"How Green Is BP?"

            In this article, Darcy Frey investigates the oil and gas company, BP and their claims of being the leading pro-environmental oil company. The article was published in 2002, and thus was placed at the beginnings of the environmental campaign. During the late 90’s and early 2000’s, BP radically changed their anti-environmental stance to the purported leader in “earth friendly” resource extraction. He continues to elaborate on this company’s overt rebranding and whether or not if their claims are genuine in the slightest. Given the luxury of reading this article some twelve years after its release, we can see how blatant, and maliciously false these claims have turned out.

            I have always found it to be rather interesting when a company whose sole purpose is the exploitation of some resource and then its foolish use of expending it, to be on the side of the people who are trying to fight them. To the average person this form of obvious hypocrisy is disconcerting, how can anyone involved with this industry’s pattern of systematic destruction of the environment possibly maintain that they purport to help it? How can they live with that much cognitive dissonance? Unless of course they know full well the true results of their actions and any contrary claim is nothing more than an artificial placation to the people of the world. These types of pretentious assertions are nothing new to industries that are involved harmful, but profitable endeavors.

            What worries me the most is that this article had been published over a decade ago, that we as a society knew of their repulsive machinations to manipulate the public and still their was nothing done about. Even worse we all got to witness destruction on such are large scale with the BP oil spill in then late 2000’s and still they continue. If BP or any company in the oil and gas industry were just a single individual, the level of such brazen devastation to both the world and people would result in a hefty prison sentence, or if they were in Texas, the death penalty. But because we give corporations more rights than individuals they hardly suffer more than a meager fine barely making a dent in their yearly net profit. So really, just how green is BP?