For more than a decade, BP had flooded the media with advertisements showing solar panels, windmills and waving fields of grass without a drop of oil in sight. The company adopted a stylized green sun as its logo and rolled out the slogan "Beyond Petroleum."
But when the company's Deepwater Horizon offshore well began blowing tens of thousands of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico each day, no outlay of advertising dollars could change the cold, hard facts: BP still derived more than 99 percent of its revenues from gas and petroleum.
The BP blowout was the swan song of an old style of green marketing, one in which companies could make green claims and hope that no one would look over their shoulders.
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BP is by far the dirtiest oil and gas company operating in North America, and yet somehow managed to maintain an image of energy cleanliness up until Earth Day 2010, when the
ReplyDeleteDeepwater Horizon exploded and 11 more employees of BP met their untimely deaths.
I expect BP will eventually pay the largest fines the company has yet paid in response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster, which continues to spew oil and kill everything from sea
life to the regional economy.
Greenwashing facts