Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power Read Online Free PDF Page A

Raymond never surrendered his conviction that irrational environmentalists had exacerbated Exxon’s problems in Alaska by their opposition to dispersant use, but he did scrutinize the catastrophe for other lessons. One of these was that “no matter what you decide is the right thing to do in terms of trying to deal with the spill, you have to get after it very quickly. The lesson learned here was to try and make sure that there were procedures both in the company and in the respective governments that they knew and we knew that if an incident were to happen, exactly what to do and how to do it.”
    Raymond conceded that the
Exxon Valdez
episode suggested the need for “perhaps a rebalancing of risk-reward in many of our operations.” The risks of accidents of the sort that poisoned Prince William Sound that spring and summer of 1989, he said three years later, “apparently are much higher than anybody in either our company or the industry had envisioned.” 23
    J ohn Browne—later Lord Browne of Madingley—joined British Petroleum, as it was then known, in 1966, as a university apprentice. In comparison with Lee Raymond of South Dakota, Browne was an international and cosmopolitan figure. He was half Hungarian, half British; he was born in Germany and spent parts of his childhood in Singapore and Iran. As a young oil executive assigned to New York, he lived in Greenwich Village, taught himself to cook, and spent his spare time at the opera and in Soho art galleries. He was a charismatic young man with floppy ears and a mop of dark hair. As he rose through B.P.’s leadership ranks, Browne began to think that corporations “must behave consistently with the will of society,” as he put it. He puzzled over what that insight might imply for the practices of a large oil corporation.
    The oil in the holding tanks of the
Exxon Valdez
had been pumped from Arctic Alaskan fields partially owned by B.P. On the morning of the ship’s grounding, Browne happened to be asleep at a company base camp on the North Slope, where he had come to say good-bye to colleagues as he departed for a new assignment. At 5:00 a.m., B.P.’s Alaska general manager woke him up. “We’ve got a message,” he reported. “There’s some oil seeping around Valdez. It’s from a tanker and they say it’s Exxon’s. But no one seems to be doing anything.”
    Browne would recall that he “knew right away that something terrible had happened.” He boarded a plane and flew over Prince William Sound, “home to precious wildlife” where “whales would be returning from the warm water in the south soon.” As he peered down from above, he could see that white ice floes already were tinged with black. It seemed to him that too little was happening by way of response and cleanup. Where were the response boats and the booms to keep oil off the beaches? In fact, that was a question that British Petroleum’s senior executives should have been able to answer; the inadequate response was their failure, too, but it would soon be overshadowed by Exxon’s culpability.
    Browne sensed that the spill’s “repercussions for the industry would be huge. It was the start of a new chapter.”
    The
Exxon Valdez
had “damaged not just a fragile environment but also the flimsy trust in oil companies.” Environmental groups would “have a field day,” he expected. Unfortunately, “it was no use” saying to them “that B.P. was better than its competitors. The industry was now measured by its weakest member, the one with the worst reputation. That oil company was now Exxon.” 24
    A few days before the
Exxon Valdez
ran onto Bligh Reef, tens of thousands of Hungarians marched through Budapest. The demonstrators turned the commemoration of an 1848 uprising against Austrian rule into a revolt against Soviet-backed communism. “Resign!” they shouted outside downtown buildings housing Communist Party bureaucrats. “Freedom! . . . No more shall we be slaves!”