Fines from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill are being used to help save the lives of sea turtle hatchlings.

Disoriented by the lights of civilization, the newly-hatched turtles often blunder into traffic instead of the sea. By retrofitting nearby homes and businesses with LED lights, however, the risk to the baby tutles is dramatically reduced, because they operate on a frequency the hatchlings can't see.

From Scientific American:

A lot of the money to fund these retrofits comes out of criminal penalties from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which killed or otherwise affected an estimated 100,000 sea turtles. The first two years of the STC’s retrofit efforts were financed by the Recovered Oil Fund for Wildlife (which itself was created with money from Deepwater owner British Petroleum); the organization just received additional funding from the similar Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund, both of which are administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

This restitution money, Godfrey says, "has allowed us to actually work with private property owners to go ahead and convert their lights, to work with them, to supplement the money they’re spending. We match money they put in. In some cases where the problem is particularly heinous and the property owners just don’t have the money to fix the problem, we can actually go in and do it for them. That funding mechanism, which has been made available following the spill, has allowed a lot of major progress on this issue."

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