BP OIL SPILLS

BP Oil Spills

BP Oil Spills

This paper is based on BP Oil Spill case study. In this paper, six questions are answered. The damage inflicted on the environment by oil spills is extensive, and the effects can linger for years after a oil spill occurs. Because oil is transported thousands of miles through pipelines and in an ever-increasing number of tankers, the potential for accidents has accelerated in recent years. In March 1967, the 118,185-ton Torrey Canyon spilled 3.5 million gallons of Kuwaiti crude oil into the English Channel, polluting English and eventually, French beaches and presenting new pollution problems. The ship's master was reportedly trying to beat the tide when the boat ran aground on the Seven Stones. When the ship hit the rocks, it broke open. Under British law, the owner or master of a ship that discharges oil into international waters may be prosecuted.

Three Lessons Learned

This spill is in numerous ways an expected result of the route we have chosen. Given the falling stocks of easy-access oil, our addiction is compelling us to dig up exceedingly isolated oil — something very, very hard to do that comes with tremendous complexity and myriad dangers of catastrophic failure.

To hearken back to the recession for a moment, one of my favorite tidbits about the financial meltdown was something I read about the ratings agencies (Lustgarten, 2010).. In the spreadsheet forms they used to approximate the value of mortgage-backed securities, analysts could only close in a positive number in the development" cell. Thead covering is, they could not forecast the worth of those derivatives if lodgings charges really went down

The huge, and direct, recall was unprecedented and set the benchmark for business behavior in the face of existential threats to a business.

2. New Energy Policy

The OPA provides for enormously harder penalties and liability for spillers of oil, allocates more assets for considering with spills, and locations more responsibility on the boss agency to respond to oil spill occurrences promptly. The creation of the spill cleanup fund in the OPA was also a foremost accomplishment. The fund consolidated three smaller funds to create a bigger fund than ever before. At $1 billion, such a fund may not be sufficient to clean up the largest spill, but it still comes closer to the costs of cleaning up a spill of the magnitude of the Exxon Valdez than did any of the other funds (Casselman, 2010).

Thus, deterring criminal activity may be achieved either by increasing the severity of the penalty, by increasing the likelihood that the offender will be caught, or by changing legal rules to increase the likelihood of conviction. The “optimal penalty” for Becker is equal to the harm divided by the probability of detection. This penalty will deter potential criminals optimally because it ensures that they weigh the expected benefit from engaging in criminal activity against the expected cost—which is now set to the “expected social harm” from their illegal activity. In other words, the Becker optimal penalty turns the individual ...