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http://spewingforth.blogspot.com/2006/08/bp-beyond-believable.htmlSunday, August 13, 2006
PERMALINK Posted 1:01 AM by Jordan
BP: Beyond Believable
As we've noted several times before, the giant oil company, BP (formerly British Petroleum and BP Amoco), seems to be having its share of problems lately, killing workers, leaking huge amounts of oil in Alaska, and failing to maintian its pipelines (as well as a little fraud and good old fashioned air pollution thrown in. This is despite its nine-year old attempt to change its image to becoming a more environmentally conscious BP -- Beyond Petroleum.
New York Times business writer Joe Nocera notes that despite BP's attempt to promote its green image hasn't exactly fooled most environmentalists:
When you talk to BP officials about that commitment, they trot out a host of examples to prove that it’s not just public relations. BP owns a big solar energy company. It has significantly lowered its greenhouse-gas emissions. It has a thriving biofuels program. And it is investing $8 billion over 10 years in alternative energy, like solar and wind power (though it includes natural gas as an alternative energy, which strikes me as a stretch).
Yet at its core, BP remains an oil company, and no matter how much it says it wants to create more environmentally sensitive sources of energy, its basic task is still to stick holes in the ground in search of hydrocarbons. The company recently spent nearly $4 billion building a huge pipeline stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. But it also asked a leading environmental group, the World Wildlife Federation, to act as an environmental consultant on the project; Mr. Dean, the BP spokesman, told me I should talk to someone at the W.W.F. if I wanted confirmation that BP was one of the environmental good guys.
So I did. But James Leaton, a senior policy adviser at the federation, didn’t exactly sound thrilled about how the collaboration had turned out. “In our view,” he said, “there are some sensitive places where you just shouldn’t go. BP went there anyway. They were open to some small changes, but we were fairly disappointed. Whenever you spoke to them, their view was about deadlines and budgets. Ours was about protecting the environment.” In other words, BP acted like the oil company it is.
Environmental groups, in fact, can be fairly scathing in their appraisal of BP. In 2002, Greenpeace awarded Lord Browne an Earth Day “Oscar” for Best Impression of an Environmentalist. “They are just not clean,” Melanie Duchin of Greenpeace told me. “And no amount of rebranding can make them clean.” She made the obvious point that when you make upwards of $20 billion in profit, as BP did in 2005, an $8 billion alternative fuels program — over 10 years! —isn’t exactly a bet-the-company move.
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