The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has sparked all sorts of speculation about its impact on the future of BP – until recently the UK’s largest listed company – and whether Barack Obama can use the issue as leverage to push through his climate change and clean energy policies.
But the implications may yet be broader than that. It may just be used to hasten a push to reassess the way the world measures economic growth, and by extension corporate profits, by including hitherto unmeasured indicators such as environmental costs, and giving value to other assets such as biodiversity.
There are a bunch of videos doing the rounds on YouTube that highlight the greatest miss-hits of the now-vilified BP CEO Tony Hayward. The one where he says he wants to get his life back is popular, but the most relevant one to BP shareholders is the speech he made to a bunch of graduates from Stanford University last year.
It was when he lamented how BP, under the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ moniker championed by his predecessor, Lord Browne, had become so infested with people focused on environmental issues and “working to save the world” that they had lost track of the fact that “our primary purpose in life is to create value for shareholders.”
In retrospect, BP shareholders might have wished that Hayward paid rather more attention to those environmental issues, or at least to some basic risk management. It emerges that BP was unprepared for an oil spill because it had not contemplated the possibility that one might occur.
There are a bunch of videos doing the rounds on YouTube that highlight the greatest miss-hits of the now-vilified BP CEO Tony Hayward. The one where he says he wants to get his life back is popular, but the most relevant one to BP shareholders is the speech he made to a bunch of graduates from Stanford University last year.
It was when he lamented how BP, under the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ moniker championed by his predecessor, Lord Browne, had become so infested with people focused on environmental issues and “working to save the world” that they had lost track of the fact that “our primary purpose in life is to create value for shareholders
