MNN - Mother Nature Network

Lest we forget, the British Petroleum oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, and subsequently leaked 4.4 million barrels of crude oil into the ocean. The deep well gushed night and day until September, and created an eye-popping awareness of our guilty love affair with crude.

 

Recently BP has been in the news again, expecting that we have all somehow forgotten the horrific trauma of watching the Gulf become a permanently oil-coated ecosystem. But those of us with brains still remember the 2.5 billion gallons that leaked, the surfectant that broke up the slicks and pushed the oil out of sight to the bottom, where shellfish feed — economically devastating to the family businesses and world-class pollution of the entire area for the forseeable future.

 

So instead of trying to gloss it over, so to speak, the slick company that was responsible, British Petroleum (BP), should mop up its image and move to renewable energy. Here are ten plausible, funny, or maybe ironic headlines:

 

No explanation needed.

 

Hayward was complaining about his busy work schedule during the disaster when thousands of Gulf Coast residents were inhaling fumes off the ocean, losing their fishing and tourism livelihoods and generally watching the Gulf Coast economy collapse. He later took time off during the disaster to sail in a yacht race around England's Isle of Wight.

 

Not only did the ecosystem get wasted, but thousands of people no longer had jobs and many have still not recovered.

 

BP was found to be fudging the numbers of estimated gallons per day and other bogus and exaggerated information they passed on to the media.

 

Some fishermen were hired by BP to help perform cleanup work, and reportedly earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for their time pecking away at an epic disaster that needed an epic response.

 

As the oil catastrophe continued, smart people at universities and the government who study ecosystems figured out that the Gulf currents would eventually likely carry the oil down around the Florida Keys and up the East Coast! While this wasn't confirmed, the chemical dispersants did a good job of breaking up the tar balls into smaller oil molecules and sinking them into the waters of the Gulf, out of the view of humans and cameras, which are of course connected to the rest of the salt water on Earth.

 

Or, rather SOME responsibility for the disaster, but claims that other companies must bear some of the blame.

 

Scientists within the Environmental Protection Agency raised concerns over a chemical dispersant approved for use in the Gulf. BP sprayed almost 2 million gallons of Corexit on the slick and at the leak site on the seabed, and now large pools of oil sit on the floor of the Gulf, where shellfish and other things live. Furthermore, scientists have found that the magic microbes that were supposed to eat the oil are not doing their jobs. And, there are more than 27,000 abandoned oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico from a host of companies including BP, according to an investigation by the Associated Press, which described the area as "an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades." Some of the wells date back to the 1940s. State officials estimate that tens of thousands of them are badly sealed.

 

Once the disaster became the daily preoccupation of the news media and normal Americans, people began speculating about what would happen to those millions of gallons a day awash in the Gulf, if the weather got very hot, as it does in the summer, or if the spill lasted into hurricane season...

 

No kidding. Oddly enough, "Beyond Petroleum" was a marketing slogan BP used several years before the spill, when the company saw the potential to tilt its sails into greener wind and solar products. BP reportedly didn't forsee ambitious enough profits in the green energy venture and later pulled the plug on the slogan.

 

Recently, TED recorded a talk by Naomi Klein about our addiction to risk and the consequences it is having and will have for the world. This is worth listening to and please let me know what you think in the comments below.