Over the weekend, news broke that three months after his oil company’s rig set off the largest oil spill in American history, BP CEO Tony Hayward would be stepping down. Dispatched to a non-executive position at BP’s Russian venture, the embattled CEO will be replaced by BP managing director Robert Dudley, an American who grew up in Mississippi. BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg explained on MSNBC this morning that Dudley is simply a fresh face to help BP rebuild “our brand.” The oil giant is, no doubt, hoping that replacing Hayward will convince the public that the company is getting its act together in response to the Gulf oil spill. Yet the fact remains that Hayward’s replacement is little more than a new face on the same old ideology that places profits over safety.
HAYWARD’S CATASTROPHIC TENURE: Hayward’s departure will mark the end of a disastrous legacy that was spent botching the company’s response to its oil spill in the Gulf. Almost a month after the gusher released 32 million gallons of toxic oil into the surrounding ocean, Hayward told Sky News that “the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.” Since that time, an additional 60 million gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet the executive hinted that he feels most sorry for himself. In May, Hayward told a reporter who asked him about the victims of his company’s oil spill, “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.” Unfortunately, as thousands have been put out of work by the oil spill, Hayward will continue to rake in a hefty amount of cash from his company. He is slated to “receive an immediate £600,000-a-year ($930,000) pension when he leaves the firm in October.” Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), Chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, sent a letter to BP’s chairman decrying Hayward’s oversized compensation. “BP should be dedicating its resources to compensating the residents of the Gulf Coast who are victims of this tragedy, not handing out multi-million dollar golden parachutes. BP has an obligation to the residents of the Gulf that it must meet. Therefore, BP’s board of directors should not approve any compensation package for Mr. Hayward until every resident of the Gulf Coast has been fully compensated,” he wrote.
MORE OF THE SAME: Hayward will be replaced by Dudley on Oct. 1. Dudley, a “chemical engineer by training,” is “now in charge of BP’s Gulf Coast response.” While BP is likely hoping that replacing Hayward with Dudley will boost the company’s image with the public, the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson writes, “There is little reason to expect that the incoming BP CEO will change anything other than the accent.” In his public appearances, Dudley has defended Hayward, minimized the toxic threat from BP’s dispersant Corexit, and greenwashed BP’s awful environmental record. During an appearance on PBS’s Newshour last May, Dudley described Corexit as “essentially like soap. It’s like dish soap.” In July, he once again returned to Newshour to say Corexit’s toxicity is “not far off of the toxicity levels of dish soap.” Additionally, he downplayed the threat of oil to the Gulf Coast, telling host Judy Woodruff that “we’re not seeing anything like what you see in Louisiana in any of the other states. … I don’t think that’s going to happen.” Dudley also praised Hayward’s stewardship of the company, saying, “I think he’s done a great job of leading a company to stand up and do the right thing. … I think Tony’s doing a fantastic job.” When pressed about BP’s enormous profits and why it should continue to make them despite the devastation in the Gulf, he compared the oil giant to a dog gratefully returning a bone to its owner: “I think I would look at some of the process today as just making sure that through that sentiment we don’t actually shoot the dog who is trying to bring home the bone.”
BP’S CONTINUED MALFEASANCE: By replacing its CEO, BP is simply putting a different face on the same old corporate malfeasance. Alabama’s Mobile Press-Register finds that BP has hired scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University, and Texas A&M to “work on behalf in their Natural Resources Damage Assessment process” that determines how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region is suffering from BP’s toxic black tide. Alarmingly, the contract the scientists are signing “prohibits [them] from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.” “It makes me feel they were more interested in making sure we couldn’t testify against them than in having us testify for them,” said George Crozier, head of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, who was approached by BP. Despite the commitments it made in a deal struck last month with President Obama, BP has so far failed to deposit any money into the $20 billion escrow fund it promised to create, despite the fact that its profits are up $2.9 billion from the same period last year. Ken Feinberg, who is in charge of administering oil spill claims, told reporters that he would like to start paying out claims from the fund, but he doesn’t “want the checks to bounce.” To add insult to injury, BP “plans to offset the entire cost of its Gulf of Mexico oil spill against its tax bill, reducing future contributions to U.S. tax coffers by almost $10 billion.” Unfortunately, the oil giant’s malfeasance doesn’t end at the Gulf Coast. Evidence has surfaced that BP lobbied the British government to release Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of terrorism, to Libya in order to win lucrative oil contracts. Additionally, BP has paid a million dollars per quarter to the American Petroleum Institute, which is actively involved in lobbying the government to limit the liability from current and future oil spills. While one would imagine that the disastrous result of the drilling at the Deepwater Horizon would make BP think twice about the benefits of offshore drilling, the company continues to drill all over the world. It is readying or commencing deepwater drilling off the coast of Libya, just three miles away from the environmentally fragile coast of Alaska, and extracting oil from Canadian tar sands, which produces four times the amount of carbon dioxide as conventional drilling and has been called “the biggest environmental crime on the planet” by representatives from the indigenous Cree population.
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