Trump just proved that battle over the climate crisis will be won by lobbyists

We’re told change is afoot at BP, and there are plans to expand the company’s climate targets. Except that there’s a name for that sort of thing – public relations

Big oil has woken up to the fact that the climate crisis is becoming part of the zeitgeist. People are seeing the pictures from Australia, reading the reports about glaciers shrinking and taking on board what the scientists have been saying for years now. There’s an growing recognition of the need to take action if our children are to have a world to live in that’s actually, well, liveable. This presents a challenge to what I sometimes refer to as the "carbon industry" – oil, gas and natural resource companies.

In public, some of those businesses have been attempting to portray themselves as part of the solution rather than being at the root cause of the increasingly ominous things that have been happening as a result of a rapidly heating climate. We’ve had executives’ bonuses linked to climate change targets (at Shell, for example), lots of glossy ads about the money they’re spending on research into cleaner fuels (they all do this) and a big, big PR push on green issues. But have they really changed at all?

Unearthed, Greenpeace's news and investigations offshoot, has just released a report on BP charging that the UK oil giant “lobbied Donald Trump to weaken climate safeguards on new oil and gas projects”. The American president blames the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a cornerstone of US environmental regulation, for holding back the major infrastructure projects he’s fond of; roads, new oil pipelines and the like.

Significant changes have been unveiled that would make it easier for US federal agencies to approve projects without paying due regard to their impact on the climate. It’s a response to Federal judges delaying projects on the grounds that their environmental impacts haven’t been properly assessed, which is exactly what judges are supposed to do when governments play it fast and loose with the law.

Over to Unearthed – which says it has seen documents revealing that BP, alongside the powerful American Petroleum Institute, actively lobbied for the watering down of the legislation under the guise of “streamlining” its requirements or “modernising” a 40-year-old legislative act. It has published and linked to some of those documents in the report. So there’s evidence that BP attended a round table meeting convened by the API at the White House and a subsequent letter from BP supporting “updating and clarifying” NEPA regulations.

Which would be fine and dandy if the Trump administration’s aim in “updating” and “streamlining” NEPA involved anything other than weakening it. That’s before we get to the vexed subject of “exclusions” which led Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island to provide some fairly harsh comments about the light all this casts on the claims by big oil to care about the environment.

No, no, no says BP; Greenpeace “misconstrues” our position on the proposed “modernization” of the legislation (my emphasis). “Neither BP nor API advocated to exclude all indirect GHG (greenhouse) impacts from NEPA analysis. In fact, BP believes the NEPA analysis should include all direct and many indirect impacts.” Reading its statement, I was reminded of the way my son says “technically” when he’s trying to shoot down his parents arguments.

We’re told change is afoot at BP; that energetic incoming chief executive Bernard Looney plans to expand the company’s climate targets. He’s said to be going “all in”.

Except that there’s a name for that sort of thing. It’s called public relations – and it does rather seem at odds with the company’s approach to government relations as documented by Greenpeace, which has called out the company on previous occasions too.

Maybe that changes if Looney’s as serious about addressing climate change as the reports accompanying his taking charge suggest. But you know what? I’m not holding my breath