When we heard that Tony Hayward was scheduled to speak to the World National Oil Companies Congress – a collection of the greats and good of the oil industry – we knew it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
We wanted to challenge him to live up to BP’s slick branding and actually take the company 'beyond petroleum' in practice, rather than just talking it up. Whether it’s a business model that causes disasters like the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, or that drives BP's investment into the Canadian tar sands, the dirtiest oil available, or that assumes that six degrees of climate change is an acceptable price to pay for doing business, it’s clear that BP needs to change.
So imagine our disappointment when gaffe-prone CEO Tony Hayward pulled out from his conference speech late last night. We weren’t going to be able to get his thoughts on BP’s future direction.
But as Tony’s replacement, BP’s chief of staff Steve Westwell, stepped up to start his speech, my colleague Emma stepped out of the audience to deliver the speech that Tony should have given:
“Assembled guests – because BP is incapable of telling you the truth, I’m going to tell you what you need to know.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we need to speed up progress and make a push to end the oil age.
“That means stopping the push for dangerous projects to pump out hard-to-reach oil – like deepwater drilling and the tar sands of Canada. Deepwater drilling risks disasters like the Gulf spill while tar sands means clear-cutting forests and literally cooking the ground below to produce oil. Politicians must make moves to spark an electric car revolution so our cars can run on clean renewable energy.”
Or at least, that’s what she would have said, if she hadn’t been bundled out by security after a couple of lines.
If you wanted to find one place where the oil industry was visible in all of it’s backward-thinking glory, the WNOCC attendance list is a good place to start. Alongside the no-show Tony were the top brass from Shell, the Afghanistan minister of mining, the management teams from Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Gazprom and Halliburton, the ministers of oil from Kuwait and Iraq, and a team of people from Transocean who operated the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig for BP.
Quite a list, although they were missing one delgate in Mohamed Meziane, the chairman and CEO of Sonatrach, the Algerian oil company – he’s been suspended for corruption. It’s tough at the top.
As George Monbiot has written today, the oil industry has been exposing us to unacceptable risks for too long now. It’s time for us to end the oil age - that starts with BP, and goes for the rest of the industry.
We’ve already been overwhelmed by responses to our contest to change the BP logo for the age of Deepwater Horizon – but if we’re going to solve the climate problems we’ve stacked up for ourselves, and make sure there’s never another oil disaster like the one unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll need to change the business model, not just the logo.
