Boycott BP's Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline Greenwash Meeting, Feb 24th, London

Join us on the picket line and bear witness to the marriage of BP to a compliant NGO

Today(*) BP has invited you, as an NGO or 'socially responsible' investor, to a meeting on the highly controversial Baku Ceyhan oil pipeline. You may be aware that the groups making up the Baku Ceyhan Campaign (ie. Platform, Cornerhouse, the Kurdish Human Rights Project and Friends of the Earth) have not been invited to this meeting. WWF is also staying away in solidarity with the Campaign, while unfortunately maintaining its collaboration with BP on the disastrous Tangguh natural gas project.

This meeting is a blatant attempt to use greenwash to disguise a devastating project, which will see critical climatic and environmental destruction and flagrant violations of human rights.

We - London Rising Tide (LRT) - are asking you to boycott this event, and to join us instead on this 'picket line' at the entrance to the Radisson Edwardian Hotel. We may also be asking you to be a witness to a less-than-auspicious ceremony: the tying together in unholy matrimony of BP and the sort of compliant NGO that will be attending the meeting.

We also call on you to renounce any proposed remunerative collaboration with BP on the pipeline. After all, it seems that Mercy Corps, Save the Children (US) and Care (US) have already signed lucrative pipeline 'Community Investment Programme' deals, thus dispensing with any credibility they may have had in the NGO community and beyond.)

Lastly, we call on you to oppose and monitor critically the pipeline, not to mention BP itself.

The Sunday Times article 'BP accused of cover-up in pipeline deal', is an excellent indication of the way BP and the rest of the consortium have lied to governments and investors in its search for public and private finance, (not that those governments and investors have been exactly scrupulous in their own conduct!).

Collaborations between NGOs and corporations result in the manipulation of those NGOs as pawns, disguising those corporations' true 'profit above all else' mindset and thus giving them unwarranted credibility. The situation here is no different. Thanks for reading, and, in advance, for your support.

London Rising Tide is part of the wider Rising Tide UK network, which seeks to confront creatively the root causes of climate chaos, while seeking local, community-owned solutions to our energy needs. For more information, see www.burningplanet.net or www.risingtide.org.uk
Email:  london@risingtide.org.uk
62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES

* - Today, February 24th 2004 is also a day of action to Stop the Corporate Invasion of Iraq, with an action taking place at Bechtel's London offices at 11 Pilgrim Street (near Blackfriars) between 11am and midday. It's organised by Voices in the Wilderness UK: 07791 486484, 0845 4582564;
www.voicesuk.org We see distinct parallels between this event and our own...
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> * Can BP Keep NGOs Talking?
>  http://www.stratfor.biz/Story.neo?storyId=228315
>Strategic Forecasting Inc
>
>Can BP Keep NGOs Talking?
>Feb 20, 2004
>
>Summary
>
>The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline is presenting a novel problem for
>BP. The pipeline's geopolitical importance to the British and U.S.
>governments makes it a crucial investment for BP, yet threatens another
>major corporate interest: building ties to non-governmental organizations
>(NGOs). BP's "civil society" partners are increasingly open to attack from
>within the NGO community. It is an open question whether BP can balance
>the need to be in on major projects such as BTC against its desire to set
>itself apart from other oil majors by engaging its critics from the
>environmental and human rights realms.
>
>Analysis
>
>BP was the first of the oil supermajors to embrace the idea of social and
>environmental responsibility. A 1997 speech on climate change by CEO Sir
>John Browne signaled a new strategy: BP's goal of outdistancing
>competitors by convincing NGOs and the public that it is genuinely
>concerned with "sustainability" and human rights. BP (and lately its
>Anglo-Dutch rival, Shell) has pursued this strategy with determination,
>despite mixed successes.
>
>BP's strategy of engaging NGOs has come under intense pressure, due to the
>company's central role in projects that campaigners oppose. BP will face
>yet another test next week: London Rising Tide, a small environmental
>protest group that has campaigned against the BTC pipeline, is calling for
>NGOs to boycott a Feb. 24 meeting in London that BP is organizing. The
>purpose of the meeting is to discuss human rights and environmental issues
>surrounding the pipeline.
>
>The boycott call by Rising Tide -- which, like Friends of the Earth, was
>not invited to the meeting -- is unlikely on its own to impact BP's
>engagement strategy, nor will Rising Tide's planned protest outside the
>London hotel where the meeting is to take place. However, Rising Tide has
>attacked several NGOs that are working with BP on pipeline-related issues,
>and these public criticisms of BP's partners could yet cause some damage.
>
>Rising Tide points to three major humanitarian-relief NGOs -- Mercy Corps
>and the U.S. offices of Save the Children and Care International -- that
>it says have signed "lucrative deals to monitor the pipeline, thus
>dispensing with any credibility they may have had in the NGO community."
>
>Environmental and human rights campaigns against the $3.2 billion pipeline
>have kept up pressure on nearly all the entities involved. These range
>from the British government's Export Credit Guarantee Department -- whose
>offices Rising Tide briefly occupied last summer -- to the European Bank
>for Reconstruction and Development and private banks such as Citigroup and
>the Royal Bank of Scotland. In early February, Friends of the Earth
>criticized the Royal Bank of Scotland over its role in financing the
>pipeline, saying the deal violates the Equator Principles -- a voluntary
>code of conduct for the banking sector that RBS has adopted. A day later,
>World Wildlife Fund, the global conservation group, called the pipeline "a
>disaster in waiting" and criticized Citigroup for helping to finance it.
>WWF said Citigroup's involvement in BTC undermines the company's
>"professed commitment S to protecting the environment" -- a commitment for
>which Citigroup had been publicly lauded by Rainforest Action Network, a
>U.S. environmental group, only a few weeks earlier.
>
>BP is in a difficult position. The corporation's problems are partly due
>to U.S. and British desires to route the project in such a way that it
>brings Caspian oil to the Mediterranean, while bypassing both Iran and
>Russia. Thus, the pipeline route reflects geostrategic interests -- and
>throws a spotlight on BP's closeness to Downing Street in particular --
>rather than on the engineering and cost rationale that BP would apply if
>it were not an instrument of state policy. London's support is essential
>to maintaining operations in difficult business environments such as
>Russia and also helps to insulate BP -- and the BTC pipeline -- from
>campaigners' demands.
>
>But state sponsorship comes with costs: The pipeline will follow a longer,
>more costly and technically challenging route via the unstable former
>Soviet state of Georgia. In addition to economic and political
>complexities, such routing also places BP on a collision course with the
>wider NGO community -- and threatens the company's ongoing efforts to find
>peace with it.
>
>Now BP's "civil society" interlocutors, which the company needs to support
>its environmental and human rights policies, are under attack from their
>NGO peers. Moreover, BP's engagement with NGOs has done little to insulate
>the company from attacks by intransigent groups such as Rising Tide. Nor
>is BP alone in this experience: Citigroup, the U.S. financial services
>giant, has no doubt noticed that an agreement it reached in January with
>the pressure group Rainforest Action Network failed to give it immunity
>from attacks by WWF and other environmentalists -- coincidentally, over
>the same pipeline that is causing trouble for BP.
>
>Rising Tide said this week that "collaborations between NGOs and
>corporations result in the manipulation of those NGOs as pawns, disguising
>those corporations' [interests] and thus giving them unwarranted
>credibility" with the public. As BP struggles to balance the strategic
>goals of London and Washington against the demands of the global energy
>business and its desire for entente with campaigners, Rising Tide's
>rhetoric may begin to take on an air of truth for NGOs such as Mercy Corps
>and Save the Children.
>
>Copyright 2004 Strategic Forecasting Inc. All rights reserved.
>
>