BP and the American Hypocrisy

A foreign company creates an ecological disaster in a country, the company's host country responds, the country's government responds, orders are made to the company to clean things up, answer to possible charges and set aside a fund to compensate victims. Am I talking about BP in 2010, yes; but I could just as well as be talking about Union Carbide in 1984. Let's plot the similarites.

In 2010 an oil drilling operation off the coast of the USA and nominally in the hands of BP went wrong and oil started flooding out into the surrounding waters. The oil failed to be contained and spread onto the American coastline.

In 1984 a pesticide factory in Bhopal India, owned by a subsidiary of United Carbide went wrong and leaked an amount of a cyanate into the surrounding area.

In 2010 after the extent of the disaster became clear the head of BP was hauled into government investigations, the UK as BP's host country intervened with 'Would you mind awfully stop calling it British Petroleum'. The company was told to bear the cost of the clean-up operation and to set aside a compensation fund of $20bn.

In 1984 after the extent of the disaster became clear the US government set-up an investigation to make sure this could never happen in the USA. United Carbide allegedly failed to clear up the mess and left the groundwater polluted. The USA refused to extradite the head of United Carbide and in 1999 the area  received compensation of £470mn (several million was also available at the time of the event and afterwards)

The difference - as yet no-one has directly died as a result of the BP event, [Apologies 11 deaths at the time of the explosion] estimates put the death toll in Bhopal at 16,000 with possibly more uncounted due to the alleged polluted ground water.

Now of course this happened during the Reagan years, but one wonders if anything would have been different if the 2010 disaster had been the same as the 1984 one.