<nettime> Viridian Note 00119: BP Amoco's Glasnost

[Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>]

      [orig to Viridian List <viridian@fringeware.com>]

Key concepts:  big oil, perestroika, Sir John Browne,
greenhouse emissions, BP Amoco, public relations

Attention Conservation Notice:  It's an ambitious and 
highly capable energy-industry CEO engaged in climate PR 
spin.

Link:  January 2000 WIRED.  "The Future Gets Fun Again," 
one of the weirdest and most antic WIRED issues ever 
published.  Note spectacular graphic on pages 88-89, 
beautifully illustrating a work of relentless Viridian 
agitprop by Michael McDonough and Bruce Sterling.

Link:  NEWSWEEK January 1, 2000, page 68.  "Learning to 
Love Obsolescence."  Emersonian musings by the Pope-
Emperor as he gamely clutches a large chunk of extinct 
technology in the executive suites of IBM.  See also page 
68 on climate change.

Link: http://www.sanebp.com
http://www.bpamoco.com
http://www.bpamoco.com/_nav/hse/index_climate.htm

Source: Newsweek, December 1999.

(((It has been remarked that BP Amoco's policies "sound 
like Greenpeace had invaded the executive suite."  In 
point of fact, Greenpeace *has* invaded BP Amoco's 
executive suite.  In response, BP Amoco, in the person of 
its Gorbachevian leader Sir John Browne, has launched a 
vigorous "charm offensive.")))

"None of Us Lives in a Vacuum"

by John Browne, Chief Executive Officer of BP Amoco.

  "The oil and gas industry is in the middle of a 
revolution, one taking place on five or six different 
fronts.  After 70 years with an almost unchanged corporate 
structure among the major oil companies, the industry has, 
in the last two years, seen four major transformations in 
the United States and Europe, and a host of smaller 
linkups. (...)

     "These mergers and acquisitions don't constitute an 
endgame; the industry is not shrinking.  Demand for oil is 
12 percent higher than it was a decade ago.  Gas demand is 
30 percent higher.  And with nuclear developments again in 
question it seems certain that hydrocarbons will meet the 
bulk of the world's new energy demand for the forseeable 
future.  The geography of the industry is changing, too.  
Incremental demand for energy comes predominantly from 
Asia, driven by population growth and rising living 
standards.

     "We are seeing a new balance of fuels take shape.  
The demand for natural gas has doubled since the early 
1970s and is set to double again by 2020, partly because 
gas is more environmentally friendly == for equivalent 
electricity output, gas generates less than half the 
emissions produced by coal.  

     "As part of China's celebrations of the 50th 
anniversary of the revolution, the Chinese adjusted the 
use of some of the coal-fired industrial plants around 
Beijing. In a city that is often covered by a blanket of 
smog, people could see what they were celebrating.

    "That story is just one example of a new set of 
expectations.  People want energy, because energy means 
liberty, mobility, growth and the chance to improve living 
standards.  But people want a clean environment, too.  Yet 
at the moment consumers and government seem to be in 
denial.  They refuse to accept their own responsibility 
for increasing costs to the quality of life which are 
imposed when we all demand more.  And they deflect that 
responsibility onto the oil and gas sector."

     (((I'm in extensive agreement with the "denial" part, 
but the oil and gas sector is held responsible by 
consumers and government because the industry owns and 
maintains the means of production.  We consumers are 
pulling the nozzles and flipping the switches, but we're 
extensively and deliberately divorced from the day-to-day 
realities of running derricks and supertankers.  If we all 
had desktop oil refineries, then the energy industry would 
have a very different structure of responsibility.)))

     "There are no simple and easy answers to global 
warming, traffic congestion, air quality and waste 
disposal.  Oil companies can't solve these problems on 
their own.  But we can make a contribution as part of a 
common effort.  We all need to take measures that 
transcend the apparent == and unacceptable == trade-off 
between better living standards and pollution.

     "Take climate change.  I disagree with those in our 
industry who believe that the only answer to climate 
change is to question the science, deny responsibility and 
ignore reality. (((Viva!  VIVA!  VIVA!)))  Of course, the 
science is provisional; there are many things we do not 
know.  But it is an undeniable truth that people link 
energy to pollution, that they fear for the environmental 
future and that they believe companies should raise their 
aspirations.  We did some polling; when asked whether they 
associate energy with progress or pollution, almost 40 
percent of respondents say the first association is with 
pollution. But 80 percent believe that business has the 
ability and the responsibility to find answers."

