Abstract
Reading Abrahm Lustgarten’s Run to Failure is like viewing the film Groundhog Day: each day you wake up, read the book, and encounter the same story over and over again: British Petroleum executives demand cost-cutting, there is systemic underinvestment in safety and risk management, on-the-ground workers express alarm for their own safety, a horrific disaster ensues. Lustgarten demonstrates convincingly that the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill was not an aberration for BP, but rather an established pattern of corporate negligence and organizational acceptance of the deadly social and ecological consequences.
First, I should mention what the book is not. It is not a book about the “Deepwater Horizon Disaster” as the title suggests. Amazingly, after a short prologue on the Gulf blowout, the oil spill is not discussed at all until Chapter 15 of 16. The bulk of the book could be described as a “corporate biography” in the muckraking tradition of Ida Tarbell’s (1904) landmark castigation of Standard Oil. More specifically, the book traces the last thirty years of British Petroleum from its financial struggles in the 1980s to its resurrection of profitability through relentless cost cutting, targeted production projects, and corporate mergers.
The book is structured through a focus on a series of incidents that endlessly reveal BP’s disdain for basic precautions needed to protect workers and the environment. Each incident is predictably followed by the vociferous claims from management that BP had learned their lesson and would finally invest in the necessary equipment. By and large, government officials believe them, and BP is off the hook—until it happens again.
The first incident is the discovery that BP’s contractor was illegally dumping toxic waste—”solvents, including paint and paint thinner containing methylene chloride, naphthalene, toluene, and benzene, all carcinogens” (p. 47)—into wells on Endicott Island off the coast of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. It occurred in the wake of massive budget cuts and layoffs of one quarter of BP’s Alaska workforce and led to several fines and criminal proceedings. The book then turns to a series of disasters resulting from BP’s unrelenting refusal to invest in its Alaska infrastructure: a well explosion maimed a worker in 2002, pipeline corrosion led to multiple oil spills, culminating in the largest oil spill in the history of Alaska’s North Slope in March of 2006.
Of all BP’s disasters, including the 2010 spill, the most tragic was arguably the 2005 Texas City Refinery explosion. The decrepit refinery was absorbed by BP in its 1998 merger with Amoco, and it was in desperate need of safety renovations. Lustgarten shows that anyone paying attention could have predicted the explosion and fire that killed and injured far more workers when compared to the blowout in the Gulf (15 to 11 deaths; 170 to 17 injuries).
Finally, the last two chapters trace the series of violations of industry protocol on the cement and well-casing job that resulted in the Gulf of Mexico blowout. Bizarrely, BP flew the oil services giant Schlumberger to the Deepwater Horizon to investigate the cement job for a $128,000 fee, but this never occurred either because BP was overly confident (and too cheap) or Schlumberger personnel left for fear of their own safety (the truth is wrapped up in court proceedings).
The book also features colorful characters. There is CEO John Browne who not only instituted the cost-cutting culture at BP, but also the infamous “Beyond Petroleum” campaign which “green washed” BP’s environmental commitments. There is Jeanne Pascal, a dedicated attorney at EPA, who from the Endicott dumping incident was wary of BP’s continued promises of change. In one of the most unbelievable twists in the book, Pascal takes a debilitating fall on the morning when she was set to throw the proverbial book at BP. The injury led to her retirement and the now 14-year criminal proceedings between EPA and BP remain unresolved. There is also CEO Tony Hayward, the famous gaff machine of the oil spill, who naively spewed the same old story of BP’s changed safety and environmental protocols once he took power in 2007.
The book is meticulously researched and engaging, but is severely lacking analytically. As Lustgarten is a journalist, the 340-page book is almost entirely descriptive. The only analytical argument lurking beneath the stories is that BP is singularly irresponsible, and its corner-cutting stands apart from the rest of the industry. Lustgarten’s refusal to consider structural factors—neoliberal deregulation of policies that might have forced BP to change, the larger “bust” of the oil industry in the 1980s, the role of the United States’ larger dependence on oil consumption—results in volunteerist policy conclusions. That is, the solution is for BP to make the individual choice to change and “institute best practices that may extend beyond what regulators demand…” (p. 302). Curiously, Lustgarten often describes Exxon as a model of environmental and safety protocol who had learned their lesson from the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill. While this might be narrowly true, it not only downplays the other horrors of Exxon-Mobil’s operations—funding climate skeptics, propping up ruthless dictators (see Coll 2012)—but also implies that corporate volunteerism can prevent future disasters. A final complaint is that the book is parochially focused on the United States, and ignores the wider global reach of BP’s operations. At one point, Lustgarten asks, “Who knew what was happening in Egypt, Azerbaijan, and all the other places BP had business?” Well, isn’t that your job to tell us? Despite these flaws, the book is riveting and reveals the inside of reckless corporate culture in the age of neoliberalism. It is perhaps suited for advanced undergraduate seminars but, candidly, it is probably best enjoyed as “summer reading” outside of the halls of academe.