An Opinion piece for the Guardian (Fri 7 Feb 2020) by Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder, and David Adler, the policy coordinator, of DiEM25, exposes the fake gloss of policy commitment by the EU to cover up the fake green deal instead of a implementing A Real New Green Deal.
Ursula von der Leyen’s signature proposal co-opts the slogans of climate activism, but has none of the substance
Ryanair and others companies that have made misleading environmental claims
"People Do" advertising campaign for Chevron 1985
Three decades of greenwashing . . .
The Guardian sustainable business thread published the "backstory" to "greenwashing" in this article by Bruce Watson(Sat 20 Aug 2016) under the headline an sub heading:
The term “greenwashing” was coined in the 1980s to describe outrageous corporate environmental claims. Three decades later, the practice has grown vastly more sophisticated
Bruce Watson writes:
In the mid-1980s, oil company Chevron commissioned a series of expensive television and print ads to convince the public of its environmental bonafides. Titled People Do, the campaign showed Chevron employees protecting bears, butterflies, sea turtles and all manner of cute and cuddly animals.
The commercials were very effective – in 1990, they won an Effie advertising award, and subsequently became a case study at Harvard Business school. They also became notorious among environmentalists, who have proclaimed them the gold standard of greenwashing – the corporate practice of making diverting sustainability claims to cover a questionable environmental record.
The term greenwashing was coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986, back when most consumers received their news from television, radio and print media – the same outlets that corporations regularly flooded with a wave of high-priced, slickly-produced commercials and print ads. The combination of limited public access to information and seemingly unlimited advertising enabled companies to present themselves as caring environmental stewards, even as they were engaging in environmentally unsustainable practices.
But greenwashing dates back even earlier. American electrical behemoth Westinghouse’s nuclear power division was a greenwashing pioneer. Threatened by the 1960’s anti-nuclear movement, which raised questions about its safety and environmental impact, it fought back with a series of ads proclaiming the cleanliness and safety of nuclear power plants. One, featuring a photograph of a nuclear plant nestled by a pristine lake, proclaimed that “We’re building nuclear power plants to give you more electricity,” and went on to say that nuclear plants were “odorless [...] neat, clean, and safe”.
Some of these claims were true: in 1969, Westinghouse nuclear plants were producing large amounts of cheap electricity with far less air pollution than competing coal plants. However, given that the ads appeared after nuclear meltdowns had already occurred in Michigan and Idaho, the word “safe” was arguable. Westinghouse’s ads also ignored concerns about the environmental impact of nuclear waste, which has continued to be a problem.
The mysterious case of the stolen towels
In 1983, when Jay Westerveld first got the idea for the term greenwashing, he wasn’t thinking about nuclear power – he was thinking about towels. An undergraduate student on a research trip to Samoa, he stopped off in Fiji to surf. At the sprawling Beachcomber Resort, he saw a note asking customers to pick up their towels. “It basically said that the oceans and reefs are an important resource, and that reusing the towels would reduce ecological damage,” Westerveld recalls. “They finished by saying something like, ‘Help us to help our environment’.”
Westerveld wasn’t actually staying at the resort – he was lodging at a “grubby” guesthouse nearby, and had just snuck in to steal some clean towels. Even so, he was struck by the note’s irony: while it claimed to be protecting the island’s ecosystem, he says, the Beachcomber – which, today, describes itself as “the most sought-after destination in the South Pacific” – was expanding. “I don’t think they really cared all that much about the coral reefs,” he says. “They were in the middle of expanding at the time, and were building more bungalows.”
Three years later, in 1986, when he was writing a term paper on multiculturalism, Westerveld remembered the note. “I finally wrote something like, ‘It all comes out in the greenwash.’ A guy in the class with me worked for a literary magazine and had me write an essay about it.” And, as the magazine had a large readership in nearby New York City, it wasn’t long before the term caught on in the wider media.
