BrianGarst.com

BP didn’t “cut corners:”

The White House oil spill commission said on Monday it found no evidence to support accusations that the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history happened because workers for BP Plc and its partners cut corners to save money, mostly blaming the accident on a series of on-site misjudgments.

“To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” the commission’s Chief Counsel Fred Bartlit said at a meeting exploring the causes of the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Bartlit said the panel agreed with about 90 percent of the findings of BP’s internal investigation of the accident released this summer. BP’s report assigned much of the blame for the accident to its drilling partners.

Many on the left took the spill as an excuse to attack capitalism, throwing out thoughtless platitudes about decision making that elevated “higher profits” over all other considerations.  At the same time, they ignore the obvious financial incentives not to spill oil all over the place. But now even the government is saying that is a baseless charge.

This is not to absolve BP of responsibility. Regardless of the specific technical reasons behind the spill, which I am in no position to judge, and what their partners did or did not do, the buck ultimately stops with BP, as it was their well.  But the idea that an accident is an indictment of capitalism is childish nonsense that needs to be, and now hopefully has been, put to rest.

Deepwater Horizon oil spill