BP Funnels Millions into Lobbying to Influence Regulation an
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BP Funnels Millions into Lobbying to Influence Regulation and Re-Brand Image
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/5/bp ... obbying_to
We speak with Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry – and What We Must Do To Stop It. “The entire oil industry, will continue to use its vast wealth – unequaled by any global industry – to escape regulation, restriction, oversight and enforcement,” Juhasz writes. “BP, now the source of the last two great deadly US oil industry explosions, has shown us that this simply cannot be permitted.” [Includes rush transcript–partial]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, Tyson Slocum, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. He says BP has one of the worst safety records of any oil company operating in America. Joining us from Washington, D.C. before we go down to Louisiana. Tyson, explain why corporate crime isn’t dealt with the same way as common crime, especially when we’re talking about the deaths of workers.
TYSON SLOCUM: I think we have a very weak legal system that inadequately holds corporations accountable. And that, I think, that shows the incredible power that large multinational corporations exercise over our democracy everyday. Last year the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case took it to a very radical step enshrining corporations with the rights of people under the constitutional protections of First Amendment speech rights. but, the Department of Labor has a number of statutes requiring all sorts of regulations for employers to try to protect workers, but the fines and sanctions for failure to adhere to those laws and regulations are incredibly weak. And again, when you’re dealing with a company like BP that makes billions and billions of dollars in profits every quarter, fining them $20 million here, $50 million there just simply is a cost of doing business for the company; and so we as a society need to think about when we’re faced with a corporation like BP that, over the past couple of years, has shown willful disregard for U.S. laws and regulations, fifteen people died at a BP refinery explosion where the company was found to have committed hundreds of violations of workplace safety laws, we have to have permanent sanctions against corporate criminals like this. Weather that’s making managers and top executives criminally responsible for that misconduct or sanctioning the company by revoking its corporate charter or other types of permanent harm to the company. Because, simply issuing a fine is just a slap on the wrist for a giant multinational energy corporation like BP. And if an investigation determines that this tragic oil spill and the deaths of eleven workers from the explosion on April 20th in the Gulf was due to negligence on the part of BP, we cannot tolerate just another fine and another slap on the wrist.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you-
TYSON SLOCUM: We’ve got to take sanctions against this company.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the CEO, Tony Hayward, should go to prison?
TYSON SLOCUM: Well, I think that we need to have an investigation to determine if BP was negligent. And if it turns out that BP was negligent and that the CEO was aware of decisions that were made by top management that led to that negligence, then, yes, absolutely. Executives should go to prison if they’re found guilty of negligence that resulted in the deaths of workers.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, ever since BP’s deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank several weeks ago, BP and Transocean have been hit by a spate of lawsuits. We’re joined now from New Orleans by an attorney representing several workers who survived the blast, as well, he is representing Natalie Roshto, the wife of one of the eleven workers who were initially missing now presumed dead. twenty-three-year-old Shane Roshto was a floorhand working on the drill floor when the explosions occurred. Just a day after the explosion, Scott Bickford filed the first lawsuit on behalf of Natalie Roshto against BP, Transocean, and Halliburton accusing them of negligence and violating numerous statutes and regulations. We did invite BP on the broadcast, but they declined to come on. Scott Bickford, welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW! Please explain your siut.
SCOTT BICKFORD: Good morning. The suit that we have filed for Natalie Roshto is for the death of her husband and it’s on behalf of her and her three-year-old son at this point. We’ve alleged BP and Transocean’s negligence as well as allegations of Halliburton’s negligence. We’ve done further investigations to identify the drilling contractor on the rig at the time, to identify people who manufacture certain, various equipment on the time and we’ll go ahead and amend and add those parties as the suit progresses.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about Natalie Roshto and about her husband who is now, of course, presumed dead?
SCOTT BICKFORD: They were from- they are from Liberty, Mississippi. Natalie and her three-year-old son still live there. Shane had been working as a floorhand on the rigs for about three years. He went out there to earn a very good living for his family. Rig workers make anywhere from $70,000 to $100,000 a year doing this work. They had been married just about three years. He was a very dedicated worker. He was the guy that had his wedding date and his son’s birth date written inside his hard hat.
AMY GOODMAN: And when was the last that Natalie heard from Shane?
SCOTT BICKFORD: Actually, the morning of the incident.
AMY GOODMAN: What did she hear?
SCOTT BICKFORD: They had just talked. It wasn’t anything about the rig or, as you know this happened around 9:30 at night. He was on the drill floor when it happened along with ten other individuals. Those are the individuals- all of the individuals that haven’t been found. There were people in adjacent rooms to the drill floor where steel doors were actually blown off due to the initial explosion and they survived. However, there have never- they have not been able to find any trace of the eleven men that were actually on the drill floor itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Had Natalie- had Shane himself been afraid? Did Natalie see this as a dangerous job for her husband?