Westerveld’s essay came out a year after the launch of Chevron’s People Do campaign. As critics later pointed out, many of the environmental programs that Chevron promoted in its campaign were mandated by law. They were also relatively inexpensive when compared with the cost of Chevron’s ad budget: environmental activist Joshua Karliner estimated that Chevron’s butterfly preserve cost it $5,000 per year to run, while the ads promoting it cost millions of dollars to produce and broadcast.
The People Do campaign also ignored Chevron’s spotty environmental record: while it was running the ads, it was also violating the clean air act, the clean water act and spilling oil into wildlife refuges. But Chevron was far from the only company digging deep into the greenwashing cesspool. In 1989, chemical company DuPont announced its new double-hulled oil tankers with ads featuring marine animals clapping their flippers and wings in chorus to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. However, as environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth pointed out in its report Hold the Applause, the company was the single largest corporate polluter in the US.
Other corporate claims were equally outrageous: forestry giant Weyerhaeuser ran ads claiming that it was “serious” about caring for fish – even as it was cutting down trees in some of its forests and destabilizing salmon habitats.
1980's Chevron Commercial
Muddying the waters
By the early 1990s, consumers were wising up to sustainability concerns: polls showed that companies’ environmental records influenced the majority of consumer purchases. This interest in the environment brought an increased awareness of the greenwashing; by the end of the decade, the word had officially entered the English language with its inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. Since then, the trend has only increased: a 2015 Nielsen poll showed that 66% of global consumers are willing to pay more for environmentally sustainable products. Among millennials, that number jumps to 72%.
“People are getting more aware of the rarity of the Earth and the ways that our actions impact it,” says Jason Ballard, CEO of sustainable home improvement retailer TreeHouse. At the same time, he notes, greenwashing has become more complex. “It’s the dark side of a very positive development,” he says.
One shift has been outreach. Many companies are now working to engage customers in their sustainability efforts, even as their core business model remains environmentally unsustainable. The Home Depot and Lowes, for example, both encourage customers to do their part by offering onsite recycling for several products, including compact fluorescent lights and plastic bags. Meanwhile, they continue to sell billions of dollars per year worth of environmentally damaging products, such as paints that are loaded with toxic ingredients and which release noxious fumes.
“It’s misdirection, and it’s intended to shift the customer’s focus from a company’s appalling behaviors to something that’s peripheral,” Ballard says.
DuPont Conaco Double-Hulled Oil Tankers Seal Clapping Commercial (1991)
The bottled water conundrum
Another trend, says Jonah Sachs, CEO of branding agency Free Range Studios, is linking sustainability claims to other issues, such as personal health. “There’s this perception that personal health and environmental sustainability are two sides of the same coin,” he says. “Sometimes this is true, but many times it isn’t. Bottled water is a great example: in terms of health, it’s much better than soda or other drinks, but in terms of the environment and sustainability, it’s ridiculous.”
The water industry trades heavily on images of rugged mountains and pristine lakes to sell its products. And many companies – Nestle, in particular – spend millions of dollars trying to convince the public that their bottled water isn’t only good to drink, but is also good for the planet. Over the past few years, the bottled water giant has claimed that its Eco-Shape bottle is more efficient, that its Resource recycled plastic bottle is more environmentally responsible and that its use of plant-based plastics is less damaging to the planet.
In 2008, Nestle Waters Canada even ran an ad claiming: “Bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world.” Several Canadian groups quickly filed a complaint against the company. Five years later, during Earth Day 2013, the International Bottled Water Association doubled down on the sustainability claims, announcing that bottled water was “the face of positive change” because the industry was using less plastic in its bottles and relying more on recycled plastic.
Sustainability promises aside, only about 31% of plastic bottles end up getting recycled, which means that “the face of positive change” creates millions of tons of garbage every year, much of which ends up in landfills or the ocean.
