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Comment by datawaslost | Hacker News Reader

Huh! It’s not every day you see your work called out in The Guardian as “insidious propaganda”!

I worked for Ogilvy and Mather in the 00s and made the Carbon footprint stuff they mention, at least one version of it. Didn’t come up with the concept or wording, but was responsible for the web implementation in the US.

AMA, I guess

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Not my proudest work, but this was pre-Deepwater and BP was honestly putting a lot of new money towards green and renewable projects. At the time, it felt like a step in the right direction.

Do you think it was wrong to do in hindsight?

It doesn't keep me up at night. In retrospect, it was probably one of the most dubious things I worked on in a decade of advertising, but I (mostly) left the industry because it was morally neutral, not outright wrong. It just felt like a big waste of talent and money, rather than "insidious"

I know someone who joined Shell with the hope of helping it transition to renewable technologies (and who was actively lured with that promise), and who later quit after they realized that Shell was just trying to get all capable people who could be working on sustainability stuff to work for them instead, then drip-feed them promises of change while tempting them to work on other projects and give up on those sustainability things with big sacks o' money. One might almost say "embrace, extend (the usage of oil), extinguish".

With hindsight, do you think something like that was happening at BP too?

> With hindsight, do you think something like that was happening at BP too?

I'm pretty sure BP spent more on marketing their sustainability initiatives than they actually spent on their sustainability initiatives.

Maybe! I think the one thing I've learned from my biggest clients is that slight % increases in sales for companies of that size equal billions of dollars, so there's so much room for waste. It doesn't have to be villainous - they can spend $50m on renewable tech and it just doesn't matter - it's a drop in the bucket compared to other things, and can fail without consequences. I bet it attracted a lot of great talent, and I bet a lot of that was lured towards more profitable things with big bags of money.

Oh cool, thank you.

I’ve read that oil companies were well aware of how climate change is going to develop based on their sales volume and the resulting oil consumption.

Assuming that's true for BP. To which detail was the climate change impact communicated to you? Was it an explicit requirement to focus public interest away from BP?

What is your opinion on the article in this post?

I can't really speak to BP's higher-level strategy, but this was the mid-2000s. The fact that an oil company was saying anything about climate change felt like a step forward. Other oil companies' ads were all about American workers and generic shots of sunsets over oil fields, BP wanted to position themselves as the "green" gas station at a time when that was becoming more a concern - not just with climate change but overall. At that point, BP had a pretty good environmental record compared to competitors like Exxon, who was still reeling from the Valdez disaster - so the requirement would've been to focus public interest on BP, not away from it.

But oil companies don't run ads telling people not to buy gasoline, so you've got to come at it from a slightly different angle. Luckily, "Greener than Exxon" was a pretty low bar, so they didn't need to talk about carbon taxes or emissions. Personal energy consumption has been a part of the discourse since the 70s, and probably fit in well - virtually no one will actually change their habits in any meaningful way, but will probably come out of it feeling better about themselves and BP.

The article itself seemed kinda all over the place. I agree that the world would be a better place if her preferences would've been enacted fifteen years ago, but I'm not sure that BP's advertising campaign had that much to do with it. It wasn't 4-D chess, it was "BP = Green = Good", and literally blew up in their face a few years later when Deepwater exploded.

Honestly, the only way for grassroots efforts to do anything is to become less dependent on these doubleplus ungood corporations. I think your work is incredibly valuable, and given the quality of the Guardian recently I wouldn't be surprised to learn they're criticising your work because it encourages people to consoom less.

Bit of a technical question for your AMA, how do you see the tradeoffs in carbon footprints if supply chains shorten? There's efficiencies of scale balanced against cost of moving materials that I assume means the smallest carbon footprint for a given lifestyle requires some extended supply chains, but probably shorter than what we have today. Any thoughts on that?

It's interesting how much more complicated and better thought-out that stuff is now than it was fifteen years ago. I think supply chains and lifecycles are a huge part of things, and it was barely a part of our thinking back then. It was more like "hey did you know taking a plane burns carbon too?"

There is this one thing I always wonder about, not just in this particular context, but generally about what is seen as "greedy" corporations, politicians and so on.

Was the conversation ever blatantly villainous or was it a bit more veiled, as is the public discourse?

What would the unveiled villainous conversation sound like?

I think this stuff is a lot less complex than people think. Companies just want to increase sales with effective marketing that makes them look better than their competitors.

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