SCOTT BICKFORD: I everyone sees working offshore as a dangerous job and every year there are a number of injuries and deaths from offshore workers. It’s gotten better out there from when it was when it first started practicing law some twenty-six years ago, however you still see a number of injuries either from helicopter crashes or from actual work on the rigs. And, you know, everyone who goes out there has a little bit of anticipation that you know, they’re working in a dangerous environment. Particularly the environment that Shane it was working in because he is doing exploratory drilling. He’s done on a projection platform that’s sitting out there just producing oil out of an already-drilled well. He is on the forefront of actually going out and punching holes at 5,000 feet, which requires a tremendous amount of technology, a tremendous amount of manpower. And there are a lot of dangers in those operations.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Bickford, you’re suing BP, Transocean, and Halliburton on behalf of Shane Roshto. Explain each corporation and what you feel is their responsibility.
SCOTT BICKFORD: Well, as your prior guest stated, Transocean owns the rig, it was then leased by BP to do drilling. Halliburton is the contractor that actually cements the well, and when a well is drilled, very simply, a drill pipe is put down into the ground and someone like Halliburton comes in and fills that pipe with cement, pushing the cement down through the pipe so it comes out of the bottom of the pipe and gurgles up around the outside. When it gurgles up around the outside, the actual hole is cemented or cased so that the hole won’t collapse. If in fact the cementing job is done improperly for any reason, there’s the possibility that the hole collapses, there’s a possibility that the- that gases in cavities that they’re drilling through come into the pipe and come up through the pipe and they collapse. There are some reports that part of the drilling column that they actually drilled had collapsed and they actually had to drill a parallel column next to it and that may have occurred because of poor cementing operations. So Halliburton’s primary job in this thing was to cement and enforce the well so it wouldn’t collapse. This well was drilled both as an exploratory well and then this rig did something it doesn’t normally do, it added what’s called a production liner to the well. In other words, it prepped this particular hole to actually produce, and this rig was set to move off the hole in two days and go on to another- drill another exploratory well. They wouldn’t brought another production rig over it at the time. And then started producing it. But, this was an exploration well which was asked for some reason to finish production operations on this well and there is some inference that the company itself had lost some drilling pipe in a prior well up to $25 million worth of drilling pipe. And one of the reasons this rig stayed on this particular well to complete the production operations was to save money because they had lost money on a prior exploratory well. That, again, is something that needs to be looked into.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to follow that up with Tyson Slocum. Scott Bickford, the Attorney is in New Orleans/ Tyson Slocum, with Public Citizen is in Washington, D.C.. Tyson, two members of Congress, Congressmember Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, have called on Halliburton to provide all documents relating to the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout at the deepwater Horizon rig. They’re calling on Halliburton to do this. Can you explain further their demands? It’s by May 7th, they want this information. The status of the adequacy, the quality monitoring and inspection of the cementing work.
TYSON SLOCUM: For Halliburton, this cementing of these offshore wells is a major component of its oil services business. About fifteen to seventeen percent of its annual revenues come from this specific type of contract in.—about 15-17 of its annual revenues come from this specific type of contracting. They’re one of the largest contractors operating in the Gulf and around the world doing this and I think it’s clear that there was a problem with this particular cementing that it did not case the well properly and that allowed gas to escape which caused the blowout and enveloped the rig in gas which was then ignited and sparked the fire that killed the eleven workers. And so I think what Congress is trying to get at here is they want to know more about Halliburton’s cementing operations and I think we need not only Congress to look at this, but the Department of Interior needs to temporarily suspend the ability of Halliburton to continue doing this type of cementing contacting on offshore drills until we’ve got a full investigation- every step-by-step process of the way that this company operates to ensure that they’re complying with all safety regulations.
And that really brings us to another big point here, Amy, is that, you know, over the last decade, the Department of Interior, which oversees these offshore oil rigs, has not been doing a good enough job of overseeing the very powerful oil industry. We’re in an era where government regulations are being rolled back. Just in September of 2009, BP submitted comments on a proposed rule-making by the Department of Interior to mandate additional safety requirements on these deep water rigs and BP, in those September 2009 comments, said, ‘We don’t need additional regulatory oversight, we have our own internal voluntary safety standards which are adequate.’ And I think, no matter what the outcome of this investigation, I think that we can all conclude here that we can no longer just trust large multinational corporations to do voluntary measures to protect the public. We have to have strong government oversight over these very, very powerful corporations.
And a decade ago, the Department of Interior after a similar type of near blowout on an offshore oil platform, issued an emergency guidance calling for an emergency backup blowout prevention valve that would be on the sea floor in the event that you had a rig blowout like we’ve had here in the Gulf; because we had the first tragedy, Amy, of the explosion that killed the eleven workers, and that’s probably the worst part of this whole thing. Now the current tragedy is that oil is seeping out of the ocean floor because the rig has been destroyed and we don’t have any mechanism so far to stop that flow of oil that is just going directly into the Gulf that is threatening coastal ecosystems. Two countries that have extensive offshore oil drilling operations, Norway and Brazil, mandate that oil companies doing that offshore drilling have this emergency backup valve that can shut off the flow of oil in the event of a blowout. In the United States, we don’t have those requirements and BP did not have an emergency backup system because it was too expensive and they’re looking to cut costs. So once again, we’ve got a situation where BP, in pursuit of bigger profits, chose not to have a demonstrated technology available that would stop the flow of oil. And now, unfortunately, a lot of people on the Gulf are paying the price.
