At the beginning of this week, I did a blog entry looking at a court hearing into the proposed $50 million penalty for BP over its negligence that resulted in the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 workers. The outcomes should not pass without comment.

The bereaved appeared in court and told Judge Lee Rosenthal that the settlement between BP and the US government be thrown out. "This is no deterrent to BP, nor does it provide incentive for BP to take the kind of action necessary to prevent more deaths," said David Senko, a contractor who lost 11 workers at Texas City, reported The Guardian.

And BP's problems continue with reports of a new US federal investigation into the death of another BP refinery worker. William Joe Garcia was killed when a metal lid blew off a pressurized water filtration unit and hit him and investigators want to find out why there was an unexpected build-up of pressure under the lid.

The question is how it is that a company that has been leading the fight against global warming could also be so cavalier with safety that it borders on the criminal. How do we explain this double standard?

It's a point examined by Bloomberg's Ann Woolmer who gives a harrowing account of this week's court proceedings. "It is fine to credit BP for plowing money into solar cells and bio fuels," Woolmer writes. "It is good that it said early on that manmade carbon emissions might speed up global warming. But surely it is possible to figure out how to take the carbon out of gas and coal at a plant in Scotland, for example, and still have the resources to shut down a deteriorated waste stack in Texas before it explodes. And what would it have taken to locate a workers' trailer a safe distance from the stack? Investing in windmills is lovely. But shouldn't the company be more concerned about maintaining whatever old-fashioned equipment it has so as not to pollute the waters of Alaska's North Slope?"