BP burns pledge to wildlife fund, too

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2010:
NEW YORK CITY–Less than 24 hours before British Petroleum
began burning oil recovered from the Deepwater Horizon leakage
capture pipe at sea, BP president Tony Hayward announced that BP had
created a wildlife fund that would receive any profits made from
selling the recovered oil.
“BP is committed to protecting the ecosystems and wildlife on
the Gulf Coast. We believe these funds will have a significant
positive impact on the environment,” Hayward told New York Daily
News staff writer Meena Hartenstein on June 8, 2010.

Hartenstein noted that Hayward “failed to mention that under
the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, BP is required by law to fund clean
up and restoration of wildlife in the Gulf damaged by its operations.”
Reported Associated Press writers Brian Skoloff and Ray Henry
the next afternoon, “Kent Wells, BP’s senior vice president of
exploration and production, said a semi-submersible drilling rig
would capture and burn about 420,000 gallons of oil daily. Once on
board, oil and gas collected from the well will be sent down a boom
and burned at sea,” meaning that there will apparently be no sales
of the recovered oil, and no profits to commit to helping wildlife.
Associated Press writers Justin Pritchard, Tamara Lush, and
Holbrook Mohr meanwhile exposed “glaring errors and omissions” in
BP’s 582-page oil spill response plan for the Gulf of Mexico region,
and in a 52-page site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon
drilling rig.
“The plan lists cold-water marine mammals including walruses,
sea otters, sea lions and seals as ‘sensitive biological
resources,'” Pritchard, Lush, and Mohr discovered. “None of those
animals live anywhere near the Gulf.”