BP, oil and gas company responsible for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as—actually, you know what? That’s the only thing worth mentioning about BP in this encyclopedia. Any amount of text dedicated to when the company was founded or how many billions of dollars it earns each year would shift focus away from the fact that BP’s main contribution to society is an explosion that killed 11 men and dumped 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the ocean over the course of three months. Including anything else in this entry, like the number of operations BP has worldwide, seems pretty goddamn inconsequential by comparison. Moreover, even mentioning its listing on the London Stock Exchange would be immaterial because the only thing any reasonable person should be concerned with is how BP nearly destroyed the entire Gulf Coast economy and could have avoided doing so had it adhered to federally mandated safety regulations. If anything, this entry should do more to clarify that 4.9 million barrels is more than 200 million gallons of oil, which covered anywhere from 2,500 to 68,000 square miles of the Gulf, affecting the ecosystem in ways that will never be quantifiable—all facts about BP that are a hell of a lot more noteworthy than who served as its first CEO, though it is worth mentioning that the CEO during the oil spill, Tony Hayward, is a huge prick.