AMY GOODMAN: Halliburton has said it’s premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues. Interestingly, it was accused of performing a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea, that’s off East Timor, last August. An investigation there is under way. As you’re talking about the standards in the United States versus other countries, Tyson Slocum, when it comes to dealing with blowout prevention?
TYSON SLOCUM: Yeah, I mean the United States has weaker standards compared to at least two other countries that have extensive offshore operations. And that’s Norway, which a lot of Americans may not realize is actually a huge oil producer and oil exporter, and Brazil, which has huge offshore oil resources. In both of those countries, they require that oil companies have to have this remote-controlled blowout valve. And so basically, the way it works is it’s triggered acoustically. And so you’ve got a ship on the surface of the ocean, that after a blowout could send an acoustic signal down 5,000 feet down to the sea floor, and you could have that emergency backup valve shut off that flow of oil. These valves cost about $500,000. BP believed that that was too expensive, and so they elected not to install that technology. But a number of experts have weighed-in and said it could definitely help. Of course, Amy, there’s never a guarantee that a backup system is going to work with a catastrophic blowout like we’ve seen. But it’s clear that in two other countries, they require this because they believe it is a prudent measure to help prevent the flow of oil after a blowout.
In the United States we currently don’t have that and I think that Congress, one of the things that they need to do in the aftermath of this blowout is require all deep water wells to have this technology. We have to remember, Amy, that this type of drilling is a lot different than we’ve seen from a generation ago. They are drilling deeper and deeper, and that means that there’s more and more pressure and it’s a much more dangerous activity. They are operating and 5,000 feet of water and the drill, from the floor of the ocean, is going another 18,000-20,000 feet down. These are massive operations that were not happening a decade or more ago and we have a lot more risks. And the regulatory oversight needs to catch up to those risks and we have to mandate that these companies comply with stronger protections both for their workers and the environment.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined from San Francisco by Antonia Juhasz, the author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do to Stop It.” She is director of the Chevron Program a Global Exchange. She’s been looking at the millions of dollars BP spends on lobbying. Welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW! Antonia Juhasz. You write in The Observer that ‘the explosion of BP Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig is neither surprising nor unexpected.’ Why?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, for a lot of the reasons that Tyson has cited, this company, in particular, has an egregious record of cost-cutting. The finding that Tyson had referenced to the 2005 Texas City explosion, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board found basically a long history of egregious mismanagement, egregious cost-cutting, and an egregious rejection to the concept of security. BP, while it was experiencing its highest profits in its own history, in ‘99 and 2005, cut spending twenty-five percent across all of its U.S. refineries, it operates five. The Chemical Safety Board found this cost-cutting and a lack of attention to security as the cause of that tragic explosion in 2005. That explosion was, at its time, the largest workplace accident in the United States in 15 years. Now- that was fifteen workers died. Now we have eleven workers presumed dead. But certainly the magnitude of this explosion is certainly going to top that 2005 explosion and it’s the same company.
But I think, beyond the lack of surprise that, unfortunately that the next great major U.S. oil industry incident involved BP, was the lack of surprise, unfortunately, that it took place in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and involved offshore drilling- and that it involved this industry. Essentially, we have the largest, wealthiest industry in the world. In 2009, for the first time, seven of the ten largest corporations on the planet were oil companies. They have used their wealth, including BP, to lobby aggressively, spend on campaigns aggressively, push the boundaries of what’s technologically feasible to get oil and to use their money to gain access to places I think they shouldn’t even be and to reduce the regulatory oversight over those operations. So we have them simultaneously working in places they shouldn’t be working under less regulatory oversight than should be in place; and that has everything to do with the money available to this industry which isn’t available to others.
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia Juhasz, talk about the lobbying money that is being spent by BP in Washington.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: BP spent $16.5 million lobbying last year. That made it among the top twenty lobbyists in the United States. That was $6.5 million more than it spent in 2008, which was its previous record. It is following the trend of the oil industry as a whole which has significantly increased its lobbying, essentially since the Obama administration came in, or since the Democrats took over the House and Senate. Under the Bush administration, you essentially had an oil government, an industry that was filled with oil industry executives, lawyers, lobbyists, people on their way in and out of the administration, to the oil industry. And essentially the industry was able to legislate and not lobby, which they did for eight years under Bush. When the Democrats and then Obama took over, the industry was forced to revert to the more standard method of lobbying to get what it wants. And while this administration is most certainly not an oil administration, it is far from immune to the just massive, massive dollars that are being poured in to lobbying by this industry. I think we evidenced that most directly when Obama continued the process that Bush began of opening up our offshore waters to more drilling. Thank goodness Obama has pulled back on that and said we’re going to wait and see to the cause of this accident.
But this industry spends really enormous- unprecedented amounts of money on lobbying. But that, now, may yet pale when we look at how much, for example, BP spent on campaigns in 2008. A mere $500,000, sounds like nothing compared to its lobbying. Well, now with Citizens United, those relatively small campaign investments, relative to lobbying investments, now, of course, can equal the lobbying investments. And so this is a critical moment as Citizens United takes effect, and while we think we’ve seen the power of this industry to influence public policy, we have no idea what it’s going to be like now that they can open the floodgates. Literally, this is an industry that has too much cash, it does not know what to do with its cash on hand. That’s one of the reasons why it spends $1,000,000 a day drilling for oil in places where only two out of ten of the holes they drill even yield oil. They have enough wealth to push and get as much oil as they can. Once that money starts going into campaigns, we’re really at a critical juncture where we have to rein in the industry immediately before that flood of cash really hits our political spectrum.