     (((Well, it's the truth as far as it goes, and it's 
good of him to 'fess up to it.  I would have liked to hear 
a little more about the climatic reality, and a little 
less about the polling.  It's not a problem of aspiration, 
it's a problem of respiration.  Thirty percent more CO2 in 
the atmosphere can't be wished away with better corporate 
public relations.  Energy will mean "liberty, mobility, 
growth" as well as "progress" only when energy no longer 
pollutes.)))

      "We can't afford to disappoint them.  That's why, in 
a speech at Yale last year, I committed BP to reducing our 
own emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 10 percent 
from a 1990 base by the year 2010.  Because our business 
is growing rapidly, that is a reduction of more than 40 
percent from the level we would have reached if we took no 
action at all.  And it's why we've pledged this year to 
introduce new clean fuels in at least 40 cities around the 
world by the end of the year 2000."

     (((This seems to me like a profoundly effective 
public-relations move.  It works because we are all 
thoroughly implicated in carbon abuse.  A small scrim of 
dissidents exist, but the masses as a whole are mortgaged 
to combustion in the way that Soviets were to mass 
factories and collective farms.  So: have *you* reduced 
your *own* emission of greenhouse gases "by 10 percent 
from a 1990 base"?  You haven't done that?  Then by what 
conceivable right can you criticize those noble souls at 
BP Amoco?  You should sit down and shut up!)))

   "But our decisions on global warming and clean fuels 
also taught us a larger truth.  We learned that for a 
company like ours == indeed, for any international company 
with a large number of highly skilled employees == top 
management can no longer expect to make policy in a 
vacuum.  When we accepted that, on the evidence, global 
warming was a true problem, we did so in  part because our 
own employees had told us that we couldn't go on living in 
denial.  Their families, and their children in particular, 
believed we were *part* of that problem.  

    "Our staff found it intolerable that we seemed to be 
on the wrong side of a fundamental issue.  I have never 
received so many personal e-mails from BP Amoco employees 
as I did after announcing our new policy.  A few weeks 
later we asked all our teams for their direct support, so 
that we could identify ways of reducing our own emissions.  
I got hundreds of pages of e-mail from people all around 
the world with detailed practical suggestions."

    (((Hurray, hurray, not just for the BP-Amoco children 
== tomorrow's little consumers == but for the engineers 
who dare to have a conscience and some foresight.

     (((There must be Viridian readers out there who 
cynically believe that oil company personnel (hundreds of 
thousands of technically educated people all over the 
planet) are terminally afflicted with  false-
consciousness.  They somehow want to see their own 
children stew in a Greenhouse world.  Nobody's eager to 
reform themselves out of a job, admittedly. But it's other 
wrong and evil to deny other human beings any capacity for 
intelligence and reform.  What Browne says about his 
industry's 70-year stagnation is true.  And the revolution 
he describes is a real one.  The fate of the giant oil and 
gas enterprise is up for grabs to an extent unseen in many 
decades. 

     (((When Maid Marian showed up in Sherwood Forest, 
cynics would have hanged her for being an aristocrat.  If 
we want energy perestroika instead of a Greenhouse Terror, 
we have to wisely exploit the growing disorder inside the 
castle.   Sir John says he wants to reform; he's taking 
concrete steps to reform; he's deliberately and publicly 
cut himself out of the Greenhouse-denial pack; so he 
deserves a hearing and should be taken at face value.  
Certainly the Greenhouse-denial industry is in no doubt 
about his intentions:  they hate, fear and vilify John 
Browne for daring to break ranks.)))

    "The old order, symbolized by the remote and arrogant 
corporation, convinced of its own virtue and 
invincibility, is passing.  The new order is neither 
comfortable nor predictable; but it reminds us that 
companies, however big, are simply servants of society.  
We exist only because somebody wants to buy what we 
provide.  In a complex world, the companies that thrive 
will be those that can combine the traditional strengths, 
like a strong financial balance sheet and a great 
portfolio of assets, with something new: the capacity to 
listen and to learn."

(((Hear hear.  God bless us every one.  Merry Xmas.)))

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CURRENTLY GENERATING 1,500 WATTS IN
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