BP plc is the 4th largest company in the world, with 115,000 employees and annual profits of over $20 billion. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is one of the component shares of the FTSE 100 index.

BP is no stranger to destroying the environment and flaunting safety laws in the name of bigger profits, and recently received the largest fine ever imposed by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This $87 million fine was for failing to correct safety hazards from 5 years earlier when one of BP’s largest refineries in the US blew up in March 2005, killing 15 people. This explosion was the culmination of several smaller accidents at the plant because of cost cutting that cut maintenance and safety measures. The fine is the equivalent of one day’s profits for BP.

BP’s operations in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska have also been marred by their cost cutting measures that resulted in several serious spills. Cost cutting resulted in them spilling over 1 million liters of oil from pipelines leading to the Alaska Pipeline in 2006, and in 2007 they spilled 2000 gallons of toxic methanol into a nearby lake, killing everything in the lake.

BP is the largest shareholder in the controversial Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline that has been fiercely opposed by environmentalists because of it’s proximity to natural resources and vital water supplies to the region. The construction of the pipeline had a major environmental impact on the local area and despite the pipeline passing across 14 active earthquake faults through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey it was not properly engineered to withstand earthquakes. Any major earthquake or an attack by Georgian separatists will trigger this ticking timebomb to destroy the water supplies of several countries.

The Cree aboriginal group of Canada describe BP, and their role in extracting oil from Canadian oil sands, as being complicit in “the biggest environmental crime on the planet”. This process of oil extraction creates four times the amount of CO2 that conventional drilling creates and turns vast areas of land into filthy wastelands. BP’s public relations department likes to talk about what a green company they have become but this is nothing more than marketing propaganda. The fact is that BP routinely flaunts health and safety rules, designed to protect the environment and their workers, in the name of cost cutting.