As if the fatal blast at its Texas City plant earlier this year (for which it has already admitted liability) and the listing of its huge Thunder Horse drilling platform was not enough, British Petroleum executives wake up today to a front page Wall Street Journal ($) article that reports that the OSHA investigation into the blast has discovered that it was only the latest in a series of major “incidents” at the Texas City plant over the past 16 months, including a September 2004 accident in which two BP employees were scalded to death while removing a valve from a hot-water line and a big March 2004 fire that did not result in any deaths.
Behind the motto “Beyond Petroleum,” BP has been one of the corporate leaders in promoting an image of social responsibility, a topic on which Professor Ribstein has written and commented extensively. For example, BP CEO John Browne has been a mainstream media darling for advocating reduction of global warming by lowering carbon-dioxide emissions at BP facilities. Now, against a backdrop of cost cuts and old equipment at its Texas City refinery, plaintiffs’ attorneys in the wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits resulting from the Texas City blast are planning on portraying BP’s social responsibility agenda as merely a public relations ruse to cover-up its business practice of exposing refinery workers to grave danger. BP announced a $700 million charge against earnings earlier this week to cover its projected liability related to the lawsuits.
Isn’t it interesting how even seemingly innocuous corporate policies have a way of backfiring when they stray too far afield from the basic corporate purpose of maximizing shareholder value?
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In a potentially significant step that could end over three decades of violence in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland, the Irish Republican Army has ordered its members to discard their weapons. As noted in this earlier post, the I.R.A.’s continued use of terrorism in attempting to achieve its political goals — and some United States politicians’ often ambivalent stance toward it — represented one of the more troubling hypocrocies of the U.S.’s current War on Terror.
