What it is

The first part of the 4/30/10 NYTimes article about the nascent Gulf oil spill offers a little background on majority-owner and thus majority-guilty-party BP. Intrepid Reporter Krauss starts by drawing our attention to the company's 2004-2010 effort to rebrand itself the "green" oil company (remember pretty "Beyond Petroleum" TV/magazine spots that barely stopped to nod at BP's core business?) Good: that was the first of many cynical campaigns oil majors, petrochemical concerns and their trade/lobbying tentacles launched in the wake of that weird mid-decade mini-awakening re carbon emissions & climate change. Background established, he changes his ink, hits enter a couple times, and then really starts to wade into it.
Turns out BP began neglecting the "maintenance and safety" aspects of its operations around the same time this rebranding thing started. Coincidence? Hardly, assures I.R.K., because an enormous, highly bureaucratized integrated oil company is incapable of managing its corporate image and engaging in the complex business of making sure one's tangled network of rigs, wells, refineries, pipelines, tanker trucks, gas stations and other flammable/toxic things remains not in flames and/or not leaching into the bayou at the same time. Companies like this probably don't even have separate offices for those kinds of things, right? Well. In a perfect world, large corporations would post a framed set of best practices in every every office in every outpost from corporate tower on down to field office 6b and the term "social responsibility" would be something more than the nebulous catchphrase marketing consultants bandy about during the fat parts of their boardroom expository spools. Bad things like tanker leaks, rig explosions and pipeline failures wouldn't happen because everyone would be totally honest about everything and no one would dare to cut corners. Regulations & restrictions would be followed to the letter, t-crosses and i-dots included. No, actually; they'd be exceeded, because you can never be too careful. Good safety records behoove everyone, right? People, profits, wildlife critters: win-win-win?
Sucks to say that the world in which the people who tally oil-major safety records tally oil-major safety records is a world filled with nuance and gradience. No one follows the rules down to the last, but even the guys--and often they're littler, but they're still guys--who mostly play it straight find themselves in shit-water once in a while. I.R.K. knows this, of course. The two well-publicized, unfortunate incidents he outlines in the freshest of inks (it's still not totally dry) were big, preventable, would have been reputationally devastating whether in the vacuum or in concert, and worst of all occurred within two years of each other. It's hard to be on BP's side here. The first incident, a high-visibility Texas refinery explosion that received saturation coverage on cable-news outlets for a couple days, killed 15 people right off the bat and spewed black smoke into the air until America got sick of it; the second, a major failure on a remote pipeline in northern Alaska, surely could have been prevented or at least ameliorated by whatever passes for "routine maintenance" up on the tundra. Ouch. But please let's not the lazy. To suggest that these ugly incidents, occurring in bang-bang fashion as they did, lay bare an established player's disregard for the safety of its employees or the continued existence of the ecosystems in which it operates is facile, maybe disingenuous, and certainly not a great reflection on the reporting techniques employed by "the best journalists in the world, and there's no debating that." Not that this last is of particular concern given that the politics of the moment have turned so mightily against BP--the Times, or anyone else for that matter, could say whatever they wish about those associated with energy exploration at this point. Anyway, I.R.K. backs it up with this half-hearted long-jumper:
Last year, when the federal Minerals Management Service proposed a rule that would have required companies to have their safety and environmental management programs audited once every three years, BP and other companies objected.
Natch. What else would they do? This is how business works in these feast-or-famine sectors. The bad guys, the big evil concerns, play hardball, softball or whatever you want to call it (see MMS scandal) with regulators in the hopes that they'll eventually be able to squeeze something favorable out of them. Not that this is always difficult: before Republicans lost the legislature in 2006 and le Bush admin felt obligated to change its tune a little said squeeze had been a walk in the park for a minute.
BP and its supermajor cousins could always be paying more attention to safety, maintenance, and general good corporate governance; we'll even allow that this ultra-deepwater drilling thing seems like it was conceived hastily & without all that nonsense homework re spill prevention, which is a totally different proposition beyond the shelf. But BP's executive corps being a bunch of dicks shouldn't lull reporters at the paper of record into lazy dot-connections which do little to advance rational discourse--and which, while not perhaps as reprehensible as oil execs' buck-passing re matters of life and death, are both indefensible and terrible for the journalistic image at the worst possible time. The I.R.K. of 4/30/76 would have had more balls.