- BP popularized the notion of a so-called "carbon footprint" in the public consciousness. It was the 'environmental oil brand'...
- As do most ideas of the hard left, the results punished the innocent and rewarded a bloodthirsty criminal mob. A mob which happens to reside in the US White House.
- 6/19, "BP has spent the last decade rebranding itself as Beyond Petroleum in order to make out that it doesn’t do anything so disgusting and immoral as plundering Mother Gaia of her dwindling supplies of precious black blood.
- As Patrick Hayes argues in a brilliant article at Spiked, this is not the fault of BP’s beleaguered CEO Tony Hayward, but of his fantastically wrong-headed predecessor Lord Browne of Madingley.
Under Browne’s stewardship, BP became the first multinational oil company
- to accept a causal relationship between increased carbon emissions and global warming.
- In 2005 it famously developed a carbon footprint calculator for use on its website.
According to Mathis Wackernagel, executive director of the Global Footprint Network, the media campaigns around
- BP’s calculator played an important part in establishing the notion of a ‘carbon footprint’ in popular consciousness.
As a result, BP, the world’s second-largest oil company, came to rank high on a wide range of the ‘key performance indicators’ so beloved by companies. It was lavished with awards, including a gold ‘Effie’ at the American Marketing Association awards. Brand research revealed that BP was seen as the most environmental oil brand, and BP’s brand awareness rose from four per cent in 2000 to 67 per cent in 2007. It has been claimed that the rebranding generated considerable increases in sales for BP. In 2007, Business Week speculated whether the AA risk rating awarded to BP by credit agency Innovest was a result of its commitment to invest $8 billion in renewables.
Funny to remember how Browne was revered in so many profiles of the era as the kind of
- modern, touchy-feely, visionary boss all go-ahead companies should emulate.
What we can now recognise is that Browne did about as much for BP’s unfortunate shareholders
- as Kenneth Lay did for Enron’s.
Had BP spent a fraction of the budget it has
- dedicated to greenwashing (its 2001 rebranding alone cost $200 million; it has
- squandered further millions on solar and wind power)
on doing the job its supposed to do – ie drilling for oil as safely and efficiently as is reasonably possible in so risky business; definitely not cutting corners –
- the Gulf Oil disaster would almost certainly have never happened.
Exxon gets a lot of stick from the green movement. But its safety procedures are much more stringent than BPs. (Hat tip: Tom Blanton)
And while we’re on the subject of the warped, self-destructive tactics of eco-zealots, lets not forget the disastrous role America’s
- Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has
- played in all this.
Thanks to the EPA’s bizarre sense of ecological priorities, the US government initially
- turned down an offer from the Dutch
to provide 4 oil skimmers capable of scooping up 146,000 barrels of spilt oil per day.
The Dutch offered to fly their skimmer arm systems to the Gulf 3 days after the oil spill started. The offer was apparently turned down because EPA regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.
This crazy decision has since been rescinded. But as I’ve argued before, for
- Obama and his eco-fascist chums in the global green movement,
the more damage this disaster is allowed to do to the image of Big Oil and Big Carbon the better.
- For them this crisis isn’t a disaster at all. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime."
6/19, UK Telegraph, J. Delingpole, "The real villain of the gulf oil-spill disaster: not BP but PC" via Tom Nelson
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