The most galling/depressing thing to me is that our population is so overwhelming that if even just 1% of us are bad actors, that's still so many that catastrophes like this (environmental and otherwise) become mathematically inevitable.

No, they are definitely terrified about it happening again. Deepwater Horizon cost BP nearly $70 billion total in direct financial payouts, including $20 billion in fines. $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. This is an enormous amount of money, even for a large corporation such as BP. BP suspended their dividend because of the spill.

That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.

"It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again."

Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).

Would people stop burning oil if there weren't people out there concerned with profit?

Not antagonizing but curious: how else would you do it?

Those aren’t mutually exclusive - time and money were spent to dump tons of dispersants in an effort to actually clean it up. This comes after the Exxon Valdez spill where it was learned that hot water and high pressure hoses to clean areas did more damage than good - the untouched beaches recovered faster via natural breakdown than the beaches that were cleaned. In deepwater, they skipped the scrubbing and cleaning and emphasized dispersants (y’know, solution to pollution being dilution) and it probably hurt the ecosystem more than letting natural enzymes and such take care of it. The bottom line is that every major oil spill clean up effort is an experiment. But sometimes the instinct to “do something” causes more harm than good. Would the public tolerate an “all natural” approach or a light touch of beach cleaning? Probably not, even though there’s good reason to think the ecosystem (exclusive of human needs) may be better served by that.

As another comment pointed out - total cost to BP over this is somewhere in excess of $140BN. It's hardly "free of consequence".

I think you're reading the wrong motivation into this and reaching the wrong conclusion.

This behavior, being skeptical and precise, is the very thing that makes scientists more trustworthy than the average Joe with his motivated reasoning.

I'm confident that the people working on this would have made the causal claim if they had been able to collect enough data to support it. They may well be working on gathering data to support the causal claim right now.

I'd argue that Three Mile Island was more impactful to American hesitation towards nuclear energy than Chernobyl ever was. By the time Chernobyl happened American nuclear industry was already in a massive panic over TMI

Oil drilling helps oil companies.

Nuclear power threatens oil companies.

We used to talk about replacing transportation fuels and low-carbon shipping (global energy). Now we talk about personal responsibility and rooftop solar (residential electricity). You can find oil company PR slide decks explaining why and how. Greenwashing worked, pushing the renewable ‘debate’ worked. We missed the windows on critical infrastructure change, and seemingly enjoy an unstable chunk of desert dictating global energy, inflation & food prices. <shrug>