go beyond oil

The masters at Marvel comics would struggle to find bad guys worse than these.

Take two of the world’s biggest environmental villains – Russian Rosneft (special powers: oil leaks. 7,526 in 2009 alone) and British BP (special powers: oil spills. Gulf of Mexico, 2010).

We've released a report today with partners from Platform and Oil Change International about oil investment and increasingly risky sources of oil. Download the report here (pdf).

Lorne Stockman, from Oil Change International, blogs about the issues covered in the report:

Is a key valuation metric used by analysts to assess oil companies pushing big oil towards riskier and riskier projects?

Want to be this man? Apparently not.

Yesterday someone pointed me to an article on the BBC lamenting the drop in young brains chasing jobs in the dirty oil sector. It seems that having lost the battle for our hearts many moons ago, the oil industry has now officially lost the battle for our minds, too.

Cairn Energy has fired the starting guns on its 2011 Arctic drilling operation.

Their plan is to lug a couple of massive rigs up to the icy waters around Greenland and drill four exploratory holes in the seabed.

So the US government is suing BP (along with a bunch of other oil spill sidekicks).  The announcement this morning sent investors running scared and wiping a cool £2.8 billion off BP's share price. Shame the wildlife don't get lawyers.

From Chevron to Shell, Nigeria to the North Sea, the slippery mask of big oil was briefly removed this week.

On Tuesday we learned from a leaked internal company report that Transocean – the operators of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig – had a partial “blow-out” on one of its North Sea rigs only months before the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe.