Too Busy Being Green, Part 2

Well, the big news roiling markets today is that BP (fka British Petroleum) has shut down the largest US oil field because of corrosion in the pipeline. Don't be too hard on BP, because it is well-known that corrosion can creep up on you. Heavy duty steel is known to degrade rapidly over the course of a several few days or a few weeks at most and can easily go undetected.

This is not the first example of BP taking their eye off the ball and fumbling big time. Sadly, the last time it cost people their lives. So is this just more of the typical callousness that we should expect of 'Big Oil'? Maybe, but BP is the poster child for the self-loathing energy company that is PRing us to death so that we will think it is a swell, eco-righteous entity. BP, or "Beyond Petroleum" as the ad campaign tells us, spends tens of millions on their annoying ads, one of which has some inarticulate hippy/surfer dude telling us we need to "make that change" because "we're messin' things up." How about increasing the budget for infrastructure maintenance instead?