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, I asked you about specifically the money BP spends on lobbying, but overall how much it is spending on its PR campaign, the whole rebranding of BP from British Petroleum to, what? ‘Beyond Petroleum,’ its whole- what many call ‘green washing?’
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yes, most certainly, green washing. That switch to ‘Beyond Petroleum’ I believe in 2005. It truly is simply a PR green wash. At very best, using very generous estimates on my part, I found that BP spent, at best, four percent of its total capital and exploratory budget on anything remotely resembling green, alternative energy. Now, four percent is real money when you look at BP’s budget, but it hardly qualifies the company to be ‘Beyond Petroleum’ when everything else that it’s doing is in the petroleum sector and the most aggressive modes of production. Whether it’s the Tar Sands, offshore, you’re really breaking the boundaries of the damages that can be caused caused from oil production. And that four percent, by the way, was a high point. BP has since cut its alternative energy investments significantly, it even closed its headquarters in London. It’s really pulling itself back in like the rest of the oil industry is to move more aggressively into oil, the place where they can ultimately make the most money. Again, you know, oil, of course, reached a high of $150 a barrel, fell significantly down, but it’s on its way back up. The company I pay the closest attention to, for example, Chevron, like most of the industry, its profits fell significantly last year as the price of a barrel of oil fell. Well, this first quarter of 2010, Chevron doubled its profits from the first quarter of 2009. I imagine BP is in the same circumstance. They’re on the way- they’re on their way back up, but they’re doing that by really focusing in oil, not on alternative energy. So it is pure green washing. To think of this company as anything other that an oil company and to think of it as anything other than a dirty oil company.
AMY GOODMAN: A 2007 customer survey found that BP by far had the most environmentally friendly image of any major oil company. That year, the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ campaign also won the gold award from the American Marketing Association. Antonia Juhasz.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: They do a great job of marketing. They spend a lot of money on marketing. And, to be fair, that public perception is right. Of all the oil companies, BP spends the most on alternative energy- or at least has over the past couple years. That four percent, sadly, was the best. Most of the other companies spent three percent, two percent, zero in the case of Exxon until very recently. So, you know, at four percent, this was the best company. That four percent is pennies, it’s pure green washing. The problem is that the public is increasingly perceiving this green washing as a real marker, a hallmark on where they think the industry is going. And it’s logical to think that if oil is running out and you’re an oil company, it makes sense that you would try and stay in business by moving into alternative energy. That just simply is not the case for any industry- or any company. And the reason why they want us to think that they are green companies isn’t actually so that we’ll keep purchasing their gasoline. The real reason is so that we will think of them in warm and fuzzy ways and not think of them as companies that need desperately to have a heavy hand of regulation. They want to keep us from pressuring our elected officials, from saying we won’t vote for you, we won’t support you, we won’t do the things you need to do to stay in office unless you take a heavy-handed regulatory approach to this industry. If we think of them in warm, fuzzy ways and that they are about solar and wind, then we’re less likely, in all the issues that we’re so concerned about all the time, to focus in on this industry and say it must be regulated. It is not to be trusted. And hopefully, the positive side of this horrific tragedy will be that the public will see that this is simply an industry not to be trusted. It must, instead, be regulated.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Tyson Slocum, the issue of President Obama’s policy that President Bush did not succeed in doing: opening the coast to offshore drilling. The announcement coming just before this explosion in the Gulf Coast and what this means?
TYSON SLOCUM: Public citizen, along with a lot of other groups, were sharply critical last month when President Obama announced that he was going to lift the moratorium and open up new areas on the eastern United States in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to new drilling. That was a ban put in place by a Republican President, Ronald Reagan. And we warned that this would have environmental consequences. I think one result of this tragedy in the Gulf is that plans to open up new drilling on the east coast of the United States is dead on arrival. There’s no way that Republicans or Democrats, in pristine coastal areas like the Carolinas, are going to support offshore drilling when they see the devastation that is going to be occurring and already is occurring already on the Gulf. It really underscores the fallacy that we can “Drill, Baby, Drill” our way to energy independence or “Drill, Baby, Drill” our way off of foreign oil. The fact is is that this shows that domestic oil production poses significant economic harm, significant problems with the ecosystem and workplace safety. That if we really want to become energy independent and sustainable, we’ve got to get off fossil fuels, period. We just had that mining accident with Massey Energy and West Virginia and that’s one of a series of deaths that’s occured. Our continued dependence on coal and oil present too many harms to workers, too many harms to the climate and to our local ecosystems, and this should be a wake-up call that our dependence on these fossil fuels is just more harm than good and we’ve got to make that transition to cleaner, renewable, sustainable energy.
