Ethical Issue of British Petroleum



Research on Ethical Issue of British Petroleum

Introduction

British Petroleum (BP) is a multinational oil and gas corporation of Britain and is the 4th largest in the whole world while 3rd largest in the list of all energy companies as per evaluation of revenues of 2011. It performs its operations in all the fields of oil and gas inclusive of production, exploration, distribution, refining, petrochemicals, marketing, trading, and power generation. In this paper, there will be a research on several ethical issues that a company may go through.

Discussion

Major subsidiary of BP in the U.S. is known as BP America, Inc. and situated in Warrenville, Illinois. Thus, in current years the environmental image of BP has been stained as BP has performed unethically and it is ambiguous for defining ethics of the company appropriately.

As per Antonia Juhasz who is an activist, the investment of BP in green technologies reached at 4 percent of its tentative budget that was before cutbacks, inclusive of the Solar Program discontinuation and the shutting down of alternative headquarters of energy in London. He claims such amount as used in green-washing exercise. Greenpeace has subjected the branding of BP as further than Petroleum, and cited it in the budget of 2008 which involved $20 billion in the investment of fossil fuel and $1.5 billion in all substitute energies. Not just this, but there were many other cases as well in which BP was involved in extremely unethical practices such as: refinery fire of Texas City, oil spills of the Alaska, treatment of farmers of Colombia, and the Gulf of Mexico's explosion. In all these instances, BP was socially liable and accountable but denied that and regarded that as error of systematic safety pattern and environmental failures (Proctor, 2011).

Capitalism is not a just system ...