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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gemlaoshi who wrote (99027)	3/6/2013 7:28:32 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 219974

In 1986, I was employed by BP Oil International. Because they had bought Sohio, they had effectively become a USA company. <My responsibility to my clients includes not only their facilities, but the risks to their system of a Fukushima-like event anywhere in the United States. > My position was that BP thereby became in danger of the dreaded USA lawsuit which can destroy any company. To the extent that it was my job, I tried to explain that BP had better be very careful indeed. Unlike in the rest of the world where accidents and other culpability were treated more benignly, the class action lawsuit and lawsuits in general could easily see the end of the company. My part of the business was transport fuels - lead in petrol and therefore in children's brains, causing loss of cognitive power, which was an obviously class action risk [and rightly so], carcinogens in fuel, deaths through volatility of gasoline causing fires in accidents and other situations, environmental degradation in general [SOX, NOX, COX, particulates]. I had worked for Texaco and thereby learned about USA lawsuits and the huge damage that can result to companies. Exxon Valdez should have been a big warning too. Then BP lost the Gulf of Mexico well and the big drama began. BP had put a lot of effort into health, safety and environmental issues over the decades since I left, but obviously not enough in the right place - or they simply got the bad luck. An exploration and production friend from another company [now retired] said it could pretty well happen to anyone. Such risks are hard to model. But good sense would say to expect tsunamis at Fukushima, earthquakes in various places, floods, mistakes and bad luck, and to have fail-safe designs. Of course the costs can be so high that staying in business until the disaster might be impossible because customers won't buy the products loaded with the cost of the risk. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Governments need to disallow the cost of risk to be off-loaded into the future when the event finally happens [just as they now do not disallow the cost of pollution to be off-loaded onto other people]. My very last official conversation with BP was with my boss's boss in Antwerp. He said BP was coming around to my way of thinking, but I laughed because large companies moving seemed glacial. I was heading back to NZ. My argument had been that BP should seek government regulations to allocate such costs and thereby avoid community damage, which would also keep competitors out who would otherwise act less than well, and take BPs business. For example, the government should ban lead in petrol to avoid pollution of children's brains. If BP stopped putting lead in, then so many customers would buy cheaper petrol from competitors that BP would be out of business. Promoting such a regulation would avoid a class action suit, avoid damaging people, keep competitors out, and boost sales. Mqurice