Has BP finally gone beyond greenwash? The oil giant has rolled out some eye-catching pledges lately – most notably an unprecedented proposal to cut its oil and gas production by 40 per cent by 2030, in order to reach ‘net-zero emissions’ by 2050. The news has earned BP a heap of positive press – and a share-price bounce. But all is not quite what it seems.
To start with, that supposed 40-per-cent production cut drops to 28 per cent once you include the oil and gas extracted via BP’s partnership with the notoriously spill-happy Russian state oil company Rosneft. That’s less than a 3-per-cent reduction per year, which simply isn’t good enough – figures from financial thinktank Carbon Tracker suggest we need to at least halve global fossil-fuel use by the early 2030s, and phase the stuff out completely by the 2040s – and that’s for a 50-per-cent chance of keeping warming at 1.5°C. To have a better chance, which takes account of tipping points and feedback loops, we should aim to cut significantly faster. Yet BP still plans to sell oil and gas in 2050, well beyond the point of climate safety, and is using promises of unproven and uneconomic ‘carbon capture’ technologies to balance out its net-zero numbers.
