Public discussion of the environmental impacts of BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion and resulting oil plume has focused almost exclusively on BP’s liability to U.S. plaintiffs (federal, state and private) under the Oil Pollution Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act or, more recently, the $20 billion trust fund “voluntarily” established by BP to compensate U.S. businesses and individuals for a portion of their injuries. There has been virtually no discussion of the potential liability of BP or the U.S. government to foreign nations or citizens whose environment or businesses may be injured by the spreading subsurface plume.
Similarly, there has been little public discussion, at least in the United States, of how to establish a workable international regime to reduce the likelihood of similar environmental disasters in other deep-water oil fields around the world. Nor has there been more than glancing reference to any remedy for BP’s tortuous conduct beyond liability to injured U.S. plaintiffs. On the contrary, it has been assumed that, because of the enormous size of the oil and gas deposits included in BP’s lease from the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS), even BP’s $20 billion escrow fund is a manageable price for it to pay for future exploitation of those deposits.
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