And the water that goes in the bottles is often equally unsustainable. Nestle’s Arrowhead water claims that “Mother Nature is our muse” and boasts that it “has a team of experts dedicated to watching over each one of our 13 spring sources” to ensure responsible water stewardship. This sounds promising until one considers that those springs are in California, which has been in a state of drought for five years. The company also bottles water in Arizona and Oregon, both of which are also experiencing droughts.
Westinghouse Nuclear :30 Commercial HD June 2013
A golden oldie
Some of the classic greenwashers are also taking cues from the new greenwashing playbook. In 2013, amid worries about unemployment and continued concerns about energy sustainability, Westinghouse put a fresh face on its old claims with a brand new commercial. “Did you know that nuclear energy is the largest source of clean air energy in the world?” the ad asked viewers right before claiming that its nuclear power plants “provide cleaner air, create jobs, and help sustain the communities where they operate”.
What the commercial failed to mention was that, two years earlier, Westinghouse was cited by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for concealing flaws in its reactor designs and submitting false information to regulators. And, in February 2016, another plant that uses Westinghouse reactors, New York’s Indian Point, leaked radioactive material into the surrounding area’s groundwater. Advertisement
Greenwashing may have taken on a new shape in the last decade, but it’s still as murky as ever.
Grist has this story by Kate Yoder on Feb 7, 2020 headlined:
The world has known about the dangers of climate change for decades — so why are oil and gas companies still drilling for crude as if there’s no tomorrow? There’s no simple answer. But any explanation would have to give some credit to the wizards of public relations. For more than a century, these spinmasters downplayed misdeeds, twisted facts, and cajoled the media into mimicking their talking points.
“A lot of what we have as PR today, in general, was built in service of the fossil fuel industry,” said Amy Westervelt, the host of Drilled, billed as “a true-crime podcast about climate change.”The first season of Drilled investigated the history of climate denial, and the second looked at the West Coast crabbers suing Big Oil for contributing to warmer oceans and throwing the marine food web out of whack. In the latest season launched last month, Westervelt introduces the “Mad Men of Climate Denial” — the publicists who coached the fossil fuel industry how to shape public opinion over the past century.
Creating a cloud of confusion around established science is one of their well-known tactics. Exxon and the coal industry knew about global warming as early as the 1960s; instead of telling the public, they spread doubt about the science behind it. That’s just one facet of the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda machine. (“Propaganda” might seem too strong of a word, but Westervelt says it’s the very definition: “a one-sided message with the aim of shifting public opinion or policy.”) Digging through archives, presidential libraries, and old PR books, Westervelt found the pushy executives, manipulative schmoozers, and “inventive” storytellers who made it work.
“People are largely unaware that there’s a massive system running underneath everything,” Westervelt said in an interview with Grist. “A lot of the ideas they have about the fossil fuel industry and even the language they use has been crafted very carefully by the industry itself.”
She takes us on a wild journey from a turn-of-the-century massacre in Colorado coal country to the messaging strategy of, yes, Nazi Germany, telling the stories of the people who worked to boost oil’s image and how their experiences taught them to influence the media, politicians, and the courts. Here are just a handful of the wild strategies they came up with, all still in use.
Fake news: “Fake news” proliferates on the internet today, a plague of modern life with a long pedigree. You can trace it back to Ivy Ledbetter Lee, often called the father of modern public relations. In the early 1900s, Lee was tasked with rehabilitating the public image of the tycoon John D. Rockefeller. His company, Standard Oil, had brutally stamped out a workers strike at a Colorado coal mine in 1913, setting tents on fire and spraying their camp with machine guns. Lee crafted a story to smooth things over, claiming that the strikers were actually plants hired by a labor union, and that the whole thing had been orchestrated by Mother Jones, a famous labor organizer (he also made up that she ran a nearby brothel). “What are facts anyway but my interpretation of what happened?” Lee said later on.
Corporate philanthropy: Lee’s coverup went so well that Rockefeller kept him on board for the rest of his life. In addition to inventing the press release (imagine, the newspaper prints your version of the story word for word!), Lee prodded Rockefeller to donate to charitable causes, like museums, to burnish his reputation. The approach gained traction as other robber barons realized that they, too, could be remembered as kindly philanthropists. The arts are now soaked with oil money — and with their names emblazoned on art museum walls and festivals signs, corporations get a similar reputational boost.
