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BP CEO Looney: Booming oil business
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Daniel Leal/AFP
When thinking about the current state of the world, comparisons from the medical field quickly spring to mind.
There is something clearly pathological about what humanity is doing to the planet and the biosphere: the planet is in fever.
We commonly call uncontrolled, destructive growth cancer.
Comparing economic growth and cancer sounds very brutal, even activist, exaggerated, tendentious.
But it is not: the available data shows very clearly that the growth that the world economy has experienced over the past 200 years or so is the carrier wave for the highly dangerous developments that we are dealing with today.
First and foremost, of course, the climate crisis and species extinction.
With our economic activities we are destroying the biosphere.
tumor growth = muscle mass?
Right now we're acting like a bodybuilder suffering from cancer, but happily misinterprets any tumor growth as gains in muscle mass.
Unfortunately, the gross domestic product (GDP) growth measure, which has served as a guideline for the prosperity of nations for many decades, does exactly that: it cannot distinguish between cancer and muscles.
At the moment there is a new push to finally replace the GDP growth measure with one that no longer brings mankind towards the abyss, but actually benefits it.
Because the GDP ignores injustice, environmental destruction, climate catastrophe and other undesirable developments.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres once wrote: »We are destroying nature, but we count it as an increase in our wealth.«
In Germany we call it the »diesel scandal«
Which leads to another category from the clinical realm, this time from psychiatry.
The Canadian law professor Joel Bakan put it this way as early as 2004 in a book and a documentary film based on it: At its core, a modern corporation behaves like a psychopath.
However, the term psychopathy is no longer used in psychology and psychiatry because, like many diagnostic terms, it has become a swear word.
In the fifth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-5) the disorder is called "antisocial personality disorder".
And indeed, the catalog of criteria for this diagnosis reads in part like a description of normal business practices in international corporations.
obstacle to business conscience
For example, the disorder includes "failure to conform to societal norms regarding lawful behavior" and "lying, deception, and manipulation for personal benefit or amusement."
In Germany, for example, we call something like this a “diesel scandal”.
But one could also think of the climate change denial and misinformation campaign of the coal and oil companies, which has been carried out completely consciously for decades at great financial expense.
Generally, antisocial personality disorder is seen as "a pervasive pattern of disregard for consequences and the rights of others."
Such behavior, as Joel Bakan wrote back in 2004, is structurally built into companies that are purely profit-oriented.
It's not because the people who hold managerial positions in big companies are all ruthless psychopaths.
Actions driven purely by the quest for profit automatically produce results that look confusingly similar to those of an antisocial personality disorder.
A conscience is only a hindrance in doing business.
All of humanity will pay
All the big oil companies are also constantly providing examples of this: They are planning to develop huge new oil and gas deposits and to build new pipelines all over the world: in Guyana, in the Gulf of Mexico, in Libya, in Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa.
This is something that neither the climate nor humanity can cope with.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently called for an end to “the bottomless greed of the fuel industry and its supporters”.
He continued with a “special message” for the fossil industries: “If you don't have a credible net-zero emissions trajectory, with 2025 and 2030 targets affecting all of your operations, you should be out of business .«
The incredible profits of the oil companies
However, above a certain size, companies behave automatically inconsiderately and potentially criminally.
There are an incredible number of examples of this.
The oil company BP delivered a current one this week.
Business is great for BP and the other big oil companies: Shell reported annual profits of around $40 billion for 2022 in early February, which represents a doubling of profits from the previous year.
In 100 years of company history, the company has never earned so much in a single year.
ExxonMobil made even more profit in 2022, namely $56 billion, Chevron came to $37 billion.
Just in case you're wondering where inflation is actually coming from.
According to Reuters, the oil companies in the world known as “Big Oil” earned (not turned over) 219 billion dollars in total in the war year 2022.
The climate catastrophe is very lucrative.
For some.
Pump even more out of the ground
BP -- nearly $28 billion in annual profit -- responded to its massive earnings with an announcement that fits perfectly with the disruption picture outlined above.
CEO Bernard Looney stated that he would now cancel his own climate targets.
Originally, BP wanted to reduce its emissions by 35 to 40 percent by 2030.
Now that the money is bubbling up, it should only be 20 to 30 percent.
That's what governments and society around the world want," Looney said.
But the climate crisis will not thank us for suppression.
Physics doesn't care about the marketability of products, they don't make exceptions and they don't grant delays.
Even investors are getting queasy
Interestingly, even many BP investors are ahead of the CEO.
According to Bruce Duguid of the asset manager Federated Hermes , which manages more than 600 billion dollars in assets, the announcement that it would like to extract more raw CO₂ after all “raises a significant question of corporate governance”.
After all, a large proportion of investors would have fully supported the previous reduction targets just nine months ago.
So even those who make money off anti-social business practices are now feeling remorse.
Investors also have children and grandchildren.
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Christian Stoecker
We are the experiment
Publisher: Karl Blessing
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As long as the optimization goal of the fossil industries - earning as much money as possible from the sale of raw CO₂ - remains unrestricted and legal, as long as there is a market for their toxic products, their behavior will not change.
It is, within the narrow, narrow-minded, in this case: suicidal laws of the market, completely rational.
BP is a money-making organization, nothing more, nothing less.
A corporation has no conscience.
Consequently, we should stop including lobbyists from these sectors in decisions about future national and international regulations as soon as possible.
It is essential to prevent the next COP climate conference from being chaired by the head of an Arab oil company of all people.
The federal government should do everything possible to prevent this.
There can be no »balance of interests« with companies whose business model is in contradiction to the continued existence of civilization.
You don't ask the anti-social dealer how he would like the drug legislation of the future to be.