Big BP Announcement 9/14 Blahblah New Sustainable Direction Blahblah 2050 Carbon Free Blahblah
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BP plans to unveil further details of the company’s climate strategy at a virtual investor meeting on Monday September 14th. The company’s history of false-starts on climate action and misleading clean energy advertising provides plenty of fodder for justified skepticism. So, how shall we assess their climate claims this time around?
n February, BP CEO Bernard Looney announced to great fanfare the company’s aims to bring carbon emissions from the oil and gas it produces and brings to market to net-zero by 2050 (with lesser ambitions for the oil and gas BP buys from other producers and then markets). In early August, Looney further pledged that by 2030, BP would cut its oil and gas production by 40% below 2019 (pre-pandemic) levels, increase its renewable electricity generation from ~2.5 gigawatts (GW) today to a whopping 50 GW and stop exploring for fossil fuels in new countries. “Today is about a vision, a direction of travel,” Looney said at the February rollout. “I appreciate you want to see more than a vision. We don’t have that for you today, but we will in September. The direction is set. We are heading to net zero. There is no turning back.”
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Under Browne’s leadership, the company rebranded as “Beyond Petroleum” and made a short-lived effort to expand its investments in renewable energy before returning to its roots as single-minded fossil energy giant paying lip-service to addressing climate change while pushing back on climate policy. And — as this year’s 10th anniversary of the explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and ensuing massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico reminds us — also enabling a culture and practice of serious negligence on environmental health and safety.
Make no mistake, BP’s ambitious new climate claims justly deserve our attention. Slashing oil and gas production 40% by 2030 would be a big deal. But too often, fossil fuel companies’ pledges of future climate action are met with unquestioning acceptance and unwarranted fulsome praise. A recent piece in the Washington Post, for example, simply takes Bernard Looney at his February press-statement word that the “oil giant BP Plc is planning to become a net-zero emissions company by 2050.” Bloomberg Green’s headline on BP’s February announcement breathlessly reads: “BP Sets Bold Agenda for Big Oil With Plan to Eliminate CO2.” (With more well-deserved skepticism, a Fortune article in August asked, “Is oil giant BP finally ready to ‘think outside the barrel’?”)
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https://cleantechnica.com/2020/09/12/is-bp-finally-committing-to-ambitious-climate-action-or-about-to-fool-us-twice/