Behind the spin, the oil giants are more dangerous than ever

The green rebranding of Shell and BP is a fraud. Far from switching to biofuels, it’s drilling and devastation as usual

For a company that claims to have moved “beyond petroleum”, BP has managed to spill an awful lot of it on to the tundra in Alaska. Last week, after the news was leaked to journalists, it admitted to investors that it is facing criminal charges for allowing 270,000 gallons of crude oil to seep across one of the world’s most sensitive habitats. The incident was so serious that some of its staff could be sent to prison.

Had this been Exxon, the epitome of sneering corporate brutality, the news would have surprised no one. But BP’s rebranding, like Shell’s, has been so effective that you could be forgiven for believing that it had become an environmental pressure group.
These companies have used the vast profits from their petroleum business to create the impression that they are abandoning it.

p>Shell’s practices look even worse. Though the flaring of gas from oil wells in Nigeria was banned in 1969, it is still burning hundreds of millions of cubic feet a day, wasting a precious resource and producing more carbon emissions than everyone else in sub-Saharan Africa put together. The surrounding communities are plastered with sticky soot. In April, Shell was ordered by a court in Lagos to stop the flaring, but does not intend to do so until 2009. It has also been fined $1.5bn for polluting the Niger delta, but won’t pay pending its appeal.

Last year, Shell took five men from the Bog of Erris in Ireland to court for refusing to allow its high-pressure gas pipeline to cross their lands. They were jailed for 94 days. Green groups have begged it not to extract oil from the seas around Sakhalin Island, off the east coast of Siberia, where a spill could wipe out the world’s last 100 western Pacific grey whales, but it won’t back down. To boost its reserves, it has just invested another $2bn in extracting petroleum from oil sands in Canada. It would be hard to devise a more polluting business.

Both companies are cleverer than they used to be. They have stopped pretending that climate change does not exist or that no one ever gets hurt by their projects. Shell even publishes a list of its recent convictions. But this doesn’t mean they have stopped spinning.

Guardian