Oh geez, I already boycott Exxon. I am running out of places to buy gasoline.

gasoline is fungible and they sell BP manufactured gasoline at the Exxon station and at the Wal-Mart station and at the 7-11. Boycotting the local BP franchise may give you some illusory good feeling but it is unlikely to have any effect.

-from MeFi

So basically, stop buying gas. Also, write your congressperson and tell them to kill "Drill Baby Drill".

I think it's beyond any single company. The profits and kickbacks in the world of oil are so attractive that even with more regulation, there'd still be this sloppiness and greed. The real problem is our fossil-fuel dependent infrastructure, which we rely on for not just auto gas but cheap food and cheap consumer goods from abroad. This spill is just one localized example of the risks we have accept in order to have the things we want at such low prices.

The second-cheapest gas in this area is at the ARCO (a division of BP) stations; even the independents can't beat 'em, the only place that can is Costco (membership required, but I have one). But who knows where Costco buys its gas from; if the ARCO stations lose business, BP will probably sell more gas at a lower price to Costco. Well, at least I can boycott the Corn Dogs at the AM/PM Mini Markets attached to the ARCO.

I remember the day--not long ago, actually, within the last ten years--I asked my smartest friend--an economist by nature although no longer by trade--a question about market, generally, and he used oil as the example. And I couldn't get past how *%!$@! cheap a barrel of crude oil is. Seriously. I thought he was making the number up for simplicity's sake, so I could follow the math and the explanation. But no. I spend more on a pair of boots than a barrel of crude oil. My monthly transit pass is one day's lunch cheaper than a barrel of crude oil. This is insane. It is a travesty.

We absolutely made this stinking filthy bed we're lying in and boycotting a gas station because of how it's branded isn't going to make a bit of difference.

Boycott gasoline -- ride your bike to work this week!

Let's assume that the boycott was so effective and widespread that BP became unprofitable.

How would it pay for the clean up?

BP has about $240B of assets and $136B of liabilities, so a net worth of about $104B. Its current market value of equity is $145B, down from a high of $196B earlier this year.

So investors, as a group, are expecting the cost of clean up plus lost profits and future opportunities to equal ~$50B in present value terms.

In other words, if that $50 estimate is accurate, BP is productive enough to both pay for this disaster and continue to create value above and beyond the book value of its assets.

But if the estimate for clean up costs grows significantly, or if the rest of the business becomes unprofitable (due to widespread boycotts, for example), then BP may become insolvent. And by insolvent I mean that the total value of BP may be less than the total of its liabilities ($136B) and the expected cost of the clean-up.

In that case, victims could only be assured of getting their money by liquidating BP and hoping that other energy companies have the appetite and financial resources to acquire BP's assets at prices that cover costs. If those asset sales don't fully cover the liabilities and clean up costs, there will be nasty court battles over who takes the first loss (various creditors including retirees or the victims). I don't know the legal issues involved with that.

Anyway, it seems to me that the best outcome is that BP remains a viable enterprise and pays for the cleanup out of future profits.

Well, it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes more than a single corporation to bung up a deep water oil well. By my reckoning, and I admit I ain't all that bright about such things - but it appears that Transocean, Halliburton and perhaps a host of other third party subcontractors could bear some liability in this here clusterfuck.

pay for this disaster

I have a hard time with this one. There's a difference between "settling the claims of businesspeople and property owners directly affected" and "pay for". There isn't really going to be able to be a way to pay for the long-term impact of a sudden death blow to the populations of animals in the sea and on land that are or will be affected by this. This disaster calls into question the trajectory of their survival - interrupted mating seasons, population decimation, complex interactions with their predators and prey which will undoubtedly result in a fundamentally changed Gulf ecosystem. If a large die-off of native populations occurs, making way for introduced/invasive species to establish, there will never be a way to return to the Gulf as it was a few months ago.

"The timing is really quite bad,...For some species, it's the beginning of the nesting season, and there are birds on nests and eggs on the ground, on barrier islands and beaches where the oil is likely to occur."...April also happens to be the time when migrating shorebirds are arriving in south Louisiana, soon to begin mating and starting their own nests, and when intertropical migratory songbirds are literally dropping out of the sky to rest after a sometimes 500-mile flight over the Gulf of Mexic

There isn't going to be a way to pay for an increased cancer and miscarriage risk for people who live along the coast and inhale vapors created by the spill; it's terribly hard to prove single environmental causes for cancer, tracing them to a specific point, but it's also well established that compounds evaporating from oil contain known carcinogens. This cost won't be known until twenty or thirty years from now, and at that time won't clearly be traceable to the spill, even if caused by the spill. Miscarriages are caused by too many things to point to a single cause, as well, and yet this spill could cause many more than is proportional for the population exposed. No amount of paying can make up in human terms for lost pregnancies and ended or shortened lives.

