Why I Told BP to Come Clean About Their Interplanetary Escape Pod

I sat nervously near the end of an aisle, somewhere in the middle of the hall. It was BP’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in London’s Excel Centre, on 12 April 2012. The room contained several hundred shareholders, and I was waiting for my turn to address the board of directors. As the holder of a (single) BP share I had every right to be there, but to avoid undue attention I was wearing an uncharacteristically sharp suit and had grown a neat little beard for the occasion. It seemed to have worked so far – the security guards were all ignoring me.

After a range of questions from shareholders and campaigners, my turn came at last, and I stepped up to the microphone. Despite my nervousness, my voice sounded calm as I addressed the board:

“Mr Chairman, we’ve already heard that, according to your annual report, you believe that fossil fuels will still make up 80% of global energy use in 2030, leading to a 28% rise in CO2 emissions. This will lock us into disastrous runaway climate change. So my question is: what’s the escape plan? I mean, the really scary stuff will start to kick in over the next 20 to 30 years, and a lot of people in this room will still be around then. So I can only assume that there’s some kind of interplanetary escape pod being built in a secret BP bunker, to carry the board, executives and senior shareholders away as society collapses around us.”

Laughter began to ripple around the room as I continued: “I’d like to know how many spaces are available on the ship, and where the board is planning to escape to – Mars? The moon? Somewhere deep below the Earth’s surface, or another solar system altogether? Also, are tickets available to shareholders, and how do we book our places onboard?”

The board refused to answer the question, which means that they definitely have an escape pod, and just don’t want to share it. On hearing this, I gave a cry of “BP are leaving us all to die! We’re all going to be killed by climate change!” and tumbled to the floor, dead. This was the cue for eight more people around the room to collapse, groaning, into the aisles.

There was a moment of confusion as security guards came running over, and then someone helpfully shouted out, “They’re not dead, they’re just demonstrating!”, prompting more laughter. I decided to stay dead and let security carry me bodily out of the hall, while others in the group were dragged, escorted, or explained that they’d be happy to move of their own free will as soon as BP pulled out of tar sands extraction. I tried cheerfully explaining to shareholders as I passed that numerous studies have shown that it would be perfectly possible for everyone on the planet to have a good quality of life without the use of fossil fuels. I’m not sure if their grins were in response to this statement, the stunt we’d just pulled, or the fact that one of our group was still loudly refusing to move until he got his ticket to the space pod.

We’re so used to having to deal with corporations as though they’re huge, formless beasts. The The AGM is one of the rare opportunities we get to put some human faces on the corporate monster and look them in the eyes. Before our sudden attack of climate death, the Board had faced challenging questions from representatives of Gulf Coast communities whose health and livelihoods had been wrecked by BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster, which has still not been cleaned up. Their statements were followed by a challenge from Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Indigenous Environmental Network, about the dubious legality of BP’s tar sands leases on First Nations territory in Canada. In response, the Board just reeled out some prepared statements that completely ignored the questions.

This isn’t really surprising. They don’t have answers to these questions. All pretence at being a “sustainable” oil company and going “Beyond Petroleum” has now been dropped, and their entire focus is on short-term profitability. That’s why we might as well ask them about their interplanetary escape plans – we’re just as likely to get a sensible answer to that as to anything else.

The combination of all of this – the questions from frontline communities and campaigners, our die-in and dramatic ejection, plus shareholder uproar about the CEO’s over-generous multi-million pay bonus – led to blanket press coverage the next day, from the Guardian to the New York Times to the Financial Times and even the Sun.

These kinds of actions won’t bring down the fossil fuel industry by themselves, but they help to chip away at the veneer of social responsibility these companies hide behind to expose the brutal profit-driven reality beneath. They’re also an important reminder of just how powerful we can be. When “ordinary people” are organised, determined and with right on their side, they can beat the corporate PR machines. Plus, I was in the Wall Street Journal asking BP about a spaceship, so that’s another personal life goal achieved.

The BP AGM action was coordinated by the UK Tar Sands Network (www.no-tar-sands.org). We’ll be doing it all again for the Shell AGM on May 22nd, which is happening simultaneously in London and the Hague. Why not join us? Contact info@no-tar-sands.org for more information and to get involved.

 A longer version of this article was first published with images by New Internationalist, at www.newint.org

By Danny Chivers (@chiversdanny)