In February 2025, BP announced a total reversal of the modest green ambitions it had launched with a fanfare in 2020. The plan then was to cut oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, boosting investment in low-carbon energy by a factor of ten, on the way to becoming a net zero energy company by 2050. Instead of aiming to reduce production to 1.5 million barrels of oil and gas per day, it will now, instead, increase its investment in oil and gas to £7.9bn, aiming to reach an output of 2.4m barrels per day (bpd) by 2030. That means starting production at ten large new oil and gas projects in the next two years, with up to ten more by the end of the decade.
Global carbon emissions must be reduced by 45% by 2030 to have any chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. This is a conservative estimate, as the whole planet verges on the 1.5C level; Europe exceeds that target year on year. The climate scientist James Hansen has said the target of limiting global temperature rise even to 2C is defunct as global energy use rises. The last two UN Climate Change conferences have been in countries whose major exports are oil and gas, who worked with the imperialist nations to ensure that transitioning away from fossil fuel use was not on the agenda.
The planet is edging closer to environmental tipping points, where positive feedback loops kick in, locking in temperature rises and climate chaos. Already we are seeing more frequent and ferocious floods, droughts, wildfires, and storms, increasing loss of sea ice, glaciers, and fresh water supplies. But for BP and other capitalist companies, the profit motive trumps all other concerns.
In the last two years, BP has lost a quarter of its market value, with profits falling year on year from £22.4bn in 2022 to £7.9bn in 2024, whilst amassing debt of around £18bn. With rivals in Europe and the US increasing their market value, there was an existential threat to the company with the possibility of a takeover. US hedge fund Elliott Management has taken a 5% stake in BP. This aggressive fund manager has previously taken stakes in companies that have lost market value, demanding fundamental change, as with pharmaceutical company GSK and housebuilding company Taylor Wimpey. Besides cutting investments in low carbon energy and boosting production in oil and gas, BP will sell off over £15bn of assets in non-fossil fuel production and cut 5% of its workforce.
BP announced its green ambitions at the height of environmental standards promoted by the biggest companies, investors, and capitalist governments intent on showing how capitalism would save the planet. Under pressure from a growing environmental movement, it needed to show how capitalists could play a progressive part without accepting democratic regulation. However, the logic of capital has shown these ideologues to be pure fantasists. Shell scrapped a plan for ‘advanced recycling’ of plastic polymers as ‘unfeasible’. Volkswagen delayed a pledge to reduce carbon emissions for cars and light commercial vehicles by 30%. Giant US investment firms Black Rock and Vanguard now openly oppose environmental standards. In the banking world, JP Morgan became the sixth major US bank to leave the Net Zero Banking Alliance. With the capitalist crisis deepening, the multinationals drop all pretence of caring about the majority of people and life on the planet in their insatiable quest for profits.
In opposition, Britain’s Labour Party announced a £28bn green investment plan, but that was quietly dropped before the election. In October 2024, it pledged that the government would kickstart the country’s first Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, along with funds from oil and gas multinationals, including BP.
CCS is dirty, dangerous and not been proved to work at scale to make a real difference to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. In any case, by early March 2025, the Labour government was planning to scrap the plan.
Now the Labour government must decide on the future of the Rosebank (Britain’s biggest untapped oil field, see p14) and Jackdaw gas fields. The decisions to greenlight these projects were taken under the last Conservative government but were ruled unlawful after being challenged by climate campaigners. 13 more licences for oil and gas extraction are due for review. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has already consulted on revised environmental guidance and is expected to report back in spring. The Treasury under Rachel
Reeves is in favour of the projects going into production, as well as a third runway at Heathrow.
Capitalism and their governments will not allow any obstacle to stop the capital accumulation process. As Karl Marx wrote ‘Après moi, le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation’. We must destroy capitalism before it destroys us.
David Hetfield
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 305 April / May 2025
