BP is at it again

Looks like those tree-huggers over at British Petroleum are at it again. It didn't take long after their $375 million dollar settlement - price gouging, refinery explosions and oil spills - for them to start polluting again.

Actually, no, I guess they've been polluting the whole time. A great feature piece by Michael Hawthorne in the Chicago Tribune describes how a BP oil refinery is dumping ammonia and suspended solids (I don't even want to know what that stuff is) right into Lake Michigan.

The best part is this - not only do they admit to the pollution - they seemed to have thrown up their hands and have stopped trying to curb it.

Despite skimming the wastewater with oil-eating microbes and filtering it through sand, the pollution continues.

"If there's a breakthrough out there, we don't know about it," Dan Sajkowski, the plant manger is quoted as saying.

There you go Danny, that's the spirit.

How about this - Stop refining oil until you figure it out.

Seems that the journalist Michael Hawthorne, however, was able to dig up a few breakthroughs of his own. He names two ConocoPhillips (big environmentalists I might add) refineries that have developed new techniques such as using ammonia-absorbing bacteria and reverse osmosis to reduce pollution.

Tetra Tech, an environmental engineering firm, believes that BP could fix problem using these techniques at a cost of about $40 million.

But of course, all BP does is make excuses that the plant is too small for proper safeguards and that production is just too high now.

High production - guess BP is too busy making money to take the time to worry about the poisons that it dumps into Lake Michigan.

But hey, it is a Great Lake - what harm could a few tons of refinery waste do?