That sort of holds them responsible. It doesn't do anything to raise money to pay for the disaster. It leaves the owners of BP holding a lot of equipment and buildings they can't use, so they'll sell the company to a liquidation type company that will sell all that stuff to other oil companies.
As far as I can tell BP didn't do anything illegal or unusual in setting up their offshore well, and offshore drilling was and is legal. So legislating a corporate death penalty would be a pretty arbitrary form of punishment. Now that the disaster has occurred the only thing left to do to BP is make sure that litigation against them has a fair chance of success. That includes litigation from affected large businesses, from classes of affected people and small businesses, from the Federal EPA, state EPAs, and probably from Mexican and Cuban concerns as well. If BP can survive fair payouts to all these parties it lives -- if not, it goes the way of SCO.
If BP can't survive fair payouts to all affected parties then it was not sufficiently capitalized and/or insured to undertake offshore drilling. So we'd do well to increase the requirements for capitalization and insurance for offshore drilling to a level ensuring they could probably make fair payouts.
This sounds like common sense. Parties harmed by another party's actions should be compensated, and capitalization/insurance requirements should be sufficient to ensure that this is possible. That's the basic theory behind corporations and limited liability (shareholders are protected personally against litigation and in exchange the corporation must be sufficiently capitalized or insured to handle litigation it might reasonably expect to face). But actually following that would be a radical change from what our government does. How can we know this? Because lately we've seen so many businesses having to be bailed out by the government because they weren't sufficiently capitalized to handle the risk. Even the US automakers, under their bankruptcy settlements, got to essentially write off billions in liability, and they didn't even cause a catastrophic disaster (other than the rise of the American car culture, that is). *Unwilling* creditors were left behind so the *willing* creditors on Wall Street could be paid. To be sure, doing the basic and obvious right thing would send shockwaves through the market. How did we get here?