PRESS ALERT: GROUPS CALL ON CONGRESS TO LIFT LIABILITY CAP FOR BP OIL SPILL

Fifty consumer, environmental, campus and public interest groups sent a letter today to the U.S. Senate asking Congress to pass the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act of 2010. This legislation would significantly increase BP's liability for damage it has caused in the Gulf. The bill would amend current law to raise retroactively the liability cap for offshore oil spills from $75 million to $10 billion, eliminate the $1 billion per incident cap on claims against the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, and other measures.




The letter states, "Given the scale of the current disaster, and the heightened risks that ultra-deepwater drilling poses to worker safety and the environment, there should be no liability cap at all. Liability caps allow companies like BP to avoid bearing responsibility for the full cost of damage it inflicts. This legislation is the least that Congress must do to provide some assistance to the victims of the Deepwater Horizon spill.



"These bills are needed for three reasons: first, to authorize timely compensation to those with economic losses from the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and spill; second, to reduce taxpayer funding of an unwarranted bailout of the parties responsible for this spill; and third, to provide appropriate financial incentives for oil companies to prioritize worker and environmental safety.



"Companies like BP, who are not assessed the full cost of damages they inflict, may not take sufficient precautions to prevent future harm. That seems clearly to have been the case here. The incompetence of the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service combined with the extremely low liability cap allowed BP to avoid pursuing adequate safety measures, which might have prevented this catastrophic blowout."



The letter concludes, "A rash of corporate and regulatory disasters in recent months related to dirty energy production have cost numerous lives, and widespread environmental and economic damage. ... The last thing we should do as a country is subsidize bad behavior by corporate miscreants. Instead, we must hold them accountable for the harm they cause."