AMY GOODMAN: Tyson Slocum, I want to thank you for being with us, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. Also, Antonia Juhasz, thank you as well, author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do to Stop It.” She’s Director of the Chevron program at Global Exchange. And thank you very much to Attorney Bickford, joining us from New Orleans, who has brought suit on behalf of Shane Roshto who died in the explosion. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. We’ll be back in a minute.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/5/bp ... obbying_to
We speak with Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry – and What We Must Do To Stop It. “The entire oil industry, will continue to use its vast wealth – unequaled by any global industry – to escape regulation, restriction, oversight and enforcement,” Juhasz writes. “BP, now the source of the last two great deadly US oil industry explosions, has shown us that this simply cannot be permitted.” [Includes rush transcript–partial]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, Tyson Slocum, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. He says BP has one of the worst safety records of any oil company operating in America. Joining us from Washington, D.C. before we go down to Louisiana. Tyson, explain why corporate crime isn’t dealt with the same way as common crime, especially when we’re talking about the deaths of workers.
TYSON SLOCUM: I think we have a very weak legal system that inadequately holds corporations accountable. And that, I think, that shows the incredible power that large multinational corporations exercise over our democracy everyday. Last year the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case took it to a very radical step enshrining corporations with the rights of people under the constitutional protections of First Amendment speech rights. but, the Department of Labor has a number of statutes requiring all sorts of regulations for employers to try to protect workers, but the fines and sanctions for failure to adhere to those laws and regulations are incredibly weak. And again, when you’re dealing with a company like BP that makes billions and billions of dollars in profits every quarter, fining them $20 million here, $50 million there just simply is a cost of doing business for the company; and so we as a society need to think about when we’re faced with a corporation like BP that, over the past couple of years, has shown willful disregard for U.S. laws and regulations, fifteen people died at a BP refinery explosion where the company was found to have committed hundreds of violations of workplace safety laws, we have to have permanent sanctions against corporate criminals like this. Weather that’s making managers and top executives criminally responsible for that misconduct or sanctioning the company by revoking its corporate charter or other types of permanent harm to the company. Because, simply issuing a fine is just a slap on the wrist for a giant multinational energy corporation like BP. And if an investigation determines that this tragic oil spill and the deaths of eleven workers from the explosion on April 20th in the Gulf was due to negligence on the part of BP, we cannot tolerate just another fine and another slap on the wrist.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you-
TYSON SLOCUM: We’ve got to take sanctions against this company.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the CEO, Tony Hayward, should go to prison?
TYSON SLOCUM: Well, I think that we need to have an investigation to determine if BP was negligent. And if it turns out that BP was negligent and that the CEO was aware of decisions that were made by top management that led to that negligence, then, yes, absolutely. Executives should go to prison if they’re found guilty of negligence that resulted in the deaths of workers.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, ever since BP’s deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank several weeks ago, BP and Transocean have been hit by a spate of lawsuits. We’re joined now from New Orleans by an attorney representing several workers who survived the blast, as well, he is representing Natalie Roshto, the wife of one of the eleven workers who were initially missing now presumed dead. twenty-three-year-old Shane Roshto was a floorhand working on the drill floor when the explosions occurred. Just a day after the explosion, Scott Bickford filed the first lawsuit on behalf of Natalie Roshto against BP, Transocean, and Halliburton accusing them of negligence and violating numerous statutes and regulations. We did invite BP on the broadcast, but they declined to come on. Scott Bickford, welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW! Please explain your siut.
SCOTT BICKFORD: Good morning. The suit that we have filed for Natalie Roshto is for the death of her husband and it’s on behalf of her and her three-year-old son at this point. We’ve alleged BP and Transocean’s negligence as well as allegations of Halliburton’s negligence. We’ve done further investigations to identify the drilling contractor on the rig at the time, to identify people who manufacture certain, various equipment on the time and we’ll go ahead and amend and add those parties as the suit progresses.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about Natalie Roshto and about her husband who is now, of course, presumed dead?
SCOTT BICKFORD: They were from- they are from Liberty, Mississippi. Natalie and her three-year-old son still live there. Shane had been working as a floorhand on the rigs for about three years. He went out there to earn a very good living for his family. Rig workers make anywhere from $70,000 to $100,000 a year doing this work. They had been married just about three years. He was a very dedicated worker. He was the guy that had his wedding date and his son’s birth date written inside his hard hat.
AMY GOODMAN: And when was the last that Natalie heard from Shane?
SCOTT BICKFORD: Actually, the morning of the incident.
AMY GOODMAN: What did she hear?
SCOTT BICKFORD: They had just talked. It wasn’t anything about the rig or, as you know this happened around 9:30 at night. He was on the drill floor when it happened along with ten other individuals. Those are the individuals- all of the individuals that haven’t been found. There were people in adjacent rooms to the drill floor where steel doors were actually blown off due to the initial explosion and they survived. However, there have never- they have not been able to find any trace of the eleven men that were actually on the drill floor itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Had Natalie- had Shane himself been afraid? Did Natalie see this as a dangerous job for her husband?
SCOTT BICKFORD: I everyone sees working offshore as a dangerous job and every year there are a number of injuries and deaths from offshore workers. It’s gotten better out there from when it was when it first started practicing law some twenty-six years ago, however you still see a number of injuries either from helicopter crashes or from actual work on the rigs. And, you know, everyone who goes out there has a little bit of anticipation that you know, they’re working in a dangerous environment. Particularly the environment that Shane it was working in because he is doing exploratory drilling. He’s done on a projection platform that’s sitting out there just producing oil out of an already-drilled well. He is on the forefront of actually going out and punching holes at 5,000 feet, which requires a tremendous amount of technology, a tremendous amount of manpower. And there are a lot of dangers in those operations.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Bickford, you’re suing BP, Transocean, and Halliburton on behalf of Shane Roshto. Explain each corporation and what you feel is their responsibility.
