Perspective: EXXONMOBIL point of view.

Image Source: Gary M. Stolz, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

perspective:”the faculty of seeing all the relevant data in a meaningful relationship” from Dictionary.com

If ExxonMobil felt the necessity of starting its own blog this could be due to a very bad coffee on the Monday morning briefing or to the will of taking advantage of this very delicate moment for the whole Oil Industry. Let’s have a closer look on their first post.
What happened to BP rig won’t happen to none of the other 14000 rigs around the world (expect those in the Nigeria Delta that are leaking since the 80’s).
This is the message on which they’ve started to work on. Mother Jones points out some interesting points, but let’s dig a little bit in what they’ve written: “This devastating chain of events is far from the industry norm. We all need to understand what occurred on this occasion that did not occur at the 14,000 other deepwater wells that have been successfully drilled around the world.”: what’s stated in this sentence is a simple affirmation (like “the sun is green”) but as long as it hasn’t any time perspective and it isn’t based on any data or facts we can’t deduce it’s validity. It simply says that a huge catastrophe isn’t the norm. Like the earth–quake that squashed Chili months ago wasn’t a common earth-quake. This isn’t useful. It’s simply redundant information.
The perspective applied here is way too evident and could be found on any marketing/communication manual. Focus the attention on the human side of a company. A logo could be the brand of evil, a company name could become synonym of a catastrophe but if you show that honest persons work at ExxonMobil, that thousands of jobs are created, that the entire world’s economy holds on few companies slippery shoulders…well at this very moment you start to think different. The rest are assertions of no importance.

Let’s back to the text: “ExxonMobil and others have, over the course of many years, developed and implemented procedures and equipment that have proved very effective in safely managing our offshore wells. What we do know is that when you properly design wells for the range of risk anticipated; follow established procedures; build in layers of redundancy; properly inspect and maintain equipment; train operators; conduct tests and drills; and focus on safe operations and risk management, tragic incidents like the one in the Gulf of Mexico today should not occur.” Again, the entire sentence lacks of evidences. Like the meaningless conclusion of an unprepared student facing a professor. How those “equipments” have proved anything? Any accident has ever occurred? I don’t think so. And it continues: What we do know is that if you put water, flour and yeast and then you cook it you should have bread. So what? What are we saying here? Absolutely nothing. Then he continues with something like: we had to do something before this happens somewhere else: “We need to understand the events that led to this unprecedented accident, and take corresponding steps to further reduce the likelihood of a similar event ever occurring again.  An expert and thorough approach to understanding what happened is crucial because this incident represents a dramatic departure from the industry norm in deepwater drilling.”
Then le grand final. At this point of the post, figures (completely absent until here) are newly available because figures help you to understand how deeply oil companies control you just to make sure that you won’t vote any stupid law that (at the end) will damage only yourself. Here we go:
Offshore and deepwater drilling provide a huge amount of the energy we all consume.
Offshore and deepwater drilling provide a lot of jobs (no matter how good or bad they are).
Offshore and deepwater drilling help us to stay independent from evil countries .
And at the end (the true end of the post) there is a statement: (No matter what you think you could do) “Within five years, global deepwater production is expected to rise to 10 million barrels per day – the amount of crude and liquids that Saudi Arabia produces every day. ” And I guess the choice of Saudi Arabia as comparison is not by chance but to remind the great service oil companies are providing.
This said, and as I said in some previous posts of this blog, BP has the full responsibility of what’s happening into the gulf but BP is only part of a greater system that would not accept any other important alternative to oil until oil (and by oil I mean all carbon-emitting technologies) will be too expensive to be extracted. And we are the system. We, citizens, that drive cars, that live into decent houses and fly around the planet and that have our pension funds invested into oil companies.
:HS: