BP

This morning, starting at  5.30am, teams of Greenpeace volunteers have been shutting down BP stations across London. We aim to close dozens down this morning.

Watch the action as it happens - pictures, video and text updates from the teams.

The teams - each named after an animal threatened by BP's reckless oil exploration - fanned out across the capital in their electric and hybrid cars, going station to station and disabling the pumps.

Why today? Because BP is expected to announce later the appointment of Bob Dudley as the company's new head to replace the gaffe-prone Tony Hayward, who led BP during the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Greenpeace USA's Mike Gaworecki reports from the Arctic Sunrise as it makes its way to the Gulf to conduct a three-month expedition documenting the true impacts of the BP Deepwater Disaster on the region's marine life and unique ecosystems.

Since the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig exploded and sank in April, BP has devoted inadequate resources to the oil spill response, withheld information from the American public, and denied access to spill sites to journalists.

So our ship the Arctic Sunrise is heading to the Gulf to do an independent assessment of the impacts. We believe it’s way past time the full, unabridged truth about the extent and nature of this oil catastrophe was told to America and the world.

Read the full blog »

As efforts to contain the oil spill continue, a new slideshow from our US colleagues details the ongoing consequences of the massive slick from the BP Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

And you can see the complete Gulf Oil Spill photoset on Flickr as well.

Greenpeace USA's Joao Talocchi writes from the Gulf of Mexico, where our ground team has been documenting the impacts of BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Today we visited one of the Bird Rehabilitation Centers in Louisiana. We saw dozens of birds, from different species, cleaned of oil with detergent, water and toothbrushes and tagged. They are monitored and then released to the wild. The center has treated and release more then 500 birds so far, a small number if you take into account that more then 550 miles (885Km) of shoreline has been impacted by the Deep Water Horizon disaster.

A couple of months back, we asked you to Rebrand BP by designing a logo that better suits their dirty business (‘Beyond Petroleum’? Or up to their necks in tar sands and deepwater drilling?)

To be honest, your response took us by surprise - not just in quantity (we’ve had well over 2000 entries), but in quality too. Orginally we were planning to ask a panel of designers to judge the entries, but because the response was so amazing we would also like you to pick a winner.

Vote for the new face of BP now »

Our colleagues in the US have been blogging regularly about the ongoing disaster in the gulf and Greenpeace's involvement in the response to the oil spill. Here, Mike Gaworecki sheds some light on the clean-up operation BP has been carrying out on its image.

There's no way to clean up an oil spill. We've seen this time and again - in Alaska's Prince William Sound, for instance, where oil from the Exxon Valdez spill is still having an impact on local ecosystems. Corporations like Exxon or BP that find themselves responsible for an oil spill - or, as was the case for Exxon and now is the case for BP, an oil disaster - are really left with only one option to handle the problem: public relations, damage control and fierce lobbying.

With BP's sponsorship of the Tate gallery under attack from all sides, BP is keen to make out that it doesn't get much in return for its philanthropic support for the arts.

But some emails we've got hold of under a Freedom of Information request give us a little glimpse that, besides using arts sponsorship to cultivate a socially acceptable face for its devastating operations, BP isn't averse to using it to help grease the way towards bigger shareholder profits.

Check out the Rebrand BP competition entries on Flickr

What lies behind BP's very public sponsorship of the arts, I wonder? Is it a selfless desire to spread a little cultural enlightenment down into the ranks of the great British public? Or could it be simply a cynical mechanism to distract attention from the company's terrible record on environment, climate change, and human rights issues?