Since 2001, British Petroleum has billed itself as the most eco-friendly of all energy companies worldwide, paying millions to ad agencies in order to craft a new image as being at the cutting-edge of alternative energy innovation and new resource exploration. The company's green sun logo and sophisticated commercial ads mask a darker reality; despite record profits from alternative energy sources, BP continues to emit carbon pollutants at an alarming rate. Despite the massive spending put down to distance its PR image from American oil companies like Exxon and promote a solar-friendly image with the introduction of the green and yellow sun icon in all their ads, BP remains an oil company committed to expanding its own profits, even if this means continuing to disregard the environment.
British Petroleum, commonly known as BP, is one of the oldest companies in the world, established in 1908, but you would never know it from their slew of sophisticated, captivating new ads. Beginning in 2000, BP launched a major, $200 million public relations ad campaign to rebrand and recast itself as eco-friendly and environmentally conscious, utilizing the widely acclaimed services of the Chicago and London-based PR firm, Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide. (Source Watch). Since 1995 when it resigned from the Global Climate Coalition, an organization of energy companies that sought to undermine the international efforts at the Kyoto treaty, BP has used an intensive television ad campaign to assert its claim that ““We were the first major energy company to publicly acknowledge the need to take steps against climate change.” (BP: “Global Climate Change”). While this is true to an extent, and the company has set ambitious claims that “Our energy efficiency projects have reduced emissions by over 4 million tons since 2001,” (ironically the same year Ogilvy and Mather won a PRWeek “Campaign of the Year” award for product brand development) below the surface BP is anything but “beyond petroleum”. (Source Watch).
Despite the massive spending put down to distance its PR image from American oil companies like Exxon and promote a solar-friendly image with the introduction of the green and yellow sun icon in all their ads, BP remains an oil company committed to expanding its own profits. Facts speak louder than words here; the company’ mild investments in solar energy acquisitions (buying Solarex in 1999 for $45 million) pale in comparison to its immense efforts buying out competitors in the oil industry, spending, for instance, $26.5 billion to acquire ARCO. BP has been expanding, rather than reducing, its oil portfolio, so even statistics like “natural gas is 40% of our portfolio” are misleading, since the portfolio, and the oil percentage of it, is constantly growing. (Source Watch). This shows that while BP is the largest producer of solar energy, it is also very much still operating as an oil company whose main goal is to make a considerable profit. Writing for CorpWatch, researcher Kenny Bruno described the re-branding of BP as the "Beyond Petroleum" company as “perhaps the ultimate co-optation of environmentalists' language and message. Even apart from the twisting of language, BP's suggestion that producing more natural gas is somehow akin to global leadership is preposterous. Make that Beyond Preposterous.” (Source Watch). While the company has claimed that it has reduced its carbon emissions by 8 million tons total since 2001, this is hardly an accurate depiction of the extent to which BP continues to damage the environment with its carbon emissions.
In 2006 the British Guardian paper’s online column, The Observer, noted that “BP's record-breaking £11bn profit… would be instantly transformed into a near £18bn loss once the greenhouse gas emissions from its operations, and from use of its products, are taken into account.” Incredibly, in 2006 alone, BP was responsible for 1.376 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, a colossal 6 percent of the world’s total emissions output. Using a British Treasury model “outlined in the working paper 'Estimating the Social Cost of Carbon Emissions', calculating the impact its energy pollution would have on the environment” would devastate BP's profits. “The company would end up facing a huge £29bn in environmental charges”!
While on the surface BP’s extremely attractive commercials, which target audiences of all nationalities, ethnic groups, and different socio-economic standing, portray an international company dutifully and enthusiastically taking on a role as cutting-edge scientific protector of the planet’s resources, The Observer concludes a far different story. Exposing “the company’s real motive; “BP has spent millions of pounds on a multimedia advertising campaign extolling its green credentials in a bid to ward off a windfall tax on its profits,” “figures calculated by the New Economics Foundation. . . appear to put its 'progressive positioning' in a new light. The calculations would have the same catastrophic effect on the Royal Dutch Shell profits announced earlier this month, the biggest in British corporate history.”
