The @BPGlobalPR Twitterer has been revealed as Josh Simpson. He has been interviewed by Mat Honan and found, by us, to be a pretty cool guy.
Awl: Were you doing this all by yourself?
@BPGlobalPR: No, not at all. The idea was mine, and all the long form writing, talks, and speeches were me. But a lot of tweets–a lot of my favorite tweets–weren’t mine. I edited and maybe tweaked some of them, but there’s no way I would have been able to come up with the quality or volume of jokes without a good team. We had about 15 people, and those writers deserve a lot of the credit. Some contributed every day. My dad did one, even. I sent him a message and told him about it, and I was like, “fuck, I’m not sure what he’ll think.†But he responded immediately with a joke.
It was nice to create something that could be inclusive with people’s frustrations. I made it purposefully non-partisan for that reason. As much as I could, I mean. When you’ve got Joe Barton grovelling on the House floor, I had to say something about that.
We suggest reading the entire interview over on The Awl.
This bit, along with a few others, was of interest to us.
Awl: What happened when you went to New Orleans?
@BPGlobalPR: That was when I realized the severity of the situation, I’d been poking fun at BP, like poking at the beast, but when I went to New Orleans I realized: it IS a beast. Meeting guys like professor Rick Steiner, who explained how BP and oil companies in general try to weasel their way out of cleaning up their mess.
For instance: the dispersant. The dispersant is criminal. It just created plumes of underwater oil and cleaned up the huge slicks on surface. They just put everything underwater, and actively made the problem worse. I realized how tied up the government is on all this–the MMS, the EPA. I don’t trust a thing those guys say. I was really disappointed when the White House said that there was only 26 percent of the oil remaining in the Gulf, because that’s just not true. This is a big problem. These guys are going to continue milking oil from our coasts in a way that obviously is not safe. And they’re going to make huge profits off of it, with the help of the government.
This is how far these guys would go. I met a person who had worked for BP for three weeks, who had to quit, because the doctor said their lungs looked like someone who had been smoking three packs a day for 15 years. Just from working out there on the water. This person told me BP cleanup crews were basically props for photos, and weren’t able to wear respirators. Not only that–and while I don’t have any way to confirm this, I do believe this person–he told me that when the cleanup crews were done with their mission, BP would give them cigars and take photos of them smoking them so at some point in the future they could deny liability.
via the awl
