“Many inside the company, including Tony Hayward, had long thought that [John] Browne was distracted by his pet issues of climate change and environmentalism, and by his flirtations with the public spotlight. They thought he had been obsessed with branding the company and lowering its carbon footprint at the expense of BP’s real business, producing and selling oil.” – Abrahm Lustgarden, Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (2012), p. 203.

“The world’s carbon budget is finite and running out fast. We need a rapid transition to net zero.” – Bernard Looney. CEO, BP, quoted in Financial Times, February 12, 2020

British Petroleum Company, then BP Amoco, then BP, has had a troubled history since it went political in the 1990. That history deserves revisiting given its latest rebranding effort.…

” … for the first time in over 40 years, today we are issuing a proposed new rule under the National Environmental Policy Act to completely overhaul the dysfunctional bureaucratic system that has created these massive obstructions. Now, we’re going to have very strong regulation, but it’s going to go very quickly. And if it doesn’t pass, it’s going to not pass quickly.” 

“… our new One Federal Decision policy — it’s called “One Federal Decision” — requires agencies to work closely together to promptly deliver one decision. Yes. The entire process will be completed; the entire federal government approval process will be done.

– President Donald J. Trump, January 9, 2020

The most free-market President in US energy history has added to his winning ways. Last week, he put into play a powerful proposal to depoliticize infrastructure spending under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA).…

“We have done extensive polling on a carbon tax. It all sucks.”

– John Podesta (Clinton campaign manager), January 2015.

“[A carbon tax is] lethal in the general [election], so I don’t want to support one.”

– Robby Mook (Clinton campaign manager), June 2015.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign would not touch it. Neither would be Democratic Platform in 2016. “[Hillary] Clinton has no intention of being suckered into a political disaster by advocating a carbon tax,” stated Democrat consultant
Paul Bledsoe in July 2016.

If Republicans will come out for it and vote for it, that’s a different matter. But until that happens, the Democrats should have nothing to do with it, because it’s political poison.” –

So if attention-hungry, anti-Trump Republicans (such as Mitt Romney) want to make a carbon tax an issue, be careful.…

… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. They don’t know what they like. They sort of like wind, even though it kills all the birds. You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill sometime….

You know, in California, you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. If you go under a windmill, you see them all over the place.

– Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, Louisiana, May 14, 2019

Back in 1997, I published a long Policy Analysis for the Cato Institute, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’.” A section of that study, “The ‘Avian Mortality’ Problem,” addressed what President Trump recently said (above) 22 years later.…