BP’s Lord Browne is Still Aiming to Go ‘Beyond Petroleum’
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
commonly attributed to John Maynard Keynes
The Financial Times’s ‘Monday Interview‘ of Lord Browne was headlined ‘Beyond BP: John Browne on the oil company’s green U-turn’. Aged 77 and now standing for the Chancellorship election at Cambridge university, it was his chance to reminisce over 40 years of career experience at BP, with 12 years as the company’s CEO. Despite the headline, he had precious little to say about the oil company’s dramatic shift away from ‘green’ investments back to oil and gas under its new CEO. As the FT put it: “Browne demurs, in his characteristically circumspect way, saying he ‘doesn’t really approve’ of former CEOs weighing in on the choices of their successors.”
Yet, by the end of the interview, one gets the feeling of an old record stuck in tunes of yesteryear, with nary a nod to newer melodies brought on by altered circumstances. Lord Browne still hankers for an age ‘beyond petroleum’, despite every possible sign that screams failure for the green cheerleaders in the past few years.
Is Lord Browne, like his intellectual comrade Ed Miliband – the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – condemned to endlessly sing the praises of the ‘green transition’, despite the many solar and wind energy companies and electric vehicle and battery manufacturers giving up the ghost?
Hasn’t BP’s experience taught Lord Browne anything? Can the Church of Climate cast a spell so blinding on its adherents that the iron laws of physics and economics matter naught?
The ‘Beyond Petroleum’ Debacle
BP was the first among the big European oil majors that took to the climate crusade with the usual glossy corporate brochures extolling ‘social responsibility’ and ‘environmental sustainability’. Its then-CEO, Lord Browne, had declared in a speech at Stanford University in 2002 that: “We need to reinvent the energy business. We need to go ‘beyond petroleum’.” As small-lettered ‘bp’, the woke green company became intent on going full tilt into solar and wind energy, the company’s $200 million re-branding exercise heralding the onset of its two decades-long share price decline relative to its US peers.
The market value of the once-great British Petroleum – unabashedly nationalistic and pro-fossil fuels – has essentially treaded water since 2000 while its competitors ExxonMobil and Chevron have multiplied several times. In 2020, newly appointed CEO Bernard Looney doubled down on Browne’s green wokery by announcing a 40% cut in oil and gas output within a decade in its ambitions to be “net zero” by 2050. While both Chevron and ExxonMobil rebounded from their lows in 2021 during the Covid lockdowns, ‘bp’ – in small letters to denote the company’s green PR strategy — has since languished.
Compare BP CEOs Browne and Looney to the unapologetic Mike Wirth, CEO of Chevron. In an interview with the Financial Times in 2022, he said that the premature transition from fossil fuels to green energy, a move to decarbonise the economy, has sparked “unintended consequences”, such as energy supply issues that are already widespread in Europe and emerging in California.
Mr Wirth noted that even though renewables, such as wind and solar, have been invested heavily in by Western governments over the last two decades to decarbonise grids, fossil fuels still are a large percentage of power generation. He said:
The conversation [about energy] in the developed world for sure has skewed towards climate, taking affordability and security for granted. … The reality is, [fossil fuel] is what runs the world today. It’s going to run the world tomorrow and five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.
It is no surprise that BP, run by its virtue-signalling climate warrior CEOs and haemorrhaging value relative to its peers for the past two decades, inevitably began to yield to the forces of physics and markets. On February 1st 2023, the Wall Street Journal’s business page led with a headline ‘BP’s CEO Plays Down Renewables Push as Returns Lag’. Its then-chief executive Looney admitted that its financial performance was dragged down by the “net zero by 2050” strategy of divesting from fossil fuels in favour of low-margin solar and wind energy businesses. As we saw, its shares, along with European counterparts such as Shell which are equally zealous in their climate credentials, have lagged over the past several years behind American companies less sold on ‘net zero’ objectives such as ExxonMobil and Chevron.
In a further development in February this year – five years after BP set ambitious targets to cut production of oil and gas by 40% by 2030 – its new CEO Murray Auchincloss unveiled a “shocking strategy U-turn” with a new emphasis on oil and gas investment and a “massive downgrade of its commitment to green energy”. The business editor of the Standard, Jonathan Prynn, noted the special irony of the hitherto-woke BP as it “pivots to the ‘drill, baby, drill’ world proclaimed by Donald Trump”.
Lord Browne is as Delusionary as Ed Miliband
In a speech to the Royal Academy of Engineering earlier this month, Lord Browne espoused his views in greater detail. He starts with a litany of familiar climate alarmist assertions, which include human-caused global warming, increasing incidence of extreme weather events, increasing spread of disease and disrupted food supplies and the danger of ‘tipping points’ which might accelerate climate disruption. For evidence, he suggests that one just has “to ask the people” about the Los Angeles fires or the floods in Germany and Pakistan.
In these claims, there is little daylight between Lord Browne and the hyperbolic UN Secretary-General António Guterres (of ‘global boiling’ fame) or a Greenpeace activist.
In arguments that parallel closely those professed by climate zealot Ed Miliband, Lord Browne sees “the dramatic growth in the use of renewables as sources of electricity driven by a very sharp fall in costs across the world. Wind and solar are becoming the first choice for new power generation, more commercially competitive and deliverable than all other available sources of energy including natural gas”. Neither Browne nor ‘Mad Ed‘ poses the prior question as to why solar and wind power companies, if they are so competitive, continually need government subsidies and mandates for their operations.
While BP in the real world is cycling back to once again focusing on oil and gas investments, Lord Browne looks to the future for a new supermajor which is “beyond petroleum”. Who was it who said that insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results?
One would have thought that after BP having gone full circle from two decades of a shareholder-impoverishing green strategy to a Trumpian ‘drill, baby, drill’ one, Lord Browne would have expressed serious reservations about ‘beyond petroleum’ in the FT interview. But the leopard cannot change his spots, and no, when the facts change, he doesn’t change his mind, possibly unlike another peer, Lord Keynes.
This article was first published in The Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2025/04/19/bps-lord-browne-is-still-aiming-to-go-beyond-petroleum/