The good news: They've successfully capped the oil spill. The bad news: they are only capturing, at best, 8.3% of the oil. Alright! Now here's some other fun facts you may not know about BP:

• The stock market may think BP's lost 29% of it's value, but BP has only spent about a billion dollars on gulf relief efforts so far. That's... not big money. In fact, they are prepared to pay 20 times that in spill related losses and still pay out the same dividends they did last year. My take: BP is now undervalued. I rate it a buy!
• Environmental impact study of a spill on this site was not performed because it was deemed unlikely.
• Amid this crisis, Obama is having trouble getting congress to drop special tax breaks for big oil.
• BP has had an unusually bad history of safety, recently. Really, worst in the industry. You really get the feeling that this is a company that treats safety risks as part of the cost of doing business.
• On paper Big Oil pays roughly 40-50% of their income in taxes, but they manage to shelter most of it offshore perfectly legally.
• The tragedy is not that the government was so desperate that the felt they needed to ask for James Cameron's help, but that BP turned him down! Can you believe it? I mean, he's a hollywood guy with his own fleet of deep-sea diving gizmotrons! Poor guy, will no one let him be the hero? He just want to be a hero like in his movies!
• You think this hurts the US? 1/6 of all corporate dividends come from BP in the UK.

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