In defense of BP.

It is very fashionable to beat up on BP.Devil of the day .Everybody seems to be wanting to get their punches in.

Many of the commercial and industrial enterprises are risky.Life itself is fatal. The harm done by the BP gulf spill makes us wonder how safe are our other enterprises. Risk in finding ,extracting ,producing and distributing power is a risky venture.More than thirty thousand Americans die in road accidents , yet we drive more than 100 million cars on the road. We all have evaluated that risk of dying outways the benefits of mobility.Tens of our fellow citizens die in America in coal mines many other get sick and die in finding and extracting other energy sources in the country.

We are alwaays making cost benefit analysis of our risks.Insurance underwriters are always assessing our risks and are willing to insure us against the health ,property and casuality risks for a price.Now since 9/11 most undrwriters have exclusions for terrorism and acts of god risk.

Highly risky enterprises are insured by government as flood insurances in flood zones.Import export bank self insures against default and losses. Medicaid and medicare take care of catastrofic sickness by public insurances.

Insurance companies not only pays in case of losses.It also improves the situation so losses are reduced.Car insurance companies have helped us reduce the cost of insurance as weel make our product safer.Underwriters labs and other institutions play similar role. FM global an insurance company based in Rhode Island has thousands of engineers who help their clients reduce losses by improving processes and procedures for many industries.

What role the insurance industry is playing in mitigating losses from deep water drilling.If this type of job is too big to be done by a private company.I would suggest that a public engineering institution or several be formed to do this work and resources be deployed world wide at the hub of production centers so that losses may be reduced and dammage controlled.

To Start with as the words largest producer and even larger user of energy products we should have a tax to be paid on the basis of crude prices for the value of our natural resources.Most of the oil and other energy producing nations get the benefit of revenue as price of energy goes up(in terms of royalty).In America we subsidise the oil industry by not charging enough for the mineral rights .So even when price of oil goes up as a oil producer who uses extra oil we do not get any benefits of all the production .All the benefits go to oil companies and oil producing countries except USA.This anamoly should be fixed so in case of higher energy prices we do not have the double whammy.

Five dollars a barrel of oil tax to pay for clean up should be imposed .With in three years technology should be developed to safeguard and mitigate any accidents at any level.These technologies should be deployed and made easy to share as fire departments share their resources.

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT WE DEVELOP THESE RESOURCES AS A NATION SO THAT IF A DISASTER HAPPENED AND THE COMPANY DID NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES NATION COULD TAKE CARE OF THE PROBLEM WITHOUT GOING THROUGH A CRISIS and wondering how to take care of the problem.Luckily this time BP has substantial resources.