Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Like it or not, BP doesn’t have the luxury of saying: “Oh, we’ll do something less profitable but better for the planet.” Capitalism chews you up and spits you out if you do that. “Shareholder value” is not a consulting gimmick, or at least not only that; it is a very real disciplinary force.</p><p>All of this, to be clear, is not to absolve BP of responsibility. Rather, it is to make a case about how we should understand the problems we face – that is, not as a problem of greedy individual firms, but a system rigged against positive change.</p><p>“The problem,” the political economist Geoff Mann has written, “is not that capitalism is a conspiracy of greedy people. The problem is that capitalism, as a way of organising our collective life, does its best to force us to be greedy – and if that is true, then finger-pointing at nasty CEOs and investment bankers may be morally satisfying, but fails to address the problem.” Substitute “greedy firms” for Mann’s “greedy people”, and this was exactly Marx’s point about capitalism and its coercive powers. Private individuals do not make history under conditions of our own choosing, but neither do businesses.</p><p>In short, the problem is not BP or indeed any other individual company. The problem is that BP and its fossil-fuel peers operate within a system that requires them to invest and operate in ways that are deleterious to the environment."</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/03/bp-green-ambitions-climate-emergency-capitalism" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theguardian.com/commentisfree/</span><span class="invisible">2025/mar/03/bp-green-ambitions-climate-emergency-capitalism</span></a> </p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BP" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BP</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/FossilFuels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FossilFuels</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/ClimateChange" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateChange</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GlobalWarming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GlobalWarming</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Capitalism</span></a></p>