Climate activists have held a former BP CEO and House of Lords peer’s feet to the fire at a key lecture on the climate crisis.
As the climate-wrecking corporation announced another year of killer profits, lord John Browne didn’t quite get the welcome reception he had bargained for at the 10-year anniversary event.
However, Fossil Free London made sure he got the one he deserved. To draw attention to more than a decade of him fronting the fossil fuel major branded ‘Blair Petroleum’ after the then Labour Party prime minister’s invasion of Iraq under false pretences, activists called on Browne to “pay up” for the warmongering company’s imperialistic past – and present.
BP profits: disaster capitalists doing what they do best
On Tuesday 11 February, BP posted its annual profits for 2024. And boo-hoo, break out the waterworks for BP, it reported that its takings had plummeted to $8.9bn. This was down from $13.8bn in 2023.
By all accounts of course, it still raked in a staggering sum of money. What’s more, it’s hardly a hit – when its 2023 profits were the second-highest across the past decade. In fact, it’s still more than the company made in 2021 ($7.6bn).
In 2022, the company leached record profits of $28bn. Of course, the energy crisis that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic triggered was the the disaster capitalist corporation’s wet dream. Price-gouging profiteers like BP were rolling in it, waging class war on the rest of us.
So excuse us while we bring out our tiny violins.
Naturally however, it’s also hardly the only war BP has been opportunistically fueling either, because there’s also its war on the climate too. In tandem with its latest profits, the company looks to be planning to its scale back its renewables arm. No surprises here though from the company’s whose well-oiled propaganda pipeline gave the world “Beyond Petroleum” before promptly dumping its slimy rebrand as swift as Deepwater Horizon oil-slick.
It was as much a stupefyingly oxymoronic misnomer then, as a former BP boss lecturing anyone on the climate crisis is now. When did that rebrand take place? Under the executive directorship of none other than lord John Browne.
Activists upstage former BP boss at climate lecture
So, on the day that BP broke the truly devastating news of its billions in losses to its loaded shareholders, the Energy & Climate Change Law Institute invited BP’s former CEO John Browne to the stage.
Unfortunately for Browne however, Fossil Free London were waiting in the wings. Activists disrupted Browne’s Q&A as he stood at the podium:
BREAKING: ex BP CEO Lord John Browne disrupted on the day BP announced yearly profits of £7.9 billion 🤑🤑🤑
Lord Browne led BP for over a decade, throughout the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was hosted by Clifford Chance, one of the worst law firms for backing big oil 🤢 at QMU pic.twitter.com/0Cw2VbX2VB
— Fossil Free London (@fossilfreeLDN) February 12, 2025
Crucially, activists were also there to highlight BP’s colonial crimes. Browne was BP boss at the time of then-Labour Party PM Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq. British oil interests – namely, BP’s in particular – were at the heart of it. Its cosy revolving door relationship speaks to this. As Declassified UK has previously underscored:
Within days of Blair’s 1997 election victory, former BP chairman Sir David Simon was ennobled and made a trade minister.
Moreover, lo and behold, BP was right on the scene to suck up the spoils:
Governments in London and Washington long denied the Iraq war was about oil. Yet BP returned to the country in 2009 after a 35-year absence and was awarded a significant interest in Iraq’s largest oil field near British-occupied Basra in the south of the country.
Of course, the predatory profiteer hasn’t slowed in its colonial capitalist conquest since either. Capitalising on Israel’s brutal genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is very on-brand. So unsurprisingly, the corporate criminal has done just that as well.
Therefore, Fossil Free London demanded reparations for the oil industry’s role in the climate crisis and its destructive, imperialistic operations to boot.
Law firm sponsor’s complicity
The Energy & Climate Change Law Institute is based at Queen Mary’s University in London. It bills itself as:
a leading postgraduate law school
Moreover, it describes its curriculum as:
anchored in the real world of the energy sector; and to be a leading voice in the law and regulation of the energy transition.
The institute hosts its annual ‘Clifford Chance Lecture’, which in it boasts is:
one of the key dates in the Energy Law calendar for energy law academics, practitioners and policy-makers in the UK and internationally.
As the name suggests, Clifford Chance law firm sponsors the event. Cue a company dripping in climate crisis complicity. Activists from Fossil Free London highlighted how the company is another handmaiden for big oil and gas.
US-based student-led Law Students for Climate Accountability ranked it amongst the worst law firms shilling for the fossil fuel industry in 2024.
When will BP pay up for the harms they’re responsible for?
The Fossil Free London activist wasn’t pulling any punches as she grilled Browne:
When will BP and past and present CEOs pay up for the harms they’ve caused, pay up for the climate disasters and deaths they’re responsible for?
Of course, it was crickets from the white collar criminal who’d pocketed his oil millions.
A former BP boss, a law firm in bed with big oil, and a bunch of fossil fuel industry sell-outs walk into a corporate-captured lecture theatre. And thanks to climate activists at Fossil Free London, they all got well and truly burned.
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