Boycotting BP gas stations won't hurt BP

Earlier, engineers had to completely uncap the broken oil well spewing into the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday after an undersea robot bumped into machinery being used to collect the spilled fuel. Hundreds of thousands of gallons more poured into the water as crews scrambled to replace a critical component.

The mishap left nothing to stem the flow of oil at its source. A camera recording the well showed huge clouds of black fluid coming out of the sea floor. It was not clear how long workers would need to replace the cap, which took weeks to install.

Bob Dudley, the managing director of BP who is taking over the spill response, said engineers expected to replace the cap in less than a day.

melodiccolor wrote:The details of this disaster just get depressingly worse and worse. Before it is over, I expect several ecosystems to be permanently damaged and some species will be extinct.

I feel so helpless; there is nothing any of us can really do except support wildlife rescue and habitat restoration organizations. So, I try not to follow this too closely as it is so very painful and distressing to me. Anyone who can volunteer to help in any way the ecosystems recover, including awareness and fund raising campaigns, I hope they do so.

Even with an all out international effort, what's done is done and some of the damage is irreversable.

It's been a long season of embarrassment for BP, but leaking oil isn't what the blogosphere is ripping the company for today. A site called Americablog spotted a press photo of BP's Houston command center, ostensibly taken on July 16. The image had quite visibly been Photoshopped — badly — to include more on-screen camera action.
Once word got out — the story was picked up by the Washington Post, where it was then spotted by the tech blog Gizmodo and others — BP 'fessed up. A spokesman admitted that the image was altered, said that a photographer had inserted shots where the TV screens were blank, and provided the original image.
"We've instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing this in the future," said the spokesman in an e-mail to the Washington Post.
Though the command center alteration doesn't seem to be an attempt to hide facts or confuse the public, it heightens skepticism for the company at a time when it should be trying to build trust. As the Americablog reporter John Aravosis wrote, "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center."
As it happens, the command center shot isn't the end of the issue. Today, Aravosis published evidence of another altered press photo, this one depicting a meeting from the failed "top kill" maneuver. "How many other crisis response photos from BP have been faked?" wrote Aravosis. "Did they fake any videos?"
Please don't tell us that the people in those sucking-it-up-and-taking-responsibilty ads are actually paid models!