Three Ways BP Can Clean the Environment and Its Image

I will not take this time to conjecture about the potential costs nor make any attempt measure the catastrophe surrounding an event that is still in progress. However, it is safe to say that this is a major environmental disaster and that the financial destruction goes beyond cleanup and litigation to small businesses that rely on the ecosystem to remain healthy. I too am a small business owner and, far too often, I see the lack of input we have on calamities of this scale. Here are a few things that I would like to recommend to BP as a humble but concerned consumer:

1. Pledge at least four billion US dollars in cleanup efforts.
The question is not can you afford to pay this, it's can you afford not to? You don't have to pay it all now, nor do you have to define where the money goes at this point (even though we can see you have 6.8 billion dollars in the bank). It can be put into research and development for better cleanup techniques or safety equipment or some of it can go to marketing efforts to promote awareness, which will help bolster your post-disaster image. People want bold action to show that you're serious and concerned about the consequences of this problem.

2. Publish all your raw data.
The world is not convinced by the superficial explanations on your shiny polished website. I know what you're concerned about is the liability of it all, but there is going to be more liability if you are not 100% forthcoming. There are many more specialists out there who might have some insights that you don't have. It would only take a small handful of the engineers you have to filter out the good and bad ideas. It would only take one great idea to make it worth it. At the same time, you would not look like you are hiding anything and you wouldn't have to shoulder the responsibility alone as it would then become a global imperative. Use the power of social networking and the internet to connect the world to your cause of plugging the leak.

3. Reach out to the other oil companies for help.
BP is not really the biggest oil company out there and you do not have more resources than any of your largest competitors. The truth is that you need their help and reaching out to them would provide you with the moral backing to keep your head high in the years to come. If two relief wells are better than one, then why not more? You could even split the oil they recover as a financial incentive. I believe the world would respect someone who is willing to admit they don't know everything than to pay homage to a company that is willing to risk more failure before they admit they have done something wrong or that they haven't been doing all that they could do.

BP has the power to create more urgency towards the situation, but has fallen short of bringing the communal sense of responsibility to the masses. While it has internally taken strong measures to find a technical solution to the problem, it has not taken its public relations or world relations campaign quite as seriously. Whereas the Exxon Valdez oil spill had clear failures of duty from the captains to the organizational leaders, they were not only able to recover the image of their company, but also, the future of the overall environmental cause.

In contrast, the Exxon Valdez oil spill cost Exxon two billion dollars in cleanup efforts and another billion in litigation. While punitive damages originally started at five billion dollars, this has now been revised to an amount only a tenth of that. In over two decades Exxon ran up a bill close to 60% of its annual net income at the time of the spill. BP has not yet responded to Senator Landrieu's request for one billion dollars, a measly 4% of last year's net income before tax. Did I mention also that BP has 6.8 billion dollars in cash according to last quarter's balance sheet?

BP has really dropped the ball here. Their response has been to issue statements from their executive leadership that they're doing everything they can and to put out a full page ad in the papers. This is not what people want to hear, especially from the organization which has marketed itself time and time again as the most environmentally responsible oil company out there. I hope that someone at BP will take this message to heart and at least think about implementing one of these ideas.