Fines: A Cost of Doing Business
In the corporate world, people are out to make profit at any costs necessary, even if it means illegally harming the environment. One of the most unethical cases that I have heard of so far is the polluting of Arthur Kill by Exxon Mobil in Staten Island, New York. The lack of consideration for the environment as well as the time that it took for Exxon Mobil to address the issue is devastating and extremely unethical.
A corporation should be treated as a single entity, and if found to have broken the law, the corporation should face judicial persecution. This is how the world should work, but it simply does not. Instead, the government fines these corporations in hope that they will stop the illegal activity. However, the reality of it is that the business will not stop what they were doing, as it was probably extremely profitable. Exxon Mobil was found guilty of dumping benzene into open-air ponds as well as denied the fact that the waters were over twenty times the legal limit of benzene. Furthermore, Exxon Mobil was found to have altered their data in fear of losing their barge-cleaning business. To top it all off, the EPA told Exxon not to dump the hazardous waste into open-air ponds, and so instead they flushed the sludge into Arthur Kill.
Instead of fining Exxon Mobil of $11.2 million, I feel that the EPA should have taken at least 1% of their profits over time in order to recover the area that they have polluted with benzene. On the large scale, $11.2 million is nothing in comparison to Exxon’s total profit in 2011, $41.1 billion. This comes out to a mere 0.0003% of their total profits and an amount so miniscule that there is not much recovery that can be done in Arthur Kill. To Exxon, this fine is just seen as a cost of doing business. After being found guilty on three separate occasions, I feel that Exxon should have faced more criminal charges as well as a larger fine. Also, I believe that it should be up to Exxon to clean up the mess that they have created instead of leaving it up to the community around Arthur Kill. We should not have to pay taxes that are used to clean up Exxon’s mess when they were the one in fault.
However, the lack of recovery however cannot be blamed entirely on Exxon Mobil. The government was given $3 million to directly restore the land on the waterway, yet from 2001 until today, the government has only used $1 million to buy and preserve wetlands. Where has the other $2 million gone? The government is also at fault by not using the funds given to them by Exxon for the sole purpose of recovering the wetlands of Arthur Kill. They are not doing all in their power to take care of something as important as the environment, and this must change.
In the 1980s, the government also made a faulty assumption by thinking that leaded gasoline was a large contributor to hazardous lead levels in the air. However, after lake bottom analysis was done on a lake in Central Park, it was found that lead levels declined drastically in the 1960s, over twenty years earlier than the ban of leaded gasoline. Lead is a cheap additive, and allowed for better fuel economy and there may have been no need to phase out leaded gasoline in the 1980s. Again, the government should base their action on research rather than on assumptions in order to allocate funds efficiently.
In order to better the environment, many steps must be taken by the corporations polluting the environment, the government, and the people. Environmental recovery will only succeed if a majority of the human population contributes in reversing the damage that has been done to the earth thus far. However, at the rate we are moving at today, with the mindset of both the corporations such as Exxon and the government itself, I feel that not much will be achieved in the years to come. Something must be done to change this.