SCOTT BICKFORD: Well, as your prior guest stated, Transocean owns the rig, it was then leased by BP to do drilling. Halliburton is the contractor that actually cements the well, and when a well is drilled, very simply, a drill pipe is put down into the ground and someone like Halliburton comes in and fills that pipe with cement, pushing the cement down through the pipe so it comes out of the bottom of the pipe and gurgles up around the outside. When it gurgles up around the outside, the actual hole is cemented or cased so that the hole won’t collapse. If in fact the cementing job is done improperly for any reason, there’s the possibility that the hole collapses, there’s a possibility that the- that gases in cavities that they’re drilling through come into the pipe and come up through the pipe and they collapse. There are some reports that part of the drilling column that they actually drilled had collapsed and they actually had to drill a parallel column next to it and that may have occurred because of poor cementing operations. So Halliburton’s primary job in this thing was to cement and enforce the well so it wouldn’t collapse. This well was drilled both as an exploratory well and then this rig did something it doesn’t normally do, it added what’s called a production liner to the well. In other words, it prepped this particular hole to actually produce, and this rig was set to move off the hole in two days and go on to another- drill another exploratory well. They wouldn’t brought another production rig over it at the time. And then started producing it. But, this was an exploration well which was asked for some reason to finish production operations on this well and there is some inference that the company itself had lost some drilling pipe in a prior well up to $25 million worth of drilling pipe. And one of the reasons this rig stayed on this particular well to complete the production operations was to save money because they had lost money on a prior exploratory well. That, again, is something that needs to be looked into.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to follow that up with Tyson Slocum. Scott Bickford, the Attorney is in New Orleans/ Tyson Slocum, with Public Citizen is in Washington, D.C.. Tyson, two members of Congress, Congressmember Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, have called on Halliburton to provide all documents relating to the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout at the deepwater Horizon rig. They’re calling on Halliburton to do this. Can you explain further their demands? It’s by May 7th, they want this information. The status of the adequacy, the quality monitoring and inspection of the cementing work.
TYSON SLOCUM: For Halliburton, this cementing of these offshore wells is a major component of its oil services business. About fifteen to seventeen percent of its annual revenues come from this specific type of contract in.—about 15-17 of its annual revenues come from this specific type of contracting. They’re one of the largest contractors operating in the Gulf and around the world doing this and I think it’s clear that there was a problem with this particular cementing that it did not case the well properly and that allowed gas to escape which caused the blowout and enveloped the rig in gas which was then ignited and sparked the fire that killed the eleven workers. And so I think what Congress is trying to get at here is they want to know more about Halliburton’s cementing operations and I think we need not only Congress to look at this, but the Department of Interior needs to temporarily suspend the ability of Halliburton to continue doing this type of cementing contacting on offshore drills until we’ve got a full investigation- every step-by-step process of the way that this company operates to ensure that they’re complying with all safety regulations.
And that really brings us to another big point here, Amy, is that, you know, over the last decade, the Department of Interior, which oversees these offshore oil rigs, has not been doing a good enough job of overseeing the very powerful oil industry. We’re in an era where government regulations are being rolled back. Just in September of 2009, BP submitted comments on a proposed rule-making by the Department of Interior to mandate additional safety requirements on these deep water rigs and BP, in those September 2009 comments, said, ‘We don’t need additional regulatory oversight, we have our own internal voluntary safety standards which are adequate.’ And I think, no matter what the outcome of this investigation, I think that we can all conclude here that we can no longer just trust large multinational corporations to do voluntary measures to protect the public. We have to have strong government oversight over these very, very powerful corporations.
And a decade ago, the Department of Interior after a similar type of near blowout on an offshore oil platform, issued an emergency guidance calling for an emergency backup blowout prevention valve that would be on the sea floor in the event that you had a rig blowout like we’ve had here in the Gulf; because we had the first tragedy, Amy, of the explosion that killed the eleven workers, and that’s probably the worst part of this whole thing. Now the current tragedy is that oil is seeping out of the ocean floor because the rig has been destroyed and we don’t have any mechanism so far to stop that flow of oil that is just going directly into the Gulf that is threatening coastal ecosystems. Two countries that have extensive offshore oil drilling operations, Norway and Brazil, mandate that oil companies doing that offshore drilling have this emergency backup valve that can shut off the flow of oil in the event of a blowout. In the United States, we don’t have those requirements and BP did not have an emergency backup system because it was too expensive and they’re looking to cut costs. So once again, we’ve got a situation where BP, in pursuit of bigger profits, chose not to have a demonstrated technology available that would stop the flow of oil. And now, unfortunately, a lot of people on the Gulf are paying the price.
AMY GOODMAN: Halliburton has said it’s premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues. Interestingly, it was accused of performing a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea, that’s off East Timor, last August. An investigation there is under way. As you’re talking about the standards in the United States versus other countries, Tyson Slocum, when it comes to dealing with blowout prevention?
