INSTITUTE INDEX: Protesting BP's Olympic greenwash
Number of people arrested last week following a protest at the Olympic Clock in London's Trafalgar Square, where activists posing as representatives of BP and other notorious polluters that are so-called "sustainability partners" for this year's Olympic games had green custard poured over their heads: 6
Number of police officers who made the arrests, for "criminal damage" caused by the custard falling on the square's stone surface, which the protesters promptly mopped up: 25
Number of gallons of toxic crude oil spilled in BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: over 200 million
Number of BP officials who have been arrested so far in connection with Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: 1
Number of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes BP is sponsoring at this year's games: 9
Number of official Olympic vehicles that BP is fueling as the games' "official oil and gas partner": 5,000
Estimated tons of carbon dioxide emissions from Olympic spectators' travel to the games that BP plans to offset: 400,000
Number of metric tons of greenhouse gases BP emitted to the atmosphere in 2011 alone: 61.8 million
Date on which BP closed its solar division, the business on which most of its "Beyond Petroleum" tagline of the early 2000s was premised: 12/21/2011
Number of U.S. Gulf Coast chefs BP sent to the London Olympics to encourage people to visit the region and eat its seafood: 8
Percentage by which the shrimp harvest in Louisiana's Barataria Bay, an area hit particularly hard by the BP oil spill, was down last year compared to the typical catch: over 38
Date on which dozens of BP logos across London were splattered with oil and its advertising billboard tagline "Fuelling the Future" was "subvertised" with the URL "f-ingthefuture.org.uk": 7/5/2012
Date on which a group of artists and environmental activists protesting BP's sponsorship of London's Tate galleries and the company's involvement in tar sands oil exploitation installed a 54-foot, 1.5 ton wind turbine in the gallery after carrying it from Wales: 7/7/2012
Date on which a group of protesters disrupted a BP-sponsored Shakespeare performance at the British Museum in London with a guerrilla performance based on Macbeth, in which three BP "executive witches" lure a museum director to his doom, with one of the protesters saying to laughter and applause, "No more o' this, BP, no more/You mar all with your logo/Here's the smell of oil still/All these shiny exhibits will not sweeten this soiled hand. Oh, oh, oh!/Out, damned sponsor! Out, BP!": 7/22/2012
(Click on figure to go to source. Illustration from GreenwashGold.org.)
Share this article