NEF policy director Andrew Simms further smashed BP’s attempts to establish itself as a credible eco-friendly organization when he said, “The way we view economic success in the UK has become a fossil- fuelled fantasy. No accounting system with a hint of common sense would view profiting from the liquidation of a never-to-be-repeated natural asset as a good thing - even less so when it leads to climate chaos.” (The Observer).
Although these articles have shown that BP has not been entirely effective in hiding some less-than-green truths about its practices, and the eventual realization among international journalists that BP was not going as green as it claimed led to sharp criticism from environmental groups, BP remains the largest competitor with American-based oil companies in the world. This is largely due to its immensely successful sustained ad campaign to promote its ‘green image’ as solar, and more recently, natural gas-friendly through an aggressive international TV buyout campaign targeted primarily to people in urban and suburban American, Britain of course, and also China and mainland Europe. The green and yellow sun has become as familiar and omnipresent in American homes as in Britain, and the husband of former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin worked as a field operator on the North Slope of Alaska until 2007.
How is this possible, that a British company, with its ads almost exclusively geared towards a technological, sophisticated, trendy message for an upper middleclass audience, using dominantly British voices in their ads, has been so successful in the United States?
There is no way to describe BP’s television commercials as being anything other than-cutting edge. On its main website, under “The Energy Mix”, BP confidently displays its message to the world: “From energy diversity comes energy security”. Is this a reflection on the post-Great Recession mentality of wanting to spread one’s dependence on natural resources out, much like how we were advised not to consolidate all our capital in one share of investments in company share holdings? A technologically well-informed, upper middle class-friendly approach to a professional, ultra-modern attitude to climate change? Perhaps all these things, and more. While the ads are usually no more than a minute and a half long, this is very long when compared to other oil companies’ ads, such as Gulf or Shell. Recently, BP launched a complex ad linking its environmental policies to maternal fulfillment; in this ad “Beyond”, BP shows an all-encompassing approach to try to draw literally the whole world in and appeal to everyone; there is very much a universalist, be-a-part-of-this-global-movement type approach.
The "Beyond" ad begins with a British male voice: “Beyond darkness there is light.” Continuing with, “Beyond a thorn, there’s a rose”, an image shifts across the screen, flashing a goth, pierced girl with brown hair metamorphosing to a blonde girl with a piercing to a blonde girl with beautiful, lush hair. Gender stereotyping is clear. This ad seems very much geared to women, despite obviously making overtures to a hugely diverse group of other people, young students, scientists, and surfers. The ad’s most captivating, longest scenes are of a woman metamorphosing into someone perceived as attractive and more socially acceptable, the joy of new motherhood, and then the horrific mastectomy and the joy of overcoming breast cancer. At the end, the company reasserts its environmental credentials, linking them, indelibly, with the images designed to captivate female attention; “Beyond darkness, light, British Petroleum, BP”.
Other television ads such as “What size is your carbon footprint?”, and “Do you believe in global climate change” have the same theme of a world united in everyone going about the business of the day, everyone embracing the new, the clean, the efficient; a universal attitude of responsibility and public concern for climate change seems to be reflected in an entirely positive manner. The ads appeal to a professional, highly intellectual, fact-driven society and a sense of common purpose and shared outlook. Confident statistics (such as “Over the next 4 years, we’re planning to implement projects to reduce emissions by another 4 million tons”, ““We were the first major energy company to publicly acknowledge the need to take steps against climate change”, “Shifting to natural gas could reduce emissions by 50%”, and “In just 10 years, natural gas has grown to almost 40% of our energy portfolio”,) are juxtaposed with witty catch phrases such as “We can all do more to emit less”, “What would you ask an oil company?” , and “You live life on the go. Why not live a little better?”
BP has arguably been more successful than any other country in casting its predominantly oil-based interests and investment ventures as not only eco-friendly, but as part of some broader cutting-edge technological, environmental revolution that does not exist. The only revolution is how the world’s largest international oil company managed to establish its image as the organization taking the lead on transformative natural gas and solar energy developments; just seeing their TV ads you would think BP was the most environmentally conscious business in the world. But it is, in fact, a business, and no ad campaign or YouTube inundations can take away from the reality that despite its billions of pounds in profits, BP, regardless of if it’s taken as “British” or “Beyond”, is still very much tied to the “Petroleum” in ‘P’, and BP continues to damage the environment to the point that its ecological and environmental emissions would cost more in fines than the company makes in annual profits. While BP is clearly funding these ad campaigns for profiting itself, indirectly, perhaps the company has fostered a broader awareness of climate change, being such a powerful international institution that garners much attention in media. Maybe its long-term impacts, thus, really are “beyond petroleum.”
