What is Obama doing about the oil spill?

Posted in Globalization, News, Current Events, Politics - 18 June 2010 - No comment

What is Obama doing about the oil spill?

What is Obama doing about the oil spill?

What is Obama doing about the oil spill?

Tuesday, one of the top BP oil execs, Rex Tillerson, admitted that they were not prepared for this type of oil spill. Tillerson was put on the spot with several US lawmakers when questioned about the spill and how he and BP were working to clean it up.

BP was not the only executive that attended that meeting. Executives from ConocoPhillips, Shell, and ExxonMobile were also there as well. The other executives in this meeting didn’t really want to get involved in the heated discussion and wanted to stay as far away as they possibly could from the oil spill off of the coast of Louisiana.

John Watson, Chief executive officer of Chevron did make the statement that this oil spill was avoidable if BP had followed the proper procedures. None of the other executives at the meeting disagreed.

The oil spill has been continuous for eight weeks now and is releasing about 40,000 gallons of oil per day. On Tuesday, there was a small fire that started on one of the containment ships and it shut down any chance of sucking up the gushing oil. Although the fire was put out. The cause of the fire was blamed on lightning. Before this happened, BP was bringing up 15,000 barrels of oil per day using equipment and ships that they had for this type of emergency. By the end of June, they plan to contain about 90% of the oil using additional lines. Whether this is even possible or not, we will have to wait and see.

Obama is still grasping at the fact that the Gulf will be restored eventually, even though millions of gallons were being released into the ocean. Is it even possible to make this assumption now after dealing with this catastrophe for such long period of time? Obama tried to assure everyone that we as a country will rise up from this disaster as well.

Obama is also trying to speed up the payments that will be made to residents who are economically affected by this oil spill. The Obama administration is going to be handling the claims process and not BP so that the payments can be distributed more quickly. They don’t want BP to have control over compensating those they have affected. It’s not certain how they are going to be compensated yet; whether they will be issued a one-time check for compensation or whether they will have an escrow fund that will compensate the victims of the BP oil leak.

The lawmakers are being demanding and ruling that BP sets up an escrow fund of at least 20 billion dollars just for the clean up and recovery from the soil. There are innocent creatures who are being taken care of if they wash up on shore alive. It’s costing money to have the right supplies and equipment to take care of this.

How is this situation affecting BP’s stock? If you are invested, you need to be ware; BP took another decrease from Fitch from “AA” to “BBB” and this is causing a huge downhill spiral in their stock values.

BP chairman, Carl – Henric Svanberg has been summoned by Obama to talk about the crisis. Hopefully, the talks can decrease and the oil spill can get under control.

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