BP exploits British Museum for its image: museum stops collaborating with it

A group of more than ninety cultural professionals has written an open letter to the British Museum calling on the institution to end its long-standing partnership with British Petroleum (BP), whose activities are deemed to be at odds with the museum’s humanistic values. The initiative comes from French archaeologist Natasha Reynolds and is in the wake of initiatives against the highly criticized sponsorship that the oil company has been granting to the museum for years.

The letter begins by mentioning the problems of climate change, which, the missive reads, “threatens our security and well-being, will exacerbate existing global inequalities, and poses particularly catastrophic risks for indigenous peoples. We are deeply concerned about this situation and believe that we must all act to reduce the damage that has already been caused by rising global temperatures.” The signatories therefore openly call for an “end to your sponsoring relationship with BP.” Transitioning away from fossil fuels, the cultural professionals write, “is critical if we are to avoid the worst outcomes of the climate crisis in the next century. This requires major economic and social changes that will affect the profitability of fossil fuel companies as they exist today. Recently, some companies, including BP, have announced ambitions to become ’zero-emissions by 2050’ companies, seeking to create the impression that they can be trusted to manage the energy transition on their own. BP continues to use sophisticated public relations techniques to manage its image and discourage scrutiny of its activities.”

“We believe,” the letter further reads, “that BP’s continued sponsorship of the British Museum should be viewed in this light, as part of a reputation management strategy. BP is leveraging the British Museum’s status as a highly respected institution and the public’s love of museums and heritage to associate its brand with values of high culture, art, education, sophistication, reason and knowledge. These values have strong meaning and appeal within our society and, especially, among our policy and civic decision makers. In reality, BP remains a huge oil and gas company, highly specialized in the extraction and processing of fossil fuels. Its investments in low-carbon energy are dwarfed by the $9 billion it is investing in fossil fuels in 2021. Several analyses have found that BP’s plans will not provide zero emissions by 2050. Its goals are unattainable without massive use of unproven carbon capture technologies. Although many known oil and gas reserves must be left in the ground if global warming is to be kept within the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Climate Agreement, the company is continuing to look for new sources to exploit and plans to continue drilling in 2050. Its plans to reduce emissions also completely ignore its 20 percent stake in Rosneft, which accounts for about a third of BP’s total oil and gas production. Rosneft is embarking on a $134 billion project to drill in the Arctic, where it plans to extract about 6 billion tons of new crude oil.”

In short, according to the letter’s signatories, “BP actively and knowingly helped promote climate collapse when we urgently needed to work together to solve it. The harmful impacts of BP’s extractive activities on indigenous peoples and frontline communities are well documented. This is a company whose activities are completely at odds with the values of humanistic research and education. We are acutely aware that the U.K. museum and heritage sector has suffered greatly from cuts in financial support over the past decade and is facing unprecedented challenges from the current pandemic. Many of us work closely with British Museum employees and consider them personal friends and valued colleagues. We know from their outstanding work that these curators and researchers deserve to be adequately funded. However, we do not believe that BP offers a necessary or sustainable solution. BP’s annual contribution represents a very small percentage of the museum’s total income, estimated at less than 0.5 percent, and has been described by a former trustee as ’not unattainable elsewhere.’”

The British Museum’s leadership on this issue, according to the letter, would have far-reaching consequences. “Rejecting further sponsorship from BP,” according to the petitioners, “would send a strong signal that fossil fuel companies, like tobacco and gun companies, are no longer welcome in cultural life. By diminishing BP’s ’social license to operate,’ it would help support our society’s transition away from fossil fuels. It would undermine BP’s efforts to deflect criticism of its activities through sponsorship and show BP that it must work even harder to transform its business if it is to find respectability. We believe that ending this sponsorship agreement would also improve the Museum’s public image and, in particular, strengthen the Museum’s ability to inspire children and youth, who are very aware of the threats posed by the climate crisis.”

In conclusion, the signatories mentioned how other major cultural institutions have already terminated their agreements with BP: the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Tate, and the Edinburgh International Festival have in fact already ended their partnerships with the oil company. In addition, the National Theatre, the British Film Institute, the Southbank Centre, and the Edinburgh Science Festival have also given up partnerships with fossil fuel companies. The British Museum is thus increasingly isolated, but now, the letter concludes, “it has a significant opportunity to reassert a leading role in its field by taking an important moral stance on the central challenge of this century and affirming that the promotion of fossil fuels has no place within our great cultural institutions. As colleagues and as friends, we respectfully ask you, the Director and Trustees of the British Museum, to do whatever is necessary to end the Museum’s association with BP and to commit publicly to do so as soon as possible.”

BP exploits British Museum for its image: museum stops collaborating with it

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