We have breaking news today on the oil industry . Ecowatch.org claims to have uncovered evidence of a Deepwater Horizon-type blowout of a BP rig in the Caspian Sea, in September 2008, two years before the Deepwater Horizon blew out. Had this incident been reported, there is no doubt that an investigation which have followed which would have very likely led to a change in the unsafe and faulty practices that ultimately led to the well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago.

Read On »

Companies are increasingly using social media as a tactic for corporate social responsibility and sustainability communications.

Read On »

5 types of metrics – Health, Wealth, Earth, Equality, & Trust – are frequently ignored in financial reports & by traditional stock analysts. These metrics are seen as “soft” when they actually relate to “hard” value.

Read On »

Just days before BP was set to go to trial with a group of more than 100,000 plaintiffs, the company announced over the weekend that it would agree to a settlement of $7.8 billion dollars.

Read On »

What does stability over the past year mean for companies, their CSR ratings and their CSR performance?

Read On »

If you were wondering what would be the next stop in the journey of businesses to identify their impacts and dependencies on ecosystem services, you got an answer earlier this week. After disclosing their carbon and water footprints, companies are moving now to disclose their forest footprint. Why they do it? Are these companies becoming the new treehuggers?

Read On »

Oil companies are developing climate change adaptation strategies, although not so long ago they funded climate change denial campaigns.

Read On »

About 20 months ago, the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, killing 11 workers and releasing over 200 million gallons of oil. The biggest offshore oil spill in US history, it seriously damaged ecosystems and caused health problems from chemical dispersants. The responsible thing for [...]

Read On »

The legal battles surrounding the Deepwater Horizon 2010 drilling disaster promise to be just as messy—and more lengthy—than the spill incident itself. The latest shots in this seemingly neverending exercise in passing the buck were fired last month when oil giant BP went to court in New Orleans claiming that US contractor Halliburton (yes, that Halliburton) [...]

Read On »

BP is putting a lot of money behind a TV commercial that opens with “This was the Gulf’s best tourism season in years.” In the sixty-second spot, businesses in Gulf cities like New Orleans and Panama City Florida invite tourists to come back. The ad is gorgeously filmed. Sparkling blue water. Giant flocks of birds. Sumptuous dishes of local fish. It’s the second wave of a campaign to restore tourism hurt by the BP oil spill and just one of BP’s efforts at restitution for regional businesses.

Read On »

On May 19, 1997, John Browne, then the CEO of BP, gave his famous ‘Climate Change: the New Agenda’ speech at Stanford, outlining BP’s new approach to global warming. One part of that new agenda was a foray into new energy technologies, particularly solar. Now it looks like solar is about to join the rest [...]

Read On »

About 10 years ago, I wrote an article about the role brands could play in driving social responsibility. My argument was that social change was needed on a massive scale, but that the institutions that had addressed societal ills in the past — government, religion, education, even the family — were no longer trusted. Therefore, brands were the only forces capable of changing human behavior.

Read On »

The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing yesterday on tax breaks for the nation’s top five oil companies: Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, BP America, and Exxon Mobil.  At stake is $21 billion in alleged subsidies.  Should oil companies be allowed to keep the tax credits?  Should tax payers no longer subsidize big oil? If the debate [...]

Read On »

April 21st marked the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. BP used the occasion to file a legal action against Transocean, Halliburton and Cameron International in advance of a closely approaching deadline for parties to file claims against each other. The lawsuits, which total over $40 billion (an amount [...]

Read On »

By Rick Bunch What did the BP Oil spill change for Americans? Very little. What can the spill teach us about how to recover from the disaster in Japan? More than you might think. It has been almost exactly a year since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and resulting massive oil spill from a [...]

Read On »

BP just released their 2010 Sustainability Report.  The 50-page glossy presentation is filled with sincerity, regret and promises to do better. It is clear that the company is eager to win back the public’s trust. According to the Chairman, Bob Dudley, We are determined that BP will be a safer, more risk-aware business. We will [...]

Read On »

Hard to believe how quickly we forget. The BP Gulf Oil spill that was presumed to be the fossil fuel industry’s Chernobyl is now, for most of us, little more than a dim memory, less than a year later. To prove it, we have the report this week, of BP’s 4th quarter earnings which show [...]