Will there be a way to pay for the involvement of publicly funded agencies and private nonprofits, from the Coast Guard to bird conservation groups, state wetlands protection agencies, OSHA, and more? Funds have already been rapidly expended from public and third-sector budgets. Though it might be that BP inventories and remunerates these bodies painstakingly for the direct costs they've incurred, is there any way to pay for the opportunity costs of not using the available funds as they were budgeted, for other projects? Since this oil spill diverted those funds, we may never know what beneficial outcomes were lost by the abandonment of existing and planned projects to deal with this emergency.

No one can adequately "pay for" this or any other disaster on this scale.

Too late to blame this on Bush; it's Obama's watch. Or, will someone try to claim we wouldn't have blamed Bush?

Too late to blame this on Bush; it's Obama's watch. Or, will someone try to claim we wouldn't have blamed Bush?

Ardiril, what's your point here? It looks a lot like you are baiting readers by bringing presidential politics into this with a short comment that doesn't contain a substantive argument. One could certainly address the comment , but it doesn't seem you're actually looking for a discussion of what kind of policy statement, command action, or concrete aid the executive branch should be rendering right now. It looks more like an attempt to irk and rile people and provoke a response. Do I have that wrong? If not, would you like to elaborate?

Yes, this occurred on Obama's watch, just like 9/11 occurred on Bush's watch. So let's react the same way and rally around the President as he crusades against oil companies and other corporations that weren't even involved, just like the way Bush crusaded against countries that were or weren't involved in the terrorist attack. IT ALL MAKES PERFECT SENSE.

If there is an interesting parallel, it's between Obama's policy shift in favor of drilling a few weeks before this disaster and Bush's deliberately ignoring warnings of terrorist threats (the "okay, you've covered your ass" statement has been absolutely confirmed) before that disaster. Fascinating.

There's a legitimately interesting discussion to be had for sure about the relationship between political powers and the oil industry.

I'm just going to ask, mod hat on, that people offer a point of view for which they can be accountable, rather than respond to an imagined point of view ascribed to some undefined others. That latter way tends to work out badly on this site.

What the hell did BoringPostcards do now?

There's a difference between "settling the claims of businesspeople and property owners directly affected" and "pay for"

I think I understand what you mean, but I don't really see the point of it. There are many consequences that cannot be adequately captured in monetary terms...but what else is there in this case?

I think the state AGs will seek to create trusts funded by BP for the benefit of future victims, which I think is how the asbestos and tobacco settlements were structured.

As has (more or less) already been pointed out, we asked for cheap fuel, cheap imported goods, cheap air travel and now we have to make an installment to the piper. I wish this was a case of actually paying the piper, but I'm afraid this is a lifetime plan and the latest cost is just an instalment. One day, we'll make the final payment, but it will be the past thing we ever do and then the cockroaches will finally take over.

What the Minerals Management Service, a regulatory agency under Obama, failed to do. Oh, and where is FEMA? Not handling their PR side very well, if anything. Why should Obama get a pass if a Republican president would have been dragged through the coals, even as a joke? What if Palin were president? I know I would be all over that shit. In fact, as long as ago as 2002, I was speculating how a Democrat president would be treated on the internet.

Consider this, too. I am more or less on your side in most of these matters, and someone has to think like the other side or we get caught with our pants down.

I was speculating how a Democrat president would be treated on the internet.

It's Democratic, unless you're playing some know-nothing name game.

Why should Obama get a pass if a Republican president would have been dragged through the coals, even as a joke?

I really try not to think in sides.

