No, they are definitely terrified about it happening again. Deepwater Horizon cost BP nearly $70 billion total in direct financial payouts, including $20 billion in fines. $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. This is an enormous amount of money, even for a large corporation such as BP. BP suspended their dividend because of the spill.

That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.

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nilamo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It wasn't enormous enough in fines, since they're still in business and capable of doing it again, and again surviving such fines.

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39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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asdff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.

	▲	appreciatorBus 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The behavior that leads to the issue is individual consumers driving cars. Outlawing this would nuke demand for fossil fuels which encourages risky well drilling. But since 99% of Americans drive they tend to get very unhappy about the prospect of banning the vroom vroom. This is a real and challenging political problem. We can't get around it by pretending that corporations drill for fun.

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jsbisviewtiful 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just about every week there’s news of some kind of ecosystem damage by another negligent company that streams into my RSS feed.

Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.

	▲	nradov 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't condone corporate negligence or violations of environmental protection laws, but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization. We're going to have an impact.

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usefulcat an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP.

That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).

I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.

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ojame 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach.

Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.

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missedthecue 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.

	▲	tristanj 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster If you checked the share price via Google Finance, it's off by 2x. The share price on April 19, 2010 (a day before the disaster) was $59.48, not >$100. Google Finance is erroneously reporting the price.

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zdragnar 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The stock price fell by 50ish percent, and they've spent 16 years recovering.

	▲	gilrain 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yet, our ecosystem likely never will. I wonder which is more important to not let fail.