We haven’t read much – if anything – about it in the press, but one of the things that Tony Hayward did when he took over as BP’s CEO was to quietly drop one of the values that had been adopted and trumpeted by his predecessor, Lord John Brown. The value was green.
I am sure there is absolutely no link with the ecological horrors unfolding since the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, but whether or not the Financial Times today is right that Hayward’s first response to the news of the disaster was to ask the question, “How the hell could this happen?”, it might just be worth the subsequent investigators asking the question whether that quiet change in the company’s declared values was a more significant than we might have realised?
I can’t help but agree with Simon Barnes in today’s Times, when he argues that, in so many respects, “our addiction to oil is madness.”
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