Astroturfing: What better way to counter grassroots activists than to fake your own grassroots group? This practice, called “astroturfing,” was the brainchild of Daniel Edelman, a PR whiz who advised Mobil Oil, Big Tobacco, and many other companies in the mid-20th century. There are now hundreds of fake front groups backed by oil-funded lobbying groups like the Western States Petroleum Association, said Christine Arena, former vice president of the firm Edelman (yes, named after Daniel), in the podcast. They go by friendly names like “California Drivers Alliance” or “Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy.”
False equivalence: Herb Schmertz, who advised Mobil starting in the 1960s, took an aggressive stance toward the press. He’d attack any journalist or outlet critical of his company, arguing that they weren’t hearing Mobil’s side of the story, and then watch them overcorrect in the next edition. The approach eventually expanded to demanding airtime for climate deniers. One study looking at climate change articles in major U.S. outlets between 1988 and 2002 found that more than half of them presented climate science and fringe, Big Oil-friendly theories as equivalent. “It took a while for newspapers to realize that this was not a great way to go,” Westervelt said.
It seems like many in the media have decided to stop playing along. And there are other signs that the tide is turning against the oil industry. Once the world’s most valuable company, Exxon’s stock has dropped by a third over the last five years, wiping away nearly $200 billion in market value. Jim Cramer, the loudmouth host of CNBC’s Mad Money, recently said that it’s time to ditch oil stocks. Even public relations companies are now taking their services elsewhere.
“As soon as an industry starts to get an irretrievably bad image, the PR folks start dropping off, and the industry has to find somebody else to do this stuff,” Westervelt said. She said she has seen oil companies turn to more obscure consulting groups, like FGI Consulting and the DCI group, to do their PR work.
The fossil fuel industry is starting to move away from publicly denying the facts about climate change (which isn’t working as well these days) and back toward pro-oil, all-American messaging, like the new ads from the American Petroleum Institute that tout oil and natural gas as “energy progress.”
If only Big Oil was as good at cutting greenhouse gas emissions as it was at marketing.
Drilled Amy Westervelt, the host of Drilled, billed as “a true-crime podcast about climate change.”The
first season of Drilled investigated the history of climate denial, and
the second looked at the West Coast crabbers suing Big Oil for
contributing to warmer oceans and throwing the marine food web out of
whack. In the latest season launched last month, Westervelt introduces
the “Mad Men of Climate Denial” — the publicists who coached the fossil
fuel industry how to shape public opinion over the past century.
The Museum of Standard Oil
The work of American artist Ed Ruscha transformed the Standard Oil gas station into an icon of Pop art.
This photograph by Ruscha of a Standard Oil Gas Station was included in his Twentysix Gasoline Stations is the first artist's book by the American pop artist Ed Ruscha. Published in April 1963 on his own imprint National Excelsior Press, it is often considered to be the first modern artist's book, and has become famous as a precursor and a major influence on the emerging artist's book culture, especially in America. The book delivers exactly what its title promises, reproducing 26 photographs of gasoline stations next to captions indicating their brand and location. From the first service station, 'Bob's Service' in Los Angeles where Ruscha lived, the book follows a journey back to Oklahoma City where he had grown up and where his mother still lived. The last image is of a Fina gasoline station in Groom, Texas, which Ruscha has suggested should be seen as the beginning of the return journey, 'like a coda'.
This painting by Edward HopperGas 1940 is part of the Museum of Modern Art New York art collection. The MoMAwebpage on this artwork says:
This work resulted from a composite representation of several gasoline stations seen by the artist. The light in this painting—both natural and artificial—gives the scene of a gas station and its lone attendant at dusk an underlying sense of drama. But rather than simply depicting a straightforward narrative, Hopper's aim was "the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature"—in this case, the loneliness of an American country road. Fellow artist Charles Burchfield believed these paintings would remain memorable beyond their time, because in his "honest presentation of the American scene . . . Hopper does not insist upon what the beholder shall feel."
