Environment

BP CEO Tony Hayward has gone from being a little known CEO to a household name made infamous by the Deepwater Horizon disaster that has led to 70,000 to 90,000 barrels of oil, according to a new analysis, pouring into the Gulf daily, for over a month. At 42 gallons per barrel, that's an astonishing 2.94 to 3.78 million gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf every day. Ever since the incident, Hayward has provided the public with a goldmine of quotes and misleading information. Possibly the most famous instance of poor propriety was when Hayward, while apologizing to the people of Louisiana, told them "I would like my life back", a comment that sounded particularly insensitive after the Gulf catastrophe claimed 11 lives in the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Further casualties now include nearly 500 birds, 227 turtles, and 27 mammals, including dolphins. Hayward's poorly-conceived statements do not stop there; he also famously said, "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."

Who is going to pay to clean up BP's disastrous oil spill, besides BP? After all, they made $14 billion in profit last year alone. BP has asserted it will pay all "legitimate claims" for damages -- talk about a lot of wiggle room there -- but beyond actual cleanup costs, BP's economic damage liability is legislatively, and outrageously, capped at $75 million, a pittance to a company that made 186 times that amount in profit in 2009. Senate Democrats attempted to increase the liability cap to $10 billion by proposing and passing a bill, but their efforts were thwarted by Senate Republicans. The current tally for the cleanup cost stands at $760 million, but that is surely understated.

Map of Gulf spill on May 8, with fishing closure areaAt first, right after the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore rig exploded on April 20, BP and U.S. government officials reported the underwater well was pumping about 1,000 barrels a day into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. A few days later, that figure was challenged by the non-profit group SkyTruth, which uses remote sensing and digital mapping to evaluate environmental issues globally. Ten days later, by April 30, some industry experts said the well could be leaking at a rate of 5,000 barrels daily -- five times the previous estimate, and the one that has been the most widely and persistently used in the media.

Wildly Disparate Estimates

But estimates continue to change. On May 4th, BP executives in a closed-door meeting reportedly told Congress that the well is discharging anywhere from 5,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf per day. At 42 U.S. gallons per barrel, that means the spill could be growing by 210,000 to 2.52 million gallons of oil each day. But how much is that, really?