TYSON SLOCUM: Yeah, I mean the United States has weaker standards compared to at least two other countries that have extensive offshore operations. And that’s Norway, which a lot of Americans may not realize is actually a huge oil producer and oil exporter, and Brazil, which has huge offshore oil resources. In both of those countries, they require that oil companies have to have this remote-controlled blowout valve. And so basically, the way it works is it’s triggered acoustically. And so you’ve got a ship on the surface of the ocean, that after a blowout could send an acoustic signal down 5,000 feet down to the sea floor, and you could have that emergency backup valve shut off that flow of oil. These valves cost about $500,000. BP believed that that was too expensive, and so they elected not to install that technology. But a number of experts have weighed-in and said it could definitely help. Of course, Amy, there’s never a guarantee that a backup system is going to work with a catastrophic blowout like we’ve seen. But it’s clear that in two other countries, they require this because they believe it is a prudent measure to help prevent the flow of oil after a blowout.
In the United States we currently don’t have that and I think that Congress, one of the things that they need to do in the aftermath of this blowout is require all deep water wells to have this technology. We have to remember, Amy, that this type of drilling is a lot different than we’ve seen from a generation ago. They are drilling deeper and deeper, and that means that there’s more and more pressure and it’s a much more dangerous activity. They are operating and 5,000 feet of water and the drill, from the floor of the ocean, is going another 18,000-20,000 feet down. These are massive operations that were not happening a decade or more ago and we have a lot more risks. And the regulatory oversight needs to catch up to those risks and we have to mandate that these companies comply with stronger protections both for their workers and the environment.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined from San Francisco by Antonia Juhasz, the author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do to Stop It.” She is director of the Chevron Program a Global Exchange. She’s been looking at the millions of dollars BP spends on lobbying. Welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW! Antonia Juhasz. You write in The Observer that ‘the explosion of BP Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig is neither surprising nor unexpected.’ Why?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, for a lot of the reasons that Tyson has cited, this company, in particular, has an egregious record of cost-cutting. The finding that Tyson had referenced to the 2005 Texas City explosion, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board found basically a long history of egregious mismanagement, egregious cost-cutting, and an egregious rejection to the concept of security. BP, while it was experiencing its highest profits in its own history, in ‘99 and 2005, cut spending twenty-five percent across all of its U.S. refineries, it operates five. The Chemical Safety Board found this cost-cutting and a lack of attention to security as the cause of that tragic explosion in 2005. That explosion was, at its time, the largest workplace accident in the United States in 15 years. Now- that was fifteen workers died. Now we have eleven workers presumed dead. But certainly the magnitude of this explosion is certainly going to top that 2005 explosion and it’s the same company.
But I think, beyond the lack of surprise that, unfortunately that the next great major U.S. oil industry incident involved BP, was the lack of surprise, unfortunately, that it took place in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and involved offshore drilling- and that it involved this industry. Essentially, we have the largest, wealthiest industry in the world. In 2009, for the first time, seven of the ten largest corporations on the planet were oil companies. They have used their wealth, including BP, to lobby aggressively, spend on campaigns aggressively, push the boundaries of what’s technologically feasible to get oil and to use their money to gain access to places I think they shouldn’t even be and to reduce the regulatory oversight over those operations. So we have them simultaneously working in places they shouldn’t be working under less regulatory oversight than should be in place; and that has everything to do with the money available to this industry which isn’t available to others.
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia Juhasz, talk about the lobbying money that is being spent by BP in Washington.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: BP spent $16.5 million lobbying last year. That made it among the top twenty lobbyists in the United States. That was $6.5 million more than it spent in 2008, which was its previous record. It is following the trend of the oil industry as a whole which has significantly increased its lobbying, essentially since the Obama administration came in, or since the Democrats took over the House and Senate. Under the Bush administration, you essentially had an oil government, an industry that was filled with oil industry executives, lawyers, lobbyists, people on their way in and out of the administration, to the oil industry. And essentially the industry was able to legislate and not lobby, which they did for eight years under Bush. When the Democrats and then Obama took over, the industry was forced to revert to the more standard method of lobbying to get what it wants. And while this administration is most certainly not an oil administration, it is far from immune to the just massive, massive dollars that are being poured in to lobbying by this industry. I think we evidenced that most directly when Obama continued the process that Bush began of opening up our offshore waters to more drilling. Thank goodness Obama has pulled back on that and said we’re going to wait and see to the cause of this accident.
But this industry spends really enormous- unprecedented amounts of money on lobbying. But that, now, may yet pale when we look at how much, for example, BP spent on campaigns in 2008. A mere $500,000, sounds like nothing compared to its lobbying. Well, now with Citizens United, those relatively small campaign investments, relative to lobbying investments, now, of course, can equal the lobbying investments. And so this is a critical moment as Citizens United takes effect, and while we think we’ve seen the power of this industry to influence public policy, we have no idea what it’s going to be like now that they can open the floodgates. Literally, this is an industry that has too much cash, it does not know what to do with its cash on hand. That’s one of the reasons why it spends $1,000,000 a day drilling for oil in places where only two out of ten of the holes they drill even yield oil. They have enough wealth to push and get as much oil as they can. Once that money starts going into campaigns, we’re really at a critical juncture where we have to rein in the industry immediately before that flood of cash really hits our political spectrum.