Oil that glitters is not gold
There is another webpage to found on the MoMA website marking significant events and documents in the timeline of the museum. There you may find an occasion in 1939 that references another Museum of Standard Oil, the MoMA itself, with its instutional links to the Rockefeller family.
The MoMA website text includes the following information:
In 1939 a Museum staff member, Frances Collins, then the manager of Publications, distributed a satirical invitation to “the semi-public opening of the new Museum of Standard Oil.” Collins was purportedly upset that various staff members had not been invited to the opening party for the new flagship building, though the reference to Standard Oil hinted at deeper concerns with the institution.
John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was married to one of MoMA’s founders, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was the oil company’s heir. On the front of the card, beneath a crown insignia, text read;
“Oil that glitters is not gold.”
Another reference to this act of criticism (and resistance) can be found in an article about Alessandro Yazbek & Media Farzin’s “Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect”, and this art project from 2010,by Negar Azimi on the BIDOUN New York website. The article points to a significantly more sinister mobilisation of the patronage of modern art in order to cloak corporate skulduggery.
Negar Azimi writes:
Sometime in 1939, on the eve of the opening of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art on New York’s 53rd Street, an intrepid museum employee played a practical joke on her bosses.
Her name was Frances Collins, and as the museum’s Director of Publications, she and a friend had concocted an invitation, to be sent to seven thousand distinguished persons, to the opening of what was described as the “Museum of Standard Oil.”
The invitation card, printed in extravagant script, came from the “the Empress of Blandings”(a character in the form of an overly fat pig drawn from the English satirist PG Wodehouse’s novels) and would, so it announced, admit “two persons or one person and two dogs.” Inside the invitation packet was a small card that read “Oil That Glitters Is Not Gold” alongside a letterpress engraving of a crown.
The overt allusion to then-MoMA president Nelson Rockefeller’s deep entanglements in the world of oil — his father, American industrialist John D Rockefeller, founded the modern oil industry as we know it — did not roundly amuse everyone.
Collins promptly lost her job.
MoMA, of course, went ahead and opened as planned.
Negar Azimi continues, referencing their 2010 Christopher Grimes Gallery in Los Angeles exhibition:
From the exhibition, we learn that the same Rockefeller who served as president of MoMA was once tapped to lead a special “government-private commission on Latin America” by then-President Franklin D Roosevelt. A decade or so before the CIA founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Rockefeller was asked to focus “on the cultural and propaganda side of wartime diplomacy.” Wartime diplomacy at the time largely translated to oil interests, as America realized it had to look outward to satisfy its appetite for petroleum. In 1939, this scion of one of the richest families in America opened a hotel in oil-rich Venezuela — which, incidentally, is where Yazbek, who is of Lebanese and Italian origin, grew up. The Hotel Avila, a classic open modernist structure designed by Wallace K. Harrison and distinguished by its generous verandas, sat in a lush mountainside location just outside central Caracas. One year later, Rockefeller commissioned the American sculptor Alexander Calder to prepare mobiles for the ballroom of the giddily grand hotel.
The work, Didactic Panel and Model of Alexander Calder’s Vertical Constellation with Bomb, 1943, recreates a delicate Calder sculpture composed of irregular and abstract shapes linked by steel wire. A large accompanying wall text, cheekily deemed “didactic,” playfully relabels the elements of the original sculpture— connecting the Shah of Iran to Churchill to Truman to Roosevelt, and so on, as manifest in the sale of Iranian oil to America, the development of hydrocarbons in Venezuela, and even the Manhattan Project. Lo and behold, history is full of accidents. Calder, we also glean from the panel, once said about his open constellations that they “had a suggestion of some kind of cosmic nuclear gases.”
