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Comment by datawaslost | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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"

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