The powers that be in the USA continue to vilify BP over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Whilst BP’s initial response may have been a tad slow off the mark and their chief executive, Tony Hayward, not perhaps the slickest communicator the company could have put forward, the fact is that if it hadn’t been a BP disaster it would have been someone else’s.

By that I mean that the USA has for too long been a vociferous consumer of energy, paying scant regard to the pollution it generated nor the fact that to supply it the oil companies were having to explore in and produce from increasingly challenging areas.

Make no mistake, drilling and producing in deep water, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or anywhere else, makes putting a man on the moon look technologically pretty simple. The American people seem to have forgotten that - if they ever realised it - and with those technological challenges come risks.

I have very sympathy with the individual fishermen and others on the east coast of the USA who are being affected by the spill. No doubt in the fullness of time BP will reimburse these people.

But I have no sympathy at all with the inhabitants of the USA in general. Not until they wake up and realise that there is no such thing as ‘easy oil’ anymore. They need, more than anyone else in the world, to mend their ways.

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