Here, the lines drawn between art and politics are abundant and seamless, and it was this articulation from within the medium of the modern itself that may have saved Yazbek and Farzin’s work from being, well, too didactic. Their installation inhabits multiple modes, documentary and aesthetic, and from there, works its way out.
Members of PCS union say institution must cut ties with oil company amid climate crisis
Matthew Taylor reports for the Guardian (Mon 10 Feb 2020):
Staff working at the British Museum in London have joined calls for its management to ditch its sponsorship deal with the oil company BP after a weekend of protests.
Members of the PCS union’s culture group, which represents 4,000 workers across the UK’s leading cultural sites, said the museum had a duty to recognise the escalating climate crisis and cut its ties with BP – one of the world’s biggest producers of fossil fuels.
“As a public institution, the British Museum owes it to its staff, its visitors and its future to play a responsible role in the greatest challenge facing society,” the PCS union said in a statement on Monday. “It is not true that we cannot afford to refuse BP’s oil money. In fact, we cannot afford to accept it.”
The move by staff follows a weekend of protest at the museum, which began on Friday night when protesters dressed as ancient Greek warriors smuggled a four-metre Trojan horse on to the museum’s forecourt. The protest was in response to the exhibition Troy: Myth and Reality, which is described as “supported by BP”.
On Saturday, 1,500 supporters took part in a day of protests, occupying 11 of the museum’s rooms, with speeches, singalongs, and talks by campaigners from West Papua and Senegal. (See NOTE below)
The protest is the latest escalation in the campaign to end fossil fuel sponsorship at the UK’s leading cultural venues. In October, the Royal Shakespeare Company ditched its sponsorship deal with BP, after a campaign from artists, environmentalists and members of the public.
John McEvoy writing for The Canary (9th November 2018) reports on BP's dubious record in a region occupied by Indonesia in a "land grab" and that has resulted in the dispossession of the Indigenous People of their land and natural resources:
Posing as a doctor, British investigative journalist Michael Gillard snuck into occupied West Papua to hold BP (British Petroleum) to account for alleged human rights abuses. Though the region is one of the most dangerous in the world for reporters, Gillard managed to reveal that BP’s activities appear to be causing a “slow motion genocide” while the company is extracting “high speed profit”. The occupation of West Papua
After Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands in 1949, the latter soon saw the “unmistakable beginning of the formation of a Papuan state” on the colonially divided island of New Guinea (part of which the Netherlands had controlled). As Australian journalist John Pilger reported, however, the Kennedy administration in the US ensured that Indonesia retained control over what, in the words of a White House adviser, was “a few thousand miles of cannibal land”.
The West Papuans were conned into having an “Act of Free Choice” over their independence. In 1969, roughly 1,000 of 800,000 West Papuans ‘voted‘ (“at gunpoint”) to remain part of Indonesia.
West Papua remains under Indonesian occupation today. Indonesia also continues to attack countries that support West Papuan self-determination.
The reason for the international community’s overwhelming silence over this brutal affair is quite simple: West Papua’s massive natural wealth. In the 1960s, British, US, and Australian corporations carved up the region’s natural resources. Indonesia could then rely on the same countries’ support for its brutal, genocidal regime. This included the massacre of “at least half a million” left-wing Indonesians, and the invasion and occupation of East Timor between 1975 and 1976.
Nearly five years ago in the Guardian thread Keep it in the ground - Oil and gas companies, Mark Brown and Terry Macalister posted this article (Sun 19 Apr 2015) under the headline:
Campaigner says attempts by oil companies such as BP and Shell to ‘artwash’ their image are done simply to gain prestige and nullify local protests
Oil companies are sponsoring the arts around the world on an “epidemic” scale as a cynical PR strategy to improve their reputation, a new book argues.
