We've been skeptical of BP's green marketing claims all along, but reports out of London today confirm that BP's new motto should be "Back to Petroleum".

The Guardian reports:

 

BP  has shut down its alternative energy headquarters in London, accepted the resignation of its clean energy boss and imposed budget cuts...

....BP Alternative Energy was given its own headquarters in County Hall opposite the Houses of Parliament two years ago and its managing director, Vivienne Cox, oversaw a small division of 80 staff concentrating on wind and solar power. But [Cox] – BP's most senior female executive, who previously ran renewables as part of a larger gas and power division now dismantled by Hayward – is standing down tomorrow.

This comes alongside huge cuts in the alternative energy budget – from $1.4bn (£850m) last year to between $500m and $1bn this year, although spending is still roughly in line with original plans to invest $8bn by 2015.

Earlier this year the company shut down solar operations in the US and Spain.

Meanwhile, BP is still moving into more destructive oil operations, such as Canada's tar sands.

 

 

Yesterday, Climate Progress called out the New York Times for running a front page ExxonMobil advertisement.

As Climate Progress points out:

"Needless to say — or, rather, in this case, needful to say — while today’s car has lower emissions of urban air pollutants thanks to government regulation, today’s car has, if anything, higher emissions of greenhouse gases, which threaten the health and well-being of the next 50 generations.  And needful to say, ExxonMobil has done more than just about any other company to undermine efforts to achieve the greenhouse gas regulations that could lower those emissions."

"ExxonSecrets details the millions of dollars that the company has shoveled to fund the disinformation campaigns of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, all of which continue to advance unfactual anti-scientific attacks as I have detailed recently (see posts on Heritage and CEI and AEI). Chris Mooney wrote an excellent piece on ExxonMobil’s two-decade anti-scientific campaign. A 2007 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report looked at ExxonMobil’s tobacco industry-like tactics in pushing global warming denial (see “Today We Have a Planet That’s Smoking!”). So it is especially egregious that the New York Times would take money to publish this disinformation on their front page."

Please email the NYT at nytnews@nytimes.com about this egregious ad and/or email its public editor at public@nytimes.com to explain you are “concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity.”

As you may know by now, Greenpeace released a report June 1 called Slaughtering the Amazon, which demonstrated the connections between the cattle sector and deforestation. Today we saw one of our first major victories as Brazilian retailers banned meat from cattle that were raised in deforested areas in the Amazon.

As the Reuters piece points out:

"CBD, Wal-Mart and Carrefour will ban beef purchased from farms accused by the Para state prosecutors office of deforestation and will demand documents from slaughterhouses related to the transit of the cattle, Abras said.

The companies also intend to conduct an independent audit to assure that meat that they buy is not from deforested areas."

Here in the US we are not a large importer of Brazilian beef that could be driving deforestation in the Amazon but we do suspect ties to US companies using leather from illegal cattle ranching in the Amazon.  While we focus on the campaign to get Nike, Timberland, Adidas, and others to prove the leather in our shoes is not from destroyed Amazon, our colleagues in Brazil are keeping the pressure on the their domestic meat sector which is the other half of the cattle-related deforestation equation.

- Lindsey