1115.org

Shame on me for looking to carefully crafted advertising as a cause for optimism.

For several months I’ve been keen to thinking of BP (formerly British Petroleum) as a partial exception to the environmentally-myopic, profit-whoring giant oil companies we’ve come to know and despise. Their latest ad campaign, which chiefly spotlights the subject of carbon usage among individuals, is encouraging to say the least. If nothing else they have been able to say that they are the only energy conglomerate willfully attempting to use the mass media to acknowledge the problem of overconsumption and/or irresponsible energy use.

Unfortunately, while BP is out measuring everybody else’s carbon footprint (mine being 11 tons CO2 per year), they’ve forgotten to measure the giant oil footprint they left in the Arctic Ocean:

the region’s largest oil accident on record has been sending hundreds of thousands of litres of crude pouring into the Arctic Ocean during the past week after a badly corroded BPO pipeline ruptured.
[…]
Exploration Alaska, the BP subsidiary that operates the pipeline from which more than 910,000 litres of oil has leaked, has recently been fined more than $1.2m (£635,000) for its poor environmental safety record. [emphasis added]

Before you go thinking that this is just another example of a company not practicing what they preach, it gets worse. Try as they might to desperately rebrand the BP initials as “Beyond Petroleum”, they’re certainly sinking deeper into the petroleum business:

In the past 20 years, [BP] curtailed diversification efforts into animal feed, chemicals, minerals, and coal, and has acquired oil companies like Standard Oil, Arco, and Amoco. Today, BP is the largest producer of oil and gas in both the North Sea and the United States. BP’s 17,150 service stations—Amoco and BP in the East, Arco in the West—make it the second-largest marketer of gas in the United States. The company is sitting on 19 billion barrels of oil and gas reserves.

Well, 19 billion, minus whatever’s been dumped into the ocean.