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, I asked you about specifically the money BP spends on lobbying, but overall how much it is spending on its PR campaign, the whole rebranding of BP from British Petroleum to, what? ‘Beyond Petroleum,’ its whole- what many call ‘green washing?’
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yes, most certainly, green washing. That switch to ‘Beyond Petroleum’ I believe in 2005. It truly is simply a PR green wash. At very best, using very generous estimates on my part, I found that BP spent, at best, four percent of its total capital and exploratory budget on anything remotely resembling green, alternative energy. Now, four percent is real money when you look at BP’s budget, but it hardly qualifies the company to be ‘Beyond Petroleum’ when everything else that it’s doing is in the petroleum sector and the most aggressive modes of production. Whether it’s the Tar Sands, offshore, you’re really breaking the boundaries of the damages that can be caused caused from oil production. And that four percent, by the way, was a high point. BP has since cut its alternative energy investments significantly, it even closed its headquarters in London. It’s really pulling itself back in like the rest of the oil industry is to move more aggressively into oil, the place where they can ultimately make the most money. Again, you know, oil, of course, reached a high of $150 a barrel, fell significantly down, but it’s on its way back up. The company I pay the closest attention to, for example, Chevron, like most of the industry, its profits fell significantly last year as the price of a barrel of oil fell. Well, this first quarter of 2010, Chevron doubled its profits from the first quarter of 2009. I imagine BP is in the same circumstance. They’re on the way- they’re on their way back up, but they’re doing that by really focusing in oil, not on alternative energy. So it is pure green washing. To think of this company as anything other that an oil company and to think of it as anything other than a dirty oil company.
AMY GOODMAN: A 2007 customer survey found that BP by far had the most environmentally friendly image of any major oil company. That year, the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ campaign also won the gold award from the American Marketing Association. Antonia Juhasz.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: They do a great job of marketing. They spend a lot of money on marketing. And, to be fair, that public perception is right. Of all the oil companies, BP spends the most on alternative energy- or at least has over the past couple years. That four percent, sadly, was the best. Most of the other companies spent three percent, two percent, zero in the case of Exxon until very recently. So, you know, at four percent, this was the best company. That four percent is pennies, it’s pure green washing. The problem is that the public is increasingly perceiving this green washing as a real marker, a hallmark on where they think the industry is going. And it’s logical to think that if oil is running out and you’re an oil company, it makes sense that you would try and stay in business by moving into alternative energy. That just simply is not the case for any industry- or any company. And the reason why they want us to think that they are green companies isn’t actually so that we’ll keep purchasing their gasoline. The real reason is so that we will think of them in warm and fuzzy ways and not think of them as companies that need desperately to have a heavy hand of regulation. They want to keep us from pressuring our elected officials, from saying we won’t vote for you, we won’t support you, we won’t do the things you need to do to stay in office unless you take a heavy-handed regulatory approach to this industry. If we think of them in warm, fuzzy ways and that they are about solar and wind, then we’re less likely, in all the issues that we’re so concerned about all the time, to focus in on this industry and say it must be regulated. It is not to be trusted. And hopefully, the positive side of this horrific tragedy will be that the public will see that this is simply an industry not to be trusted. It must, instead, be regulated.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Tyson Slocum, the issue of President Obama’s policy that President Bush did not succeed in doing: opening the coast to offshore drilling. The announcement coming just before this explosion in the Gulf Coast and what this means?
TYSON SLOCUM: Public citizen, along with a lot of other groups, were sharply critical last month when President Obama announced that he was going to lift the moratorium and open up new areas on the eastern United States in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to new drilling. That was a ban put in place by a Republican President, Ronald Reagan. And we warned that this would have environmental consequences. I think one result of this tragedy in the Gulf is that plans to open up new drilling on the east coast of the United States is dead on arrival. There’s no way that Republicans or Democrats, in pristine coastal areas like the Carolinas, are going to support offshore drilling when they see the devastation that is going to be occurring and already is occurring already on the Gulf. It really underscores the fallacy that we can “Drill, Baby, Drill” our way to energy independence or “Drill, Baby, Drill” our way off of foreign oil. The fact is is that this shows that domestic oil production poses significant economic harm, significant problems with the ecosystem and workplace safety. That if we really want to become energy independent and sustainable, we’ve got to get off fossil fuels, period. We just had that mining accident with Massey Energy and West Virginia and that’s one of a series of deaths that’s occured. Our continued dependence on coal and oil present too many harms to workers, too many harms to the climate and to our local ecosystems, and this should be a wake-up call that our dependence on these fossil fuels is just more harm than good and we’ve got to make that transition to cleaner, renewable, sustainable energy.
AMY GOODMAN: Tyson Slocum, I want to thank you for being with us, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. Also, Antonia Juhasz, thank you as well, author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do to Stop It.” She’s Director of the Chevron program at Global Exchange. And thank you very much to Attorney Bickford, joining us from New Orleans, who has brought suit on behalf of Shane Roshto who died in the explosion. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. We’ll be back in a minute.
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
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