hold BP accountable, environmentalists seemed to agree that the company’s financial resources will play an important role in the recovery. The good news here is that BP has yet to face civil claims for its violations of environmental legislation such as the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act. These civil claims could be more than ten times higher than the criminal fines the company has just agreed to pay. Public Citizen calculates that civil claims against BP could total $51.5 billion, while Oceana put the figure as high as $90 billion.

Attorney General Eric HOlder announced last Thursday that his office is prepared to go to trial in February on the Clean Water Act violations, which various estimates put at between $10 and $21 billion. It is unclear at this time if further violations will be prosecuted.

 Ialeggio says that whenever there is any kind of storm or disturbance in the weather, tar balls wash up on the beach.

The civil trials will make public much of the yet-to-be released data on the extent of the spill’s environmental impact. According to James Ialeggio, a field biologist who helped to conduct post-spill damage assessment, reports of the devastation have been intentionally understated. “My overwhelming impression of the cleanup effort I saw was that it was driven by two things: BP’s desire to minimize its own culpability, and the Gulf region’s effort to minimize the impact on their tourism,” he said.

Ialeggio was with the first out-of-state nonprofit teams to be given access to the area, some two months after the spill. By that time, much of the oil had been hidden by controversial chemical dispersants used for the first time in the Deepwater Horizon spill. The dispersants minimized the appearance of oil slicks by separating them into miniscule particles. Some researchers found that the combination of oil and dispersants had toxic effects.

Meanwhile, oil continues to be discovered. This summer, the Times Picayune reported that a 30-by-30 foot mat of solidified oil had washed up on Louisiana's Grand Isle Beach, not long after BP had declared the area clean. Ialeggio says that whenever there is any kind of storm or disturbance in the weather, tar balls wash up on the beach, though he can’t be sure they are connected to the Deepwater Horizon incident.

BP has indicated it is prepared to fight upcoming civil charges on two major points: They will contest the government’s figures on the gallons of oil spilled, and they will argue for charges of negligence rather than gross negligence, which carries higher penalties. The outcome of the upcoming trial will indicate more about whether financial punishment is adequate in this case.

“The government says that the biggest fine in history equates with justice being served,” said Allison Fisher, Outreach Director of the Energy Program at Public Citizen. “To maintain that narrative, they will really have to come through with the civil charges.”

---

Signe Predmore wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Signe is an editorial intern at YES! and is currently on leave from studying international politics in Sweden.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/BP-civil-fines-could-be-ten-times-larger-than-record-criminal-penalty?utm_source=wkly20121123&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=titlePredmore

IPS: Human Right to Water and Sanitation

INTER PRESS SERVICE    News Agency          Journalism and Communication for Global Change

Human Right to Water and Sanitation Remains a Political Mirage

Indigenous women hauling water in Chiapas, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 1 2012 (IPS) - When the 193-member General Assembly, the U.N.’s highest policy-making body, declared water and sanitation a basic human right back in July 2010, the adoption of that divisive resolution was hailed by many as a “historic” achievement.

But as the international community commemorated the second anniversary of that resolution last week, there was hardly any political rejoicing either inside or outside the United Nations.

“This human right is yet to be fully implemented,” complained a coalition of 15 international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), whose members describe themselves as “water justice activists”.



Demanding concrete action by individual governments, the coalition said, “As members of the global water justice movement, we are deeply concerned to see little progress being made towards the full implementation of this right.”

In a letter sent to member states, the 15 organisations said that as “governments aggressively pursue false solutions to the environmental and economic crises, the situation will only deepen the water injustices that our organisations and communities have been fighting for decades.”

The coalition includes the Council of Canadians, the Blue Planet Project, Food and Water Watch, National Alliance of People’s Movement of India, People’s Coalition for the Right to Water in Indonesia and Food and Water Europe.

The organisations, in collaboration with the Blue Planet Project, have produced a series of reports examining key obstacles to the implementation of the human right to water in several countries, including Argentina, Ecuador, Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, India, Palestine, the United States and countries in Europe.

In March, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) released a joint report claiming that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water (spelled out under Goal 7 on environmental sustainability) has been reached well in advance of the 2015 deadline.

“Today, we recognise a great achievement for people of the world,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, with a tinge of pride, pointing out that “this is one of the first MDG targets to be met.”

At the end of 2010, 89 percent of the world’s population, or 6.1 billion people, used improved drinking water sources, such as piped supplies and protected wells, according to the study titled “Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation 2012.”

This is one percent more than the 88 percent MDG target. And by 2015, about 92 percent of the global population will have access to improved drinking water, says the report released by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation.

A cautious UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake warned that victory could not yet be declared since at least 11 percent of the world’s population – roughly around 783 million people – are still without access to safe drinking water, and billions without sanitation facilities.

Tom Slaymaker, senior policy analyst at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS it is too early to say that the resolution on the human right to water has failed in its implementation.

“But two years on we have not yet seen the sort of step change in effort needed to reverse the historical neglect of water and, more particularly, sanitation in international development cooperation,” he added.
Slaymaker said the second “High Level Meeting of Sanitation and Water for All Partnership”, in April 2012, offered encouraging signs of increased political attention to the problem.

“But the resulting government commitments to get countries off-track to achieve the sanitation MDG back on track to meet the target in 2015 need to be backed up with the required financial resources to make progressive realisation of the human right to water and sanitation a reality,” he said.

A further key test, he pointed out, will be the extent to which emerging goals for development in the post MDG era take account of obligations relating to the human right to water and sanitation and set ambitious new targets for achieving universal access.

The resolution in the General Assembly proved politically divisive, with 122 countries voting for it and 41 abstaining, but with no negative votes.

The United States abstained and so did some of the European and industrialised countries, including Britain, Australia, Austria, Canada, Greece, Sweden, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Ireland.

But several developing nations, mostly from Africa, also abstained on the vote, siding with rich industrial countries.

These included Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Zambia, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
In its letter, the NGO coalition said the recently concluded Rio+20 summit on sustainable development affirmed “full and unquestioned consensus among UN Member States regarding the human right to water and sanitation”.

“We are therefore demanding the full implementation of this vital human right, and remedies to the tremendous obstacles we are facing in all of our regions,” the letter added.

The letter refers to several regional chapters in a new report titled “Our Right to Water: A People’s Guide to Implementing the United Nations’ Recognition of Water and Sanitation as a Human Right” authored by Maude Barlow, chairperson of the Council of Canadians and former senior advisor on water to the 63rd president of the United Nations General Assembly.

These reports, the letters says, provide several regionally-specific recommendations to ensure the progressive realization of the human right to water and sanitation.



http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/08/human-right-to-water-and-sanitation-remains-a-political-mirage/