I remember 9/11's events well, being pretty close to some of them, and in fact that Republican president at that time really did get a pass from the public. He'd been in office nine months rather than six, but it was amazing that most people, really the great majority of the country, were so shocked and concerned that they were willing to support that president's actions even as he made a case for a war that in the end, had little to do with responding to the event. It was only over the course of the succeeding years, with terrible turns of events internationally and domestically, and a Congressional investigation, that journalists and critics of the president began to place the events leading up to the 9/11 attack in perspective, and identify the documents that gave warning, which were not heeded due to the intentionally blinkered and blindered intelligence processing systems the Administration had in place. By the time Katrina came along, the President's much longer term in office meant that agency performance more closely reflected his actual approach to managing the executive branch and the agencies, and his history of failures and deceptions left little room for benefit of the doubt.

The situations are so different; and yet, at the time of the 9/11 crisis and for several months following it, the jury was still out on Bush and he enjoyed the support of the majority of Americans and of Congress in his response.

I realize that BP sells gas to other gas stations and I will try not to buy from them either. I just thought that boycotting BP branded stations might make *some* sort of statement. It may be futile. Is it better to do nothing at all? I cannot ride a bike everywhere. I have to buy gas. sigh. Another thought, if people boycott BP are we just hurting the owner of the station? They make practically zilch off gasoline sales. Their meal ticket is the "convenience" items.

Didn't the Obama administration more or less immediately backpedal on the decision to expand drilling? I thought they issued a statement reversing or freezing the March 30 proposal to expand drilling but I can't find anything referencing it.

At any rate, the Obama plan to expand drilling (announced March 31, 2010) differed from the Bush plan proposed at the end of his term. It specifically placed Bristol Bay in Alaska off-limits to drilling and closed the East coast from New Jersey up to Canada and the entire West coast to oil and gas activity. It also left undecided certain coastal restrictions around Florida, Virginia and other parts of the Gulf. The earliest any drilling could commence under the plan was 2012 because it greatly increased the necessary preliminary examinations before leases could be granted. [NY Times]

Following the BP rig explosion, the administration froze all offshore drilling leases (which may or may not have had much of a practical difference). The Administration also immediately submitted a proposal to reform MMS by splitting into one office for public safety and environmental enforcement and another for leasing and revenue collection. This ends self-regulation, essentially, and will hopefully end the sort of rubber-stamping of environmental waivers which have been endemic in the industry. Of course, there were already proposals kicking around Congress, so it's unlikely that the Administration created the proposal from scratch in the few weeks between the explosion and now (they likely were already working on one), but the ability to get it out the door in response to an immediate crisis is impressive.

Although Miko makes an excellent point about the history of the administration's management decisions, I wonder what the point in comparing this to Hurricane Katrina or the terrorist attacks really is because no-one compares the decisionmaking process. They compare the sound bites or the frothing at the mouth or the anguish of the people injured. That's not useful.

What's that proverb? Like "better to light a candle than curse the darkness" but more expansive? You can curse the 200 hundred years leading up to the darkness and use that to justify your inadequacies or use it to get yourself off the hook for your own decisions, or you can figure out how to keep a candle lit, despite the things you had nothing to do with which still get in the way.

Is it better to do nothing at all?

Oh, definitely not, but I think there's a lot of room to use less fossil fuels even if you still have to drive. There's eating more local food, consolidating errands, carpooling and using public transport, train instead of plane for longer trips, use less energy around the house, buy secondhand, etc.

Great points, crush.

in fact that Republican president at that time really did get a pass from the public.

From the public, yes, but not from me. Anyway, I'm dropping this because I won't have the time today to mess with it, and as you said, it is too tangential at this time. As midterms draw closer, the issue will become more topical.

crush, Axelrod's statement about suspending new drilling is here. In truth, nothing would have happened until 2012 at the earliest anyway.

Something else interesting to think about - if you have anything like a 401k - and you don't micro-manage it - just allocate to this and that kind of fund - oil companies and their profits impact your portfolio's bottom line.

I could own stock in BP and not know it. Any oil company.

The thought of wresting control of my investments and researching and only investing in sustainable products is both overly daunting and practically guarantees diminshed returns. So I'm not going to do that. Likewise, as mentioned above BP sells products to other stations and brands, it's almost unknowable, and I don't see how it would help the situation.

I can see doing beach clean-up volunteering, if it comes to that - time and travel permitting. My brain processes positive, active, specific responses better than negative responses to something like this.

I understand the impulse to DO SOMETHING, absolutely, and the whole thing is awful, absolutely, but as a first world citizen, I accept my own complacency and passive involvement in the whole economic system that set the stage for this accident.