It's hard to measure, quantify, and enforce an appropriate response to a corporation doing environmental damage. Our very existence as a species causes environmental damage: We need trees for homes, concrete for roads, gasoline for cars, jet fuel for jets, plastic for [url=http://science.howstuffworks.com/plastic.htm]fucking everything[/url], and so on. Should we punish people for cutting down trees to make log cabins, or for buying them from Home Depot for Christmas holidays? Should we levy bans on goods that use genetic modification to enhance the output of farms? Because if we do, a lot of people are going to starve to death very quickly. Should we punish people who kill animals, even if its for food or to control pest populations that would otherwise overwhelm the environment?

Yes, it sucks that oil is occasionally spilled. Yes, the companies that do that should pay for it in some manner. Do I have any idea how to do that? No. I'm not going to feign super intelligence or something else along those lines. Hell to write this post it required several hundred miles of network cables to send this data--which is using electricity to be produced--down a line to a server that is probably raping an electricity bill somewhere.

It's the price of industrialization. Without it, though, none of us would be having this conversation, and a lot more of us would be already dead due to some disease or otherwise.

That being said... A monetary fine maybe? How to enforce that, though, and what amount is "fair", is spilling oil in some areas better than in others, how do we make it price point viable for them to continue making a profit... :-\ Because remember, any increased costs thrown on a corporation, will be passed along to the consumer. If it costs 50 cents more to make a certain brand of toy for example due to new safety laws or otherwise, that 50 cent cost will be passed along to the people buying it, because the stockholders in that company sure as shit won't be happy with the bottom line getting screwed.

Bah. Too hard to think of a clear answer. Issue is not black and white. Needs further thought.