Do not buy BP gas.

Agree it won't work. If you boycott, you do not hurt BP, but only the poor guy who owns the station, and who may be one of your neighbors.

 

I think that is the wrong approach. Buy the biggest gas hog you can find and put as many miles on it in the shortest amount of time. Look at the brighter side, the sooner we suck the earth dry of oil, the sooner we can look forward to a day of no more oil spills, or off-shore drilling.

Keith

 

In addition .... BP has said from the beginning that they would pay the cost to clean up after the flow is stopped. Bankrupt BP and guess who will be paying for the clean-up?

I have no idea how to solve the problem ... I strongly suspect, neither does the President, any in his administration and least of all congress. Congress ONLY knows how to 1) hold hearings, 2) launch investigations and 3) posture and pontificate on and on.

Does it strike anyone else how stupid is it for the AG to threaten BP with criminal prosecution when they are the (seemingly) the only hope to eventually cap this disaster? I hate politics!

Lastly .... Will we be more secure, more comfortable of careful drilling practices, safeguards, confident that spills will be dealt with promptly and effectively, when N. Korea, and other foreign interest drill in the Gulf, when American companies are forbidden?

 

No way I am buying BP gas. It could be contaminated with salt water.

 

Been reading all the posts here and it appears BP were drilling in mile deep waters for oil. The oil pipe has split and the machinery at the bottom of the sea to cut off the supply has jammed.

Are there other oil companies drilling at similar depths? What contingency plans do they have should a similar disaster occur? Are they continuing to drill? or have they all been stopped until they can prove that if this disaster occured to them, they could stop it? If they haven't been stopped why not?

Or maybe, just maybe, good ol' American companies would have no problem stopping such a disaster and those nasty foreign companies are doing it deliberately?

Or maybe it's just a terrible disaster that indeed does need sorting out yesterday and if regulation or regulators were slack, then that needs addressing urgently. It is very worrysome that an open pipe like this can continue to spew oil in the way that it is doing.

But do we ever learn from oil disasters?

 

a bit late to this as there are 50 posts...but have to say

what company recklessly performed operations in the US?

what company has been repeatedly cited for violations but continues on without correcting their mistakes??

what company has had 980 major violations while the 2nd greatest violator has had 8 during the same time period??

granted the US is not blameless. they could have shut down BP and idled 30,000 workers but they did not.

BP killed dozens of workers when their Texas City refinery blew up a few years back. i completely detest our litigious society that we have become, but i sincerely hope that the families are suing the CRAP out of BP for what they did. unfortunatey, as i undersand it, most settled for a paltry sums of less than 5 million each. so once again Big Oil bought their way out of what is essentially an unforgivable mistake for a mere 200 million on their way to a 20 Billion dollar profit.

a parting shot; unfortunately because oil is fungible, we cannot realistically boycott BP. but we can simply stop buying gas period. right now that is no a viable option for many of us simply because auto manufacturers have ignored us.

but what we can do is reduce our usage as much as we can and support the companies like Nissan who are taking a HUGE financial risk by getting us started on the EV trail.

 

KidA; let me ask you something...

if someone gets a drivers license, then goes out and drives 100 mph thru the main aisle of a crowded shopping mall and kills 13 people, who is to blame??

the department of licensing??


**edit**
ok was gonna leave it at that, but afraid some might miss the point.

in any situation there is a level of responsibility and must be self imposed. there is no level of regulations, inspections, monitorings, etc. that will cover all those bases. BP simply willfully ignored known best practices in several instances and it appears their main motivation was to save money.

the blowout preventer failed because they did not want to pay the extra money to put in the extra safeguards. i read somewhere that they conceivably could have prevented all of this with a $900,000 part.

 

Google, for not being clearer with their map directions.

Tom

 

It does beg the question though whether one should be drilling for oil at such depths if one is not able to correct problems such as BP are experiencing.

I remember back in the first gulf war that it took ages to turn off those burning oil wells - and that was on land. A leaking well a mile down is proving difficult.

I'm sure who is to blame and why, will come out in the later investigations, but surely the question now is how to turn this leaking well off, make sure it never happens again and make sure other companies drilling in similar circumstances have the facilities and know how should they suffer a similar leak.

It also opens up a whole tin of worms as to whether such drilling should occur so near the coast line and whether such well are now viable. Will other companies be put off drilling in testing environments for fear of a recurrance?

 

I made this point on another thread, or earlier on this one, but it bears repeating. If we are going to extract oil from these depths we need the technology to deal with problems. Granted, accidents will happen, but this one demonstrates that we have no clear plan or proven technology for capping a deep oil well. BP makes money extracting oil, not planning for a blowout.

In the long run this blowout will be more expensive than up-front planning and development, but the free market tends to react rather than anticipate. You make more money in the short term ignoring the long term. If you are lucky, you have moved on to another job when the chickens come home to roost. This is why we need regulation. Otherwise nothing gets done until the damage is done, and we collectively get to foot the bill for playing catch up.

Tom

 

Or to put it another way;

Nobody wins

They certainly haven't in this situation.

 

This is one of the most absurd things I've read in this thread!

BP drilled there because...that's where the oil was.

 

They should drill somewhere more convenient, like the drunk looking for his lost keys under the streetlight because the light was better there.

Tom

 

I pledge never to buy BP gas (unless it is cheaper than any other gas around).

I'm sorry, but I have to wait for some sort of fact finding to occur. I know what the media says, but every time I have been in the papers or on TV, the coverage has been wrong in at least one important way.

Now, if Congress were to get involved...that would really top the cake!

 

What's the difference between BP and the rest of them? "Do not buy gas" makes more sense. Any driver bears responsibility for the spill.

 

Congress could stop the leak by choking it with BS.

Tom

 

The idea that any driver bears responsibility for the spill is pretty absurd. Oil is used for countless over things besides creating gasoline for cars, so blaming the spill entirely on drivers is silly in and of itself. However, I'm sure most people who want to boycott BP would be more than happy to pay more for gasoline if the gasoline was produced with as little impact to the environment as possible. Hell BP wouldn't even have to increase the price of gasoline if it spent a little more on safety instead of paying absurd sums of money to it's executives and stock holders. You can complain about the gas station owners getting hurt all you want, but those owners also have the option of changing their franchises and giving their franchise payments to other gasoline companies instead. That would affect BP's bottom line and provide a signal to other oil companies that putting our environment at such great risk will not be tolerated. If a boycott is worthless, then capitalism is too. We just have a oligarchy run by whoever has the most money to buy elections.

 

Re: Use of Military

You are exactly correct. I was a 71H20 from '69 - '71, and I know that there was and is no such MOS.

Thank you for your service, Army Wife. You and the other spouses are very special people.