Americans Would Pay $17.2 Billion To Prevent Another Deepwater Horizon Disaster

As the world looks back on BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster seven years later, a study released this week highlights the costly ecological impacts of the largest maritime oil spill on record. Scientists found that Americans would be willing to pay an estimated $17.2 billion to prevent another catastrophe like the BP oil spill, which leaked more than 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration commissioned the study, which offers the first comprehensive appraisal of the disaster’s financial impact on affected natural resources, like beaches, coral and marine life. Its findings were published in the journal Science on Friday. In 2016, BP estimated the oil spill cost the company roughly $62 billion in cleanup and legal fees. But scientists were interested in understanding the price tag attached to natural resource damage, a much trickier value to determine. To do so, researchers asked American households how much money they would be willing to pay in a one-time tax to protect natural resources by preventing another a similar disaster similar to the BP oil spill. The researchers spent the first three years after the spill developing the survey, which aimed to effectively explain the magnitude of the destruction on natural resources. They spent the next few years administering the questionnaire to a large sample of American adults and analyzing the results. The average household was...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news