Some pun about oil

Well it's been a while, but I very nearly just shouted at my computer when I read this.

Exxon are appealing against having to pay the $2.5 billion fine that they received for devastating 1300 miles of Alaskan coastline. Now while that may seem excessive, let's look at some of the facts.

The Valdez spilt 11 million gallons of crude oil. It killed an estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 Otters, 300 seals, 250 bald eagles & 22 killer whales. This was a disaster of epic proportions. Communities have been devastated, whole ecologies have been wiped out and still Exxon say that they don't think that they should be fined.

So is it because that if they pay the fine they'll be bankrupt? No. Exxon's net profit for last year was $39.5 billion. So if they payed their fine, then they'd still have had a profit of $37 billion. Which is more than the GDP of Bulgaria.

So why don't they want to pay the fine? I'll quote Walter Dellinger, Exxon's lead lawyer - "This record punitive award unquestionably raises important issues of constitutional dimension." So apparently paying a fine for putting a drunk in charge of an oil tanker is in fact anti-american.

So it's not that Exxon are a greedy, soulless bunch of fucks who don't want to pay a fine, it's that they're preserving America's freedom.

Nice one. Apparently next week, they're going to protect my freedom even further by organising a sponsored shoot an endangered species week. The board of directors have even bought state of the art machineguns for the occasion, and the CEO is looking forward to testing the integrated grenade launcher functionality on a family of meerkats.