Should oil executives decide how we deal with the climate crisis?
Should oil executives decide how we deal with the climate crisis?
by David Whyte
Yesterday, a group of climate protestors from Fossil Free London disrupted the Queen Mary Energy Law and Climate Institute’s 10 year annual lecture. The lecture, delivered by former BP Chief Executive Lord Browne, saw protestors challenging him on his commitment to climate change. Most in the audience were confused. After all, isn’t Lord Browne one of the ‘good guys’, having made a landmark statement on climate change in 1997 and latterly dedicating much of his professional life to transitioning away from a carbon-based economy?
The protestors interrupted Lord Browne to probe him on his commitment to ending a system in which big oil should continue to profit from fossil fuels. And they asked when oil company executives would “pay up” for the harm they have caused. Indeed, they questioned the legitimacy of Browne projecting himself as a ‘green’ expert in the context of the “millions of victims of climate change” and BP-fuelled conflicts in Iraq, Colombia, West Papua and Palestine.
We hope our colleagues at the Energy Law and Climate Institute don’t mind us using their event to probe a bit deeper, but the protest does prompt us to ask the question: was this disruption unwarranted, or was it an indicator that Lord Browne’s green credentials have come out in the wash?
Way back in 1997, when he was Chief Executive of BP, Browne publicly acknowledged the reality of climate change for the first time, when he made what came to be known as a landmark speech. In the speech he said it was “unwise and potentially dangerous” to “ignore the possibility of catastrophic climate change” , that we all must “take responsibility for the future of our planet” and “take precautionary action now.” In his autobiography Beyond Business: An Inspirational Memoir From a Visionary Leader, Lord Browne reflected on how the speech made him “an environmental activist” at odds with the rest of the industry. But was there really an environmental activist at the head of BP?
The statement had a very interesting effect. BP went from strength to strength, almost doubling its share price in the two years following that speech. It did so largely because John Browne’s new image seemed to resolve an irresolvable dual commitment to producing more oil and ‘being green’. Browne then renamed the company Beyond Petroleum in 2000, proclaiming its transition. The Deepwater Horizon disaster in September 2009 dampened its verve and the name was quietly abbreviated to ‘BP.’ Yet what the company was to transition to was never specified. Indeed, Browne has since acknowledged he always intended the rebranded company would have oil and gas at the core of its operations.
It is such statements that have prompted critics to portray Browne as the ‘Lord of Greenwash.’
Indeed, in recent years, BP has intensified rather than weakened its commitment to producing fossil fuels. In 2020, the company set a goal to reduce its oil and gas output by 35-45% by 2030. In 2023, it downgraded this to 20-30% and last October, it announced the abandonment of this target. BP will still produce 23 times more energy from oil and gas than from renewables by 2030.
Yesterday, BP announced an $8.9b profit for 2024. Whilst profits were down on the previous year, this came in the same year as a 10% increase in shareholder dividend and a $7 billion giveaway in share buybacks. Current Chief Executive Murray Auchincloss ominously promised to “fundamentally reset our strategy…all in service of growing cash flow and returns”. Most likely this means rising production targets and a continued move away from renewables to fund increases in shareholder cash handouts.
According to our research at the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice, annual cash payments to BP shareholders have tripled since the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Now none of this is John Browne’s fault. He has not been at the helm since 2007. But the questions that those protestors asked him yesterday must be answered.
Those questions must be answered because his biography fits the same pattern as other influential figures in the industry: make piles of cash, confess, resign, move on, repeat. After leaving BP as Chief Executive in 2007, his next major role was at Cuadrilla. In fact he was the inaugural Chief Executive of Cuadrilla, a company that was set up with the sole intention of developing ‘fracking’ at 17 sites across Britain, and he promised to do “whatever it takes” to get this hated industry up and running. As a process, fracking uses high-pressure chemical injections to shatter rock formations and extract natural gas. The climate impacts of fracking are claimed to be even worse than oil production because of the amount of methane emissions it produces. It also carries high risk of the toxic pollution of ground water and water supplies and the destruction of eco-systems. Not even the Lord of Greenwash could spin this any other way.
He left in 2015, at a time when it was clear that extended battles with environmental protestors in Sussex and the Fylde coast had made it impossible for the company to make the billions promised by fracking back in 2007. At this time he was installed as Chairman of a new oil and gas company, L1 Energy, owned by the Russian private investment firm, Alpha and reported in the New York Times that he was determined to build an oil company from scratch. He is still listed as Executive Chairman of the company on his parliamentary interests page. Not quite the kind of thing you’d expect from an “environmental activist”, or indeed from the Lord of Greenwash.
It was, however, the Lord of Greenwash that we witnessed being questioned by genuine environmental activists last night. His speech was sponsored by one of his current employers, the growth equity fund General Atlantic. He offered four suggestions – all heavily based on his current role in green finance – as a road map to get us out of this mess. They were all, with the exception of the last, predictable. First, apply the technology which is already available at a much greater scale and second, more state incentives for research and development. Those solutions depend on more big oil and more financial market investment, and he made the case for an expansion that is just as profitable as fossil fuels. Third, educate people about climate, and fourth, find a way to re-plan the economy for the long term. The fourth point is perhaps the most interesting, since here he demanded international action. But he did not come close to demanding the action necessary to strand the assets of the big oil companies and leave the oil in the ground. He is not proposing an international treaty for a moratorium on fossil fuel production, and he is not proposing that the British government intervenes unilaterally on this basis. Rather he is proposing a “new Breton Woods” agreement, a new monetary order which, in his words, must “renew and update the international financial system.”
All fine words, but we have been here before. The concrete suggestions proposed by Lord Browne generally boiled down to untested technologies that the oil and gas industry is willing to invest in precisely because it does not particularly interfere with the production of oil and gas. Indeed some forms of carbon capture and storage both enable more to be produced on a net zero basis and enhance productive efficiency. There is a growing body of scientific opinion showing that our obsession with such technologies is likely to increase rather than reduce emissions.
With the exception of the protestors, this was probably the kind of solution sought by this audience. As well as our academic colleagues, the audience was largely corporate lawyers and green financiers. Unsurprising since the lecture took place in lavish surroundings at the Canary Wharfe headquarters of Clifford Chance, a law firm that not incidentally has facilitated fossil fuel transactions worth $91.07 billion over the last 5 years. According to Law Students for Climate Responsibility, this makes it the world’s second most important fossil fuel facilitating law firm.
Our responsibility as academics is to be very careful about who we place at the centre of our efforts to solve the challenges that face us. Open debate is necessary and this Centres is open to a diversity of viewpoints, including climate protestors. At the same time we should especially vigilant about who gets to make the key decisions and strategies in response to the climate crisis.
Universities are ideally placed to understand if the debate is being shaped by vested interests in listening to the warnings of climate protest groups as well as ‘more-of-the-same’ technical and financial fixes offered by oil executives.