Mel Evans, a campaigner who five years ago was one of two activists to gatecrash Tate Britain’s summer party and pour molasses on the floor of the gallery, has written Artwash, which explores the scale and impact of oil arts sponsorship. It is published on Monday to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Evans argues that oil companies sponsor the arts for two reasons. In London, for example, BP wants the prestige of being associated with the UK’s leading arts organisations. Companies also try to sponsor the arts where they face local protests.
Evans said Shell had tried to sponsor folk festivals on the west coast of Ireland, where their Rossport gas pipeline has been a controversial issue for more than a decade. Statoil sponsors art projects in Canada because it is “trying to secure a political relationship in order to access the tar sands there”.
“If we are to consider a future beyond fossil fuel and that’s what the divestment movement and climate movement is looking towards, we can’t let our minds be filtered by big oil. Corporate sponsorship poses a threat to us … it is a cynical PR strategy.
“Oil companies like BP don’t do this sponsorship generously, they do it because they desperately want an association with galleries like Tate and the British Museum in order to cover up damage that they are doing around the world and ‘artwash’ their image. They don’t deserve this public image scoring and we want to take that away from them.”
The book argues that the campaigns against oil sponsorship resonate with historic campaigns to end tobacco and arms sponsorship of cultural events.
In the UK, BP has a five-year, £10m sponsorship deal with Tate Britain, the Royal Opera House, British Museum and National Portrait Gallery that is due to expire in 2017.
All four institutions vigorously defend the association. Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum said: “BP has been by far our best corporate friend, certainly our longest standing and most faithful corporate friend. For the last 15 years or so BP have been a major factor in enabling the museum to be the museum it is today – putting on major exhibitions in London, sending them to the regions and operating internationally.
“What would you want companies to do with their profits? Do you want them to spend them in a way that benefits the public or not?
Of course BP are doing this because they think it is good for them as well as out of a sense of corporate responsibility – but do you not want companies to exercise social responsibility by doing things that help big institutions serve the public better?”
Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate, asked if the protesters wanted BP to give up all its charitable activity. He said: “BP is a company working worldwide who have a special interest in the UK and they give quite large sums of money to the arts, they give much larger sums of money to charities. If we’re looking at BP’s sponsorship of the arts, we should be looking at BP’s sponsorship of a vast range of community and social facilities across the country.
“Those people who campaign should be perhaps looking at money which goes to other causes should be called into question.”
He said BP had been sponsoring the arts for more than 25 years, adding: “They have not significantly increased the sum as a result of poor publicity that they have had elsewhere, it has been a consistent practice to put large sums of money into the arts and other causes … they put a large sum of money into the London Olympics for instance.”
Campaigners argue that the money Tate gets from BP is an “embarrassingly small” amount and this year won a legal battle for the gallery to reveal how much money it received over a 17-year period. The total was £3.8m, given in annual amounts varying between £150,000 and £330,000 – an average of £224,000 a year. The money helps pays for Tate Britain’s permanent collection.
“If you look at it against the sums of money we get from other companies it is certainly not embarrassingly small,” said Serota. “At Tate Britain it represents something like 20% of our sponsorship income, that is a significant sum of money and it is a material sum in terms of what we are able to present to the public.
“If you look at other national collections or museums there are very few if any companies sponsoring the bedrock of work in terms of showing collections. Most are attached to much more high-profile activity and exhibitions. The fact that BP are prepared to put this money on what is seen as the bedrock activity of Tate is to their credit. They could probably get a much higher profile if they were to sponsor an individual exhibition.”
Serota said there had been a 30% reduction in grant in aid since 2010, which means Tate has to raise an extra £10m a year, and that BP’s contribution is a “significant element”.
Alex Beard, the Royal Opera House’s chief executive and the former deputy director of Tate, rejected any suggestion that BP’s money would be easily replaceable. “That is patently obviously not the case,” he said. “Our artistic ambition inevitably outstrips the available level of resource and if it didn’t it would be time to hand the keys over to someone else.”
There are always too many ideas to fund and not enough donors with the cash, he added. Beard said BP was one of a number of long-term partners – including Coutts and Deloitte, who “have been with us all the way”.
