First of all, happy 2012, for all of you, let this year bring you wealth and health.
As you all know the
Macondo catastrophe in Gulf of Mexico is still been settled by the US Dpt of Justice. After the astronomic 41 billions of dollars will be spent (and already part of it has been spent) by BP to recover the local economy and ecology. But the responsibilities are not yet fully understood, agreed and settled. A quick article from Reuters forwarded by the Finantial Times came to my twitter account saying BP is trying to give full responsibility to Halliburton for the disaster. The whole story forwarded by
FT can be found here, and there was this comment posted by a person called RiskManager that was very interesting and constructive. I did take the liberty to copy-paste it in order for all my readers to see it and I did insert some links to wikipedia for the technical terms, just in case:
If, as seems likely, the majority (perhaps 80%) of the blame ends up
with the contractors, people will have to invoke amnesia to avoid facing
the awful truth. Yep, everything you so passionately (hysterically?)
believed about this event was false. For example:
1. The actual environmental impact was very modest
2. The impact of the human hysteria was massive, in economic and stress related mental health problems
3. BP told the truth (too much as it happened) all the time
4. Contractors tried to stay silent or lied when forced into a corner
5. BP failed in its oversight of contractors
6. Contractors failed in their duties, seemingly negligently. All of
them. Cameron made a
blowout preventer that did not work, Halliburton
used a defective
cement design then tries to cover up, Transocean
mismanaged the well and then failed in every step of
blowout detection and response procedure
Now, when I find that my understanding of something is totally, utterly
wrong and that as a result I have bayed for the blood of someone not to
blame as I claimed, I would look back to find out why if only to avoid
being so humiliated again (who likes to find out they have stupidly self
harmed?)
The answer to why you had it totally wrong was..... the media..... US politicians.
Well we are stuck with the politicans until election time. Then they
can be held to account. But who holds the media to account?
You do.
Change what you read. Mass media is making you more ignorant the more
you read. Nasim Taleb said this, he is correct, mass media is corrosive
to intelligence but strong fertilizer for hysterical sensationalism and
fear, which of course is why you dear reader "consume" it. Just don't
pretend it is making you smarter. It isn't.
To his comment I would like to add two things:
- I do not agree with this point. We do not know yet the
extend of the environmental impact as the oil plumes have been mixed
with some very toxic chemical thanks to BP's mitigation plans and the
underwater currents are extremely powerful and ride the entire ocean(s).
You also seem to forget all the political and hide'n-seek game BP
played at that time. Even if they are not faulty of every thing, they
were nowhere near innocence.
- I know the fault as to be directed ALSO to contractors, but not only. 80% for me is too much if you consider BP runs its priorities by agenda. Do not forget they were late on schedule, the rig contract is strict and BP spent much more money than they expected. I have the feeling there has been of couple of heated meetings and nobody wanted to angry up the client, hence little resistance might have been encountered if BP asked for a speed up in the process. When the doors are closed we all know that what is on paper can be short cutted if it can make your boss happier. Cutting a couple of 100k WILL make your boss happier. Things are not black and white and all the parties involved into these meetings have to be made accountable for the final decisions, either for having taken the decision or just for not having resisted enough. Sometimes when the contractor steps up strongly against the client it isn't beneficial at first, but when the big picture shows up then everybody is happy. The fact that a catastrophe like this one has never happened before, nobody could assess the yet-to-come damages. Now I totally agree with the government responsibility, for lack of oversight and too much appeal for profit. This is the down side of a wide open economy, when you allow too much freedom to one economy it actually harms the other co-existing with.
Feel free to comment!!
