WCA September 2010

Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2010

From the

americas

The oil spill

As the Gulf effort intensifies, cold comfort

for Indians: a quarter-century on, Bhopal

miscreants get two years behind bars

At this writing, crude oil from the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon

drilling project continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico,

destroying wildlife and livelihoods and resisting efforts

to bring it under control. Feeling runs higher all the time,

especially in people living along the despoiled Gulf Coast.

In this context, a report from New Delhi by a

New York Times

correspondent made a startling departure from the general

run of media coverage of the oil spill. Having canvassed

local opinion on the unfolding American ecological disaster,

Lydia Polgreen gave this title to her article: “Indians, Envious

of US Oil Spill Response, Seethe over Bhopal.”

Envious?

In fact, even a cursory comparison of two

disasters almost 26 years apart will show that Ms Polgreen

got it right. Consider her summing-up on the leak of methyl

isocyanate gas at a chemical plant run by a subsidiary of

Union Carbide Corp (Houston, Texas) in Bhopal, central

India, in 1984:

[It] killed thousands, injured tens of thousands more,

and left a major city with a toxic waste dump at its heart.

The company walked away after paying a $470 million

settlement. The company’s American chief executive,

arrested while in India, skipped bail, never to return. This

month (June 2010), eight former senior officials from

the company, including one who has since died, were

convicted of negligence, but the sentence — two years

in jail — seems paltry to many [in Delhi] compared to the

impact of their crime.

India had sought $3.3 billion in damages from Union

Carbide but settled for less than half a billion dollars. The

charge of culpable homicide brought against the senior

officials was reduced by the Supreme Court of India to a

count, according to the

Times

, “most often used against

reckless drivers in car accidents.” The court also fined the

seven surviving defendants $2,100 each.

In contrast, rig operator BP has acceded to Washington’s

promptings to set up a $20 billion fund for cleaning up the

Gulf, as a first instalment on what it will ultimately pay for

the damage caused by the oil spill. A criminal investigation

has begun. As noted by the

Times

, while the environmental

toll in the Gulf is huge, the cost in human lives, vis-à-vis

Bhopal, has been minimal. Thus, Ms Polgreen noted,

however haltingly the US oil containment effort goes

forward now, “Indians cannot help but marvel at – and envy

– the alacrity with which the United States government has

acted.”

In late June, around the time that the Union Carbide

❖

defendants were sentenced in India for their negligence

in the Bhopal disaster, the

New York

Times

ran a primer

on the cap-and-capture effort in the Gulf. An abstract

follows:

How many people are working on the response, and

what are they doing?

Some 36,000 people are involved, according to the

Deepwater Horizon Response website overseen by BP.

A BP official said that included 1,185 US Coast Guard

personnel, 1,282 US National Guardsmen, and 667 BP

officials. The bulk of the personnel — a total of nearly

31,000 — work for contractors hired by BP, ranging from

United States Environmental Services, based in New

Orleans, to Houston-based Response Management.

Out on the waters around the broken well, some

27 vessels with 230 crew members and support

personnel are burning oil. Some 14,500 people are

serving as mariners, crew members, or captains on

2,680 “vessels of opportunity” recruited for the cleanup.

Some are skimming oil – either at sea, from specialized

skimming vessels, or closer to shore with so-called

“drum” skimmers, cylinders with surfaces that attract oil,

which is then squeegeed off as the drum spins.

Global economy

China’s signal of an end to the yuan’s

fixed rate to the dollar is good news for

Sino-American relations — and much

else besides

The People’s Bank of China on 19

June indicated that it is

abandoning the 6.83 yuan peg to the US dollar, adopted to

shield Chinese exporters. While the central bank said that it

does not envision “large scale” moves in the its currency, the

exchange rate will be allowed greater flexibility over time.

China’s unexpected pledge to allow the yuan to appreciate

more rapidly against the dollar made for a more peaceful

meeting of Group of 20 world leaders the following week in

Canada. Very likely, greater harmony at the Toronto summit

was a consideration in the timing of the announcement.

Beijing’s concession to Washington may also have been

calculated to shift the focus away from China and toward

the US as the delegates turned their attention to global

economic imbalances.

Even so, the US welcomed the news that the People’s Bank

is prepared to gradually relax its exchange rate mechanism.

Many American economists say the yuan is undervalued

by as much as 40%, giving China a trading advantage and

swelling its reserves to more than $2 trillion. The rigid peg

of the yuan to the dollar over the previous 23 months was

a source of unremitting friction with the US, whose exports

will become more competitive with China’s as the yuan is

allowed to rise.

While President Barack Obama promptly called China’s

decision a “constructive step,”

his enthusiasm is implicitly

conditioned on how quickly China puts the long-sought

pledge into action. It also remains to be seen whether even

a freer-floating yuan will mollify the many members of the

US Congress who want China penalised for what they see

as unfair trade practices.

Statue of Liberty Image from BigStockPhoto.com

Photographer: Marty