“BP have stuck with the Royal Opera House through thick and thin over, in our case, 25 years and they have responded in changes to what our artistic ambitions have been and how we want to engage with audiences.”
BP, meanwhile, says it is proud of its arts sponsorship, calling its sponsorship of the four organisations “one of the most significant long-term corporate investments in UK arts and culture”.
A BP spokesman said: “We are aware that some disagree with our support for these institutions. But as a major company headquartered in the UK, we believe it is right that we contribute to the wider community, and not only through our business activities. Having long-term relationships helps to develop partnerships that are beneficial to both the institution and BP.”
Evans, meanwhile, hopes her book will be a call to arms for a movement that was growing rapidly around the world. She said there were campaigns emerging in Norway, US, Canada, Brazil. “I hope Artwash can consolidate the arguments that we are all articulating and mobilise more and more artists and cultural workers who want to preserve the sector from the hands of big oil.”
Back in 2018 Molly Scott Cato in this opinion piece in the Guardian (Wed 12 Dec 2018) references Neil Young as an artist and activist calling out dirty money in the sponsorship of cultural events and institutions. Here are some extracts from the piece:
Those attending the COP24 climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland, this week have been greeted by a bizarre sight: an artistic celebration of one of the main fuels responsible for destroying the global climate. Katowice is the centre of Poland’s coal industry, and despite hosting a conference that represents the last chance saloon when it comes to taking meaningful action on climate change, local politicians pride themselves on the black stuff. Perhaps we could have expected no different when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change decided on such an inappropriate venue and to allow coal companies to sponsor the talks.
If we do make it through climate change with some form of civilisation intact, we will look back at some of the things we are doing now with the moral repugnance we feel towards slavery. There are legitimate parallels here. Climate change will most hurt those yet to be born. Our failure to make the dramatic changes needed to our economy and society means we are behaving as if we own the lives of future generations and have a right to steal their lives from them.
Art plays a key role in recording contemporary life, but because it is exploratory and imaginative it also invites us to challenge the assumptions we live by. In Katowice there is a counter-exhibition on coal by art students, drawing attention to the “dark side of coal”. Meanwhile the campaign movement Art Not Oil, which has been pushing for an end to oil sponsorship of the arts, ran a parallel protest exhibition alongside the British Museum’s I Object show in opposition to financial backing from BP – a company that proudly boasts it is one of the most significant corporate investors in UK arts and culture. Performers acted as “rebel curators”, presenting objects to the public that represent BP’s complicity in climate breakdown. Just as in Bristol, where the Green lord mayor, Cleo Lake, has banished paintings related to the slave trade from her office, so galleries should shun BP funding.
Musicians are also challenging corporate sponsorship. Neil Young is due to play a large concert in Hyde Park next summer. Recently he criticised the event’s sponsor, Barclays, declaring the bank a “fossil-fuel-funding entity”. Young said such sponsorship was incompatible with his beliefs about the climate, and that he was seeking to rectify the situation. Yesterday he claimed victory, saying the concert was now proceeding without Barclays as a sponsor.
Others need to follow his lead. And perhaps Young and other musicians concerned about climate change will also need to think carefully about the carbon footprint of performing concerts around the globe.
Neil Young has been on tour campaigning against the expansion of oil
sands projects in his native Canada. Northern Alberta's aboriginal
community says pollution from the mines is affecting their lives. But
the government says the natural resource will benefit every citizen.
Al Jazeera's Daniel Lak reports from Toronto.
Neil Young has been as vocal in this as he has before in other abuses of industrial and political power for more than a half century.
In this video we can see how Neil Young has answered the
calls for help from the Sioux Tribe. "Indian Givers" was written and
recorded within hours in reply to the encroachment on sacred native
lands by oil companies planning to lay a pipeline.
This would cross sacred burial grounds and the largest water aquifer in
the United States. This also is in direct opposition to a treaty that
the Sioux received from the U.S. government.
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