Why blame BP for what BP does?

Or, perhaps, why blame BP for sticking to its knitting?

BP criticised over plan to spend billions more on fossil fuels than green energy

Company’s oil and gas investments for 2023 will be as much as double those on renewables

BP, as an organisation, is optimised to stick straws into fossil fuel reservoirs. Find those reservoirs, work out how to extract from them, do so then ship, refine and market the fossil fuels.

That’s simply what it does, what it’s good at.

Things like windmills, solar cells, batteries, hydrodams, tidal energy, fuel cells and on and on - they’re all different businesses requiring different skills. There’s no reason to suppose that BP is going to be any good at those other things - no more reason than thinking that Ford, or IBM, me, you or the baker around the corner are going to be good at them.

“Where you spend your money says a lot about your priorities,” said Mike Childs, the head of policy at Friends of the Earth. “It’s astounding that in the middle of a climate emergency BP is planning to invest billions more dollars on planet-warming fossil fuels than on clean, green renewables.”

Complaining that anyone is investing in fossil fuels could be wrong, sure, but it’s not a logical fallacy. That no one is investing in renewables - or not enough - equally has logical merit. But that BP, an organisation, isn’t spending on something it’s not optimised for is simply stupid.

If we do want more spent - sorry, “invested” - in renewables then we want the profits from fossil fuels to flow out of BP and into an organisation optimised for renewables. That is, BP ceases renewables investments and goes into run off - there’s no good reason why an organisation should outlive its usefulness - and simply shovels the cash out the door to the shareholders. Who then reploy that money into investments in renewables, through organisations optimised for that task.

But at that point everyone would be complaining that BP was sending money to shareholders to redeploy into the new forms of investment, wouldn’t they?

This insistence that oil companies must do not-oil is to grossly misunderstand how business works. It’s to think of it all as “big-stuff” which can just be retasked. The same logic which would have Siemens making bicycles, Airbus trains, Tesla airplanes and Raleigh the cars. After all, they’re all just transport businesses, right?