Read On »

By Amy Hsuan In the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon, BP’s stocks have rallied, Halliburton has been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and many people are wondering if the world has slipped into a self-induced amnesia. But not Mark Mills, founding partner of Digital Power Capital, a private equity firm that invests in energy-oriented [...]

Read On »

BP CEO Tony Hayward will be stepping down from his post soon after a dismal handling of this summer’s Gulf Oil Spill. But is he willing to take on the role of electric car advocate? A new campaign called HelloElectric.org intends to get Hayward behind the wheel of a smooth, green machine to win him [...]

Read On »

But while BP faces litigation and steep fines, it is also gaining money from one of the US government’s stimulus programs. Over the next several years, as much as $308 million, $175 million of which is directly from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), will flow to a power plant outside of Bakersfield, California.

Read On »

The following is a post by Paul Hannam of Bright Green Leadership (a 3p sponsor) – offering internet marketing strategies for responsible businesses. This tips and observations in this series are aimed at green entrepreneurs looking to understand how internet technology can benefit them more. For the last few weeks I have been writing about [...]

Read On »

Tourism is a major part of the economy along the Gulf coast. Take 2008, for example, a year when travelers to congressional districts along the Gulf coast spent over $34 billion, which sustained 400,000 jobs, according to a recent report by Oxford Economics. Consider also, the amount of jobs the tourism industry creates for the [...]

Read On »

Now that BP’s spurting oil well in the Gulf of Mexico officially known as MC252 has apparently been shut in, and the relief well that will eventually reduce the pressure in the area, is almost done, it would be nice to think that the worst is over and all that remains now is the long, [...]

Read On »

Few of us would have ever heard of Hayward had the Deepwater Horizon rig had not exploded in April, gushing thousands of barrels of oil a day into the Gulf, placing Hayward uncomfortably into the crosshairs of cable television news coverage. An overview of his background suggests that he is a competent manager and talented problem solver—but not prepared for the intense media criticism that festered the last few months because of BP’s largest crisis to date.

Read On »

The environmental writer Andy Mannle suggests that thanks to the BP oil spill, we are enduring another painful economic lesson called the tragedy of the commons.

Read On »

Late last week BP Biofuels agreed to buy Verenium Corporation, a producer of high-performance enzymes for use in industrial processes, including cellulosic biofuel production. The transaction, valued at US$98.3 million, gives BP control of Verenium’s biofuels facilities in southwest Louisiana and San Diego, and in turn provides Verenium with cash to grow its commercial enzyme business. According to BP Biofuel’s CEO, the Verenium transaction bolsters BP’s position as a leader in the biofuels market with an integrated end-to-end capability, from the initial research and development to distribution and blending.

Read On »

CJ Warner was at the top of her game when she saw the writing on the wall. Twenty years into a glass-ceiling-busting career at BP, she had risen to the rank of Head of Global Refining for BP, making her one of the highest ranking executives in the oil industry. That was when she realized that she was running towards a dead end. “I had a slow but growing realization that the industry was maturing, the current fields were falling off in volume more quickly than anticipated, and the feats required to find new oil were becoming more and more heroic.”
Prophetic words perhaps for someone who left BP a year before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but she wasn’t so much running away from something bad as she was running towards something better.

Read On »

by Richard Telofski The current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is, of course, a first degree public relations nightmare for beleaguered British multinational BP. Many pundits and financial analysts have debated whether or not the company will be able to survive this environmental disaster. Certainly their financial survival will depend on how many [...]

Read On »

Well, it’s about time. Recent news of environmental devastation has board members and executive committees of large companies nervously adding annual cash incentives based on their sustainability performance. Receiving bonuses strictly related to quarterly profits may become a thing of the past as the corporate image of BP and its sustainability measures have reaked havoc on their stock price.

In fact, numerous reports including the recently published The 21st Century Corporation: The Ceres Roadmap to Sustainability put out by Ceres, a Boston based network of institutional investors, show that increased attention by upper level management members is forcing companies to chan

Read On »

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an unrelenting, gushing reminder of our unsustainable production and consumption of fossil fuels. It has jolted the nation as images tell the story of jobless residents, tarnished beaches and struggling creatures. The constant news coverage has prompted a nation-wide “gut check,” giving us time to ponder [...]

Read On »