BP must clean up its act!

UPMINSTER RESIDENTS HELP TO REVEAL
‘DIRTY SECRET’ BEHIND BP’S LOGO

Gulf oil slick provides graphic illustration of company’s true colours.

Local Greenpeace activists from the SW-Essex Network joined members of the Upminster public last Saturday, June 19th to reveal the dirty truth behind BP’s famous green logo.

Activists displayed specially perforated, large versions of BP’s famous ‘sunflower’ logo at the Friends of Upminster Park Family Fun Day and invited shoppers to peel off petals from the logo, revealing the mosaic of BP’s oil-soaked operations underneath.

Greenpeace says that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will come to be seen as one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history. The group claims that despite an expensive branding exercise, BP’s decision to extract the last drops of oil at any cost, shows how the company has actually gone ‘back to petroleum’.

BP is currently deciding whether to invest billions of pounds in a new project to extract oil from ‘tar sands’ in Canada. Experts say that getting oil from this source is even more environmentally damaging than drilling for regular crude oil, as the process generates far higher emissions.

People were asked to personalise the logo's "petals" before attaching them to a separate sheet to spell out the words “NO TAR SANDS”. These messages will be delivered to BP in an attempt to force the company to reverse its decision.

Steve Pullum a Greenpeace volunteer from Romford said:

“BP wants the people of Havering to believe that the company has gone “Beyond Petroleum” but the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has proved how empty these words really are. The rush to extract the last drops of oil from ever more remote regions is putting us on a collision course with nature and speeding up climate change. Next on their agenda are the Tar Sands of Canada, which contain some of the dirtiest oil in the world."

“Tar Sands are a looming environmental catastrophe that could be every bit as bad as the Gulf oil spill but this time we can stop it before it gets out of control. We are telling BP to stop scraping the bottom of the barrel and start investing in clean, safe energy projects instead.”

(1) The Tar Sands of Canada contain large deposits of oil as bitumen, which BP wants to extract using a process known as ‘steam assisted gravity drainage’. The process requires huge quantities of water to be converted to steam to pump the tarry deposits from deep underground. So much energy is used that the method produces even more greenhouse gas emissions than pumping for conventional crude oil.

(2) Local wildlife is often affected and the boreal forests, in which BP plans to operate, contain animals like beavers, caribou, ducks and moose. Local indigenous people also say the process leads to high levels of cancer and other health problems and that their basic human rights have been forgotten in the rush for short term profits.

(3)According to company records, in 2010 BP plans to spend twenty times as much on its oil and gas business as all alternative technologies put together.

An Aussie view of the BP Oil Spill

I’m an Irritant!

It would appear that I have been banned from commenting on the blog, Another Green World, owned by Derek Wall. He has, he says, introduced comment moderation just for me. Is this a first where a Green party member has been banned from commenting on another Green party member’s blog? Apparently I submitted something particularly irritating on one of his posts supporting Caroline.

Of course he still let’s through the trolls so he can tell them to fuck off but he can’t be arsed to engage with one of his own.

Does that tell you something?