BP spent more advertising its green rebrand than on renewable energy itself

Evidence

Despite the airy transcendentalism of BP’s slogan, according to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation BP spent less investing in solar, hydrogen, and wind energy over a six-year period than it did on a two-year advertising campaign to rebrand itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” 8 And so the post-carbon, transcendental vision thing is largely reducible to a self-referential marketing metanarrative. BP did, however, find plenty of funds to help bankroll the Global Climate Coalition, a consortium of mainly Big Oil and Big Auto corporations that opposed U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to lower greenhouse emissions. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 817

Categorization

• SEED: A strong essay hook: measuring ‘greenwashing budgets’ against genuine green investment as the canonical metric of performative corporate environmentalism.