“Stephen H. Schneider, a climate researcher and Stanford professor who wrote the first popular book on global warming, said [that Browne’s] speech was a welcome change of direction for an industry that has, until now, denied that global warming is a problem. ‘They’re out of climate denial,’ Schneider said.”

– Quoted in Glennda Chui, “BP Official Takes Global Warming Seriously,” San Jose Mercury News, May 20, 1997, sec. A. 20.

Then BP CEO John Browne’s speech at Stanford University in May 1997 marked the beginning of the company’s “green” (or to critics, greenwashing) approach to product differentiation and corporate governance. Left environmentalists applauded heartily–and would continue to do so until the Deepwater Horizon accident of April 2010.

Browne’s speech began by begging the question and proceeded to a non sequitur.…

Ed. Note: How did a major energy trade association/ lobbying group come to support climate alarm and forced energy transformation, reversing its prior position? The story gets back to an ex-Enron executive who imported Enron’s political capitalism model to the electricity industry, to flip the script.

“Breaking ranks with others in the electric-power industry, [James “Jim” Rogers in 1988] supported legislation putting caps on sulfur-dioxide emissions. ‘Some of my guys thought I was drinking the environmental Kool-Aid,’ he said later. ‘But I said, “Let’s shape this, let’s make some money”.’” (Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2018)

“I made money on sulfur [dioxide], and I’ll make money on carbon [dioxide].” (Bloomberg Businessweek, June 3, 2010)

“The Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing the electric power industry,” a recent New York Times article stated, “said that if without a federal role in regulating greenhouse gases, states and cities could ‘attempt to fill that perceived void through increased regulatory requirements that could vary significantly from one jurisdiction to the next.’”…

“On the 15th anniversary of the BP blowout, the real takeaway is that oil companies that think they are ‘beyond petroleum’ are value destroyers for shareholders and for the environment.”

Every April commemorates BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill (April 2010). To the anti-energy Left, Deepwater Horizon is the epitome of oil-gone-bad, coming some 21 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It was not supposed to happen again, but ….

The sad facts of Deepwater Horizon will forever remain; the multiple failures behind the seafloor accident meticulously documented. But a paradox remains. Mighty BP, captained by John Browne, the leading “environmentalist” of the petroleum industry, created a corporate culture that resulted in lax safety and environmental protocols. By saving about $5 million out of $100+ million in drilling costs, the company ended up paying out in excess of $60 billion.…

“… why doesn’t a congressional subcommittee call these companies and a few more to tell us exactly what they are up to and what is going to happen to energy prices where parties have to buy credits for something that is not a pollutant?  After the meeting the company that has done the most to sell Kyoto should be awarded naming rights.”

I had a front row seat to many things energy and climate during my 16 years at Enron (1985–2001). At Political Capitalism, I described my Enron experience debating climate science and renewable policy (here).

Enron, in the words of a Greenpeace ex, was “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.” [Jeremy Leggett, The Carbon War (London: Penguin Books, 1999, p.…