British Petroleum or Beyond Petroleum? Who cares? What’s in a name? Let’s cut the fluff. We all know BP is headquartered in London and has a British CEO with a bit of a pompous accent. And we all know BP is entirely culpable in the Gulf spill – and that there must be major recompense. But then BP has already ponied up $20 billion without a US lawyer or writ in sight.

What then is the British media’s take on the self-righteous moral tone adopted in President Barack Obama’s uneven comments, especially in his recent TV address? An address falling just short of intoning a Chicago gangster-style: Bring me the head of Tony Hayward – or, at least, in effect the bankruptcy of BP?

For the president and various American moralists, three words: Union Carbide Corporation. But before we get to the SMS (selective memory syndrome) of some American anti-BP critics ... what has the UK media been saying about the entire sordid matter?

While news is always supposed to be local, it is not so when it involves multi-national oil companies, emotionally charged pollution, and ideologically-driven energy policy. The Gulf oil spill, and particularly Obama’s response to it, could be about to test the US-UK “special relationship” to the limit, if a significantly changed tone in the British media and a strong response from new PM David Cameron to President Obama’s recent TV address are anything to go by.

Only too aware of the culpability of Britain’s leading energy companies, the UK media has previously restricted its coverage of the spill to straightforward news. That has meant focusing on BPs efforts to cap the well, the possible environmental impact, and the financial threat to British and American stock and pension holders as BP’s market capitalization has plummeted.

But in the wake of a string of public statements by Obama perceived by some as “anti-British” and a TV address that appeared more concerned to push unproven, uneconomic alternative energy technology than deal with the gusher and the clean-up operation, the president’s 18-month honeymoon with the British media appears over.

In “Obama struggles to take control of events” the London Financial Times perceived a president who by referring to the “assault” on America’s coastline and the “siege” it faces had “tried to sound Churchillian.” The Independent broadsheet newspaper headlined, “Obama Sketch: He smouldered but never really caught fire.” It may have been “home for 18 months” but the paper noted: “Barack Obama still didn’t look quite right in the Oval Office. What was he doing in there?”

While past commanders-in-chief normally spent no more than 10 minutes behind the “Resolute Desk” to “impart grave news”, The Independent complained, “Mr Obama had trouble finishing inside 20.” What seems to have bugged observers most was that the president appeared intent on using the disaster to push his personal alternative energy agenda. As The Independent put it, “There is almost a begging in his eyes: ‘Don’t you get it? This exactly explains why I keep banging on about revamping our national energy policy.’ If BP can think bottom line, he can think politics.”

Obama’s handling of the oil spill and the blatant attempt in his Oval Office address to use public outcry capital to affect an eminently uneconomic energy agenda points towards the true makeup of the man. Most world leaders and past US presidents would think twice to sacrifice national economic interest, especially in an economic slowdown, for some ideologically consistent but ill-conceived policy.

Even before Wednesday’s White House summit with BP executives, BP directors had taken the decision not to pay out shareholder dividends this year and to put in $20 billion to a compensation fund. In the light of the president eliciting a prior commitment from BP to apparently unlimited liability, the Daily Mail declared the TV address a “day of BP-bashing” by a president who “bullied the firm into capitulation.” Even the strongly leftwing Guardian saw BP’s $20 billion compensation fund as Obama’s “pound of flesh.”

The Daily Telegraph saw the TV speech through the eyes of “83,000 Twitter and Facebook comments made during and after the speech”. The Telegraph headline claimed users were “not impressed” in the aftermath of the address.

Speaking the day after President Obama’s speech, Prime Minister David Cameron made it clear that BP should not be exposed to a string of lawsuits from individuals and from the states and, in effect, to “unlimited damages.” Cameron said, “BP is an important company. It is an important company for people’s pensions, it employs thousands of people in the UK and it pays a lot of tax.” He could easily have added, “It is important for Americans, too,” given that 40% of BP shareholders live in the US.

But perhaps the most telling press reference was in the UK’s The Week magazine (June 19, 2010) which alluded to an Indian press article (in The Outlook, New Delhi) demanding: “How dare the Americans bleat about BP?” Both articles focused on the moral outrage still being felt by the people of Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, 26 years after the Bhopal chemical disaster. In particular, the abject failure of fire-breathing US politicians and press moralists to feel a similar outrage over their plight as perpetrated by a US company on their soil; a humanitarian scale way beyond that being experienced in the Gulf of Mexico.

On the night of December 2-3, 1984, the plant at Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) Indian subsidiary experienced a serious leak of gas which led to a powerful explosion and the release of a toxic cloud. Some 2,200 people were killed instantly, and over 3,500 more lost their lives due to toxin-associated injuries in the following months and years. Indian authorities estimate as many as 25,000 deaths could be linked to the Bhopal tragedy.

No one should minimize the scale of the BP Gulf disaster that caused the deaths of 11 workers and a lot of environmental damage. But the national moral rhetoric against BP, appears to be conveniently contrived and it needs to be weighed against what happened to the American company Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical Corporation, which took it over in 2001. Neither Union Carbide’s board of directors, nor the board of Dow Chemical, has ever accepted legal liability.

After the Bhopal disaster, Union Carbide’s CEO, Warren Anderson, was arrested and charged in India. But the Reagan administration succeeded in cutting a murky settlement deal with Indian authorities which resulted in all court charges being dropped, a measly $470 million paid out in compensation for all the victims, and Anderson fleeing to the US. Neither Anderson nor any of the American executives of Union Carbide’s parent company have ever faced prosecution.

By amazing coincidence, this month, a Bhopal court, reflecting the notoriously slow Indian justice system, finally convicted seven Union Carbide India ex-employees, including the former chairman of Union Carbide India, for causing death by negligence. The defendants were given 2 years’ imprisonment and fined $2,000, the maximum allowed by Indian law. An eighth defendant died before sentencing. During the case, the executives were proven to have known about 30 major safety hazards in a plant grossly lacking the same safety systems of the US parent company. To date not one employee of the US headquartered company has yet faced legal action over the Bhopal incident.

The people of the Madhya Pradesh region are today still campaigning on the streets and in the courts for justice – and the overturning of what was plainly a reprehensible US-India deal. And they want the US to clean up the chemical mess that Union Carbide left behind at Bhopal. In short, they want a bunch of company execs, beyond their shores, to assume their moral responsibility. Sound familiar?

The simple truth is that BP’s CEO and executives have shown far more moral spine than Union Carbide or Dow Chemical. Clearly BP does have a legal and moral case to answer. Thus far at least, it has appeared more than willing to answer it. Perhaps the American moral rage-aholics – those so quick to adopt the president’s “kick ass” position – might get a sense of proportion between the BP and the Bhopal incidents.

And beyond outrage pretensions nobody should be forgetting that energy and chemical production, so vital to the world we live in, are never devoid of danger. But a measured response to horrible accidents should be exactly that, measured.