Four years later, BP’s “net-zero” pledge rings hollow
While BP advertises an “‘and’ not ‘or’” approach to energy, it has dropped its climate commitments in favor of more oil.
Emily Sanders is senior reporter at ExxonKnews.
In February 2020, BP made history as the first Big Oil company to make a “net-zero” pledge — a genre of climate plan that assumes greenhouse gasses can be “balanced” in the atmosphere through carbon sequestration, offsets, and other technologies to achieve “net-zero emissions.” BP announced its “ambition to become a net-zero company by 2050 or sooner,” and decrease oil and gas production by 40% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels.
Since then, Exxon, Shell, and Chevron have joined BP in setting their own “net-zero” targets, aspirations, ambitions and goals. For years, advocates and experts have warned that these plans amount to greenwashing — that they’re not binding, rely on unproven technology to reduce emissions in far-out timelines, and have gone unmatched by actions as companies increase their production and exploration of fossil fuels.
Now, four years after BP’s original net-zero commitment, the oil giant is proving skeptics’ point. Despite its pledge, the company is moving toward producing even more oil and gas while scaling back its targets year after year.
The backslide began last year, when the company appeared to reverse course from its original pledge: it would invest more in fossil fuels while reeling back its target to decrease production from 40 to 25% by the end of the decade. “The conversation three or four years ago was somewhat singular around cleaner energy, lower-carbon energy,” explained BP’s then-CEO, Bernard Looney, at the time. “Today there is much more conversation about energy security, energy affordability,” he said.
BP’s now-CEO, Murray Auchincloss, announced this month that the company would yet again increase oil production in 2024 — and would continue to do so through 2027 — citing a “growing demand for energy right now across the globe.”
That increased demand for energy could have been met by cleaner energy sources like wind and solar — but as oil profits soar, BP has begun ditching its efforts to invest in renewables. In early 2024, BP canceled its major east coast offshore wind project because of “inflation, interest rates, and supply chain disruptions.”
The move coincides with BP’s new “It’s ‘and’, not ‘or’” ad campaign, the latest attempt to convince the public that the oil giant can continue expanding its fossil fuel business while still leading climate solutions. The ad boasts BP’s investments in “producing natural gas with fewer emissions” and sends listeners to a web page claiming that the company is “relentlessly working to reduce emissions, improve products and create new low-carbon businesses.” (Gas is about to overtake coal as the top carbon dioxide emitter in the U.S. power sector, according to new reporting from E&E News.)
As Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson at HEATED point out, BP’s new ads break its 2020 pledge to “stop corporate reputation advertising” — a part of its net-zero commitments, made after advocacy nonprofit ClientEarth brought a legal complaint against the company for misleading advertising in 2019.
This cycle of made and broken promises isn’t new. At this same time last year, Exxon was closing the door on its algae biofuels research after spending millions of dollars advertising the green goop as a climate solution. In 2023, Shell also announced it would produce more oil and gas in spite of its net-zero pledge. A November report from nonprofit InfluenceMap found that Exxon and Chevron use their net-zero goals to promote themselves online while lobbying to undermine emissions standards. And BP itself was one of the first to pull a bait-and-switch after its “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding campaign in 2001, which ran until 2008. The company sold off most of its wind and solar assets a few years later.
BP may never have been serious about its “commitment”: the company has established a pattern of touting climate pledges while making other plans behind the scenes. While the oil giant announced its support for the Paris Agreement in 2017, an internal Operational Performance Review acquired by the House Oversight Committee shows that BP intended to “[s]ignificantly increase development in regions with oil potential.” In January 2020 — a month before making its net-zero pledge — BP was still working to grow its business in fossil fuels while marketing gas as a “partner” to renewable energy and positioning itself as a leader in the energy transition, according to leaked re-branding materials obtained that year by Amy Westervelt at Drilled.
After making its net-zero pledge, BP was still backing at least eight anti-climate lobby groups without disclosing them in transparency reports, an Unearthed and HuffPost investigation found.
The company’s efforts to delay climate action and deceive the public aren’t new, either — dozens of U.S. cities and states are suing BP and other oil majors for sowing doubt and disinformation about the planetary harm they knew their products would cause.
Still, when that first net-zero commitment was announced, some members of the media treated it with credulity. The Washington Post called BP’s pledge “an admission of how profound the change in the oil and gas business has been” and noted that “This isn’t the first time BP has put significant sums into renewable energy.”
“BP… is trying to get ahead of what climate change might force the industry to do anyway,” wrote Steven Mufson, who covers “the business of climate change” for the paper.
BP’s latest unmasking should be a reminder to those who take fossil fuel company marketing at face value: as ever-growing proof of the industry’s decades of climate deception continues to show, an oil company’s word is only just that.
Its clear that the NetZero journey is reaching an end based on reality and common sense.
Here is why..
Many scientists are now saying that the climate change is mainly natural and not a threat that cannot be fixed with a small amount of local adaption.
The alternatives to fossil fuels other than nuclear (that should be accelerated) are not going to work.
Governments based on this will demand prosperity before a costly mitigation process that targets one of the main resources that has enabled us to grow the population and still feed it.. fossil fuels.
The resource sectors are reacting accordingly.. and staying focused on that direction.
Anything else is foolish, and a waste of our resources talent and time.
More at.. A Political New-Year’s Resolution On Climate Change (brainzmagazine.com)
https://www.brainzmagazine.com/post/a-political-new-year-s-resolution-on-climate-change