BP spent roughly 0% of profit on safety research

Tue Jun 29 - Yahoo!News

Monday night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow laid out a rather startling set of numbers: In the past three years, BP has netted $58.3 billion in profit, yet has spent only $29 million (0.05% of the profit) on safer-drilling research. Over the same period, BP hasn't spent one penny on researching how to respond to any type of oil spill, much less one as huge as the breach currently fouling the Gulf.

As Maddow pointed out, a BP spokesman recently told the Associated Press that instead of performing its own research on combating oil spills, the company offers support to groups that (allegedly) specialize in spill response. The BP spokesman cited the Marine Spill Response Corp. as one such group.

But when a member of Maddow's staff contacted the Marine Spill Response Corp. to see what type of spill response research it had done, a spokeswoman for the group issued the following statement: "The MSRC is an operational company, not a research and development company."

You can watch the segment at Link below:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100629/ts_ynews/ynews_ts2917