Vote BP for this year’s Public Eye Award! Share with your networks and help the Indigenous Environmental Network put a spotlight on BP as the world’s worst company!
IEN has nominated BP (Beyond Petroleum) to be the recipient of the 2011 Public Eye Award!
Go to this link to vote now: http://www.publiceye.ch/en/vote/bp/ (Last day of voting!)
Watch IEN’s video nomination on youtube here.
According to IEN, “The Public Eye Awards mark a critical counterpoint to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. Organized since 2000 by Berne Declaration and Friends of the Earth (in 2009 replaced by Greenpeace), Public Eye reminds the corporate world that social and environmental misdeeds have consequences — for the affected people and territory, but also for the reputation of the offender.”
For more info on Public Eye Awards go here.
Why the Indigenous Environmental Network nominated BP:
Gulf of Mexico: A deepwater drilling rig of BP, the British energy company, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people were killed and some 800 million litres of oil leaked into the sea. After Saddam Hussein’s burning oil fields in Kuwait this was probably the largest oil disaster ever. Long-term effects can only be estimated but the disaster is bound to affect the region’s food chain for decades to come.
Alaska North Slope: Known as the crown jewel in the assets of BP, Prudhoe Bay became BP’s greatest discovery in the 1950s and has since been one of the primary domestic sources of oil for the U.S. In May 2010, TransAlaska Pipeline, partly owned by BP, shut down after spilling several thousand barrels of crude oil in the fragile ecosystem. In 2006, BP phased out a shutdown of the Prudhoe Bay oil field following the discovery of unexpectedly severe corrosion and spills from oil transit lines. As a result of oil and gas development in the North Slope, there are growing concerns among Inupiat communities regarding the potential impacts of regional industrial expansion on their health and culture, cancer clusters, more frequent asthma exacerbations and the compounding and accumulative effects of increased exposure to organic pollutants, including carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. Since the 1950s, BP has been responsible for thousands of oil spills from leaking pipelines and drill pads in Alaska’s North Slope and are aggressively moving into critical wildlife habitats like the National Petroleum Reserve (NPR) and have been behind an aggressive lobby campaign to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) to big oil.
Canadian Tar Sands: Meanwhile, BP is moving into the dirtiest oil business of them all: extraction in the Alberta tar sands. BP is the last global major oil company to enter into the tar sands in northern Alberta. Tar sands extraction is a cause of human rights violations to Indigenous Peoples, environmental health, water contamination and loss of boreal forests, and a major contributor to climate change with processing and combustion of high carbon dirty fuels. Before the catastrophe in the Gulf, BP was the only international oil company that was not investing in the socially and environmentally scandalous mining of the tar sands. But in December 2010, BP announced a US$1.6 billion investment in tar sands mining, despite the opposition of affected communities. At the same time, BP appointed a PR agency to promote its image as a biofuel producer. The marketing slogan “Beyond Petroleum” appears on company letterhead, but even after the Deepwater Horizon disaster the slogan has no visible influence on corporate policy.
BP must undertake huge steps to live up to its “Beyond Petroleum” marketing slogan. To this end, BP must withdraw from high-risk deep sea drilling, give up the tar sands projects, and immediately cease its global lobbying against higher safety standards in oil production and for weaker climate protection laws.
For information on IEN Canadian Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign go here.
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