Sources - - - Ryan Hunter
1. http://www.bp.com/subsection.do?categoryId=6938&contentId=7050747 BP main page
2. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=BP Source Watch
3. http://www.bp.com/iframe.do?categoryId=9030814&contentId=7056943 BP: The Energy Mix: From energy diversity comes energy security
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/feb/12/oilandpetrol.business Guardian.com.uk The Observer
5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKBKAHdlWbI TV ad: “What size is your carbon footprint?” “We can all do more to emit less.” “Over the next 4 years, we’re planning to implement projects to reduce emissions by another 4 million tons.”
6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZiEMKQMjzg&feature=related TV ad: “Do you believe in global climate change?” ““We were the first major energy company to publicly acknowledge the need to take steps against climate change.” “Our energy efficiency projects have reduced emissions by over 4 million tons since 2001.” “It’s a start.”
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9m7jo5I1GQ&feature=related TV ad: “What would you ask an oil company?” “Natural gas burns cleaner than oil or coal.” “Shifting to natural gas could reduce emissions by 50%.” “In just 10 years, natural gas has grown to almost 40% of our energy portfolio.” “It’s a start.”
8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR8_BtqoVEI&feature=related: “BP: Give life.”
9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV-rLeZMUok&feature=related TV ad: “BP: Unloading Trunk” – “Extra weight in the car costs extra gasoline.” “Losing excess weight. A little less gas. A little better space.” Ending flashing across the screen: “thegreencurve.com”
10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmY2Jq9IjYY&feature=related TV ad: Ogilvy and Mather Chicago: “Keeping Going”.
11. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsPT6ePKPw&NR=1 TV ad: BP: Beyond- British male voice “Beyond darkness there is light.”
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Oil and defense and diplomacy
I don't know whether you encountered this in your research, or to what extent you care about the actual economic behavior of "Western oil companies," but BP and companies like Esso (first Standard Oil, then Standard Oil of New Jersey, then Exxon), Mobil, and Texaco collaborated to such a degree in the first half of this century on marketing, pricing, and sales that they were known as the Seven Sisters. OPEC, though seen negatively in most American eyes because it was and is a cartel, was a direct reaction to a cartel that already existed among BP and major American companies to dominate production in foreign countries and control supply, demand, and pricing. The ability to manage the supply of this crucial natural resource has been both an issue of security and fundamental inequity created by who has power (when OPEC was created, there was a massive redistribution of wealth to nations that were rich in oil but exploited by the Seven Sisters, poor, and lacking independence). I just mention this because not only is the politics of oil and natural resources limited to BP or climate change, but the fundamental distribution of power, wealth, and security in the world. I think it's worthy of discussion for defense and diplomacy.
Reply to Mintaro Oba
Thanks for your post Mintaro!
I didn't know that at all about the Seven Sisters, that's incredible! I knew of all the Western industrialization and how major oil and coal companies in the US monopolized all the business domestically in this country a century ago, but then the major trusts were successively broken up by the Roosevelt and then the Wilson Administrations and complimentary congressional legislation. I didn't know a hundred years ago there was, effectively, a global oil cartel! In modern times of course BP and many American-based oil companies have banded together to try to influence the market against OPEC (i.e. how Saudi Arabia within forty years has gone from one of the world's poorest to one of the wealthiest states but BP and Shell and others have been trying to an extent to offset this phenomenon.)
What's fascinating to me is, as you put it, the "issue of both security and fundamental inequity" and that the consequences of continued politics of oil are not limited merely to competition between companies, but the global trade networks and individual nations that depend on their oil; another relevant matter is the proposed oil pipeline under the Caspian Sea between Turkey and Armenia and the Ukraine, which would effectively cut off Russia...