[The casualness of the assumptions here, and the underlying racism, is revealing; Tony’s remarks illustrate what could be called a neocolonial mindset. Those seven words about the Liquefied Natural Gas project: ‘it involved the relocation of a village’ – could easily have come from the lips of a nineteenth-century colonial administrator in a distant part of the British Empire. I wondered how Tony thought his family in their Sussex village would react if a foreign energy company arrived one day and told them they all had to ‘relocate’ because there were gas deposits under their village?]
Moment Five
Later in the same interview, Tony described the apparently obsessive culture of health and safety at BP, when he returned to the head office after a posting abroad:
The thing that absolutely struck me, the most … the most visible when I came back was the safety culture, because, my first day back, two things happened: I went up a staircase at headquarters without holding the handrail, and a very junior person of staff remonstrated with me that I should hold the handrail – I thought, gosh [laughing] …! Yeah. Try it one day – if you walk down a staircase in BP and you don’t hold the handrail, someone absolutely [literally] will remonstrate with you. The second thing, I got into a taxi to go to a meeting across town, with a quite junior colleague, and got in the cab, my colleague said, ‘You need to put your seat belt on.’
But this obsession with health and safety clearly did not extend to operations on the ground. We then reflected on what had caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010:
Me: So attention on a micro level, but at a macro level … not!
Tony: Yeah.
Me: I mean, that’s quite shocking, in a way.
Tony: It is shocking.
Me: The difference between those.
Tony: Well, it was a classic case of [the] company convincing itself that something was happening when it wasn’t, and it was dealing with the symptoms, not the causes, if you like, and the basic problem that emerged, and it really was interesting to see … was this actually fundamental contradiction between the performance culture, which is about meeting targets – financial, operational, schedule, timing – and HSE, which means taking no risks, which means, if there’s ever a trade-off between, you know, meeting a target for a budget or for a timeline, and a trade-off with safety, you know, you have a fundamental contradiction there.
Me: That’s very interesting.
Tony: Which one predominates? And the best manifestation of this was the so-called performance contracts, that all managers above a certain level in BP had, and have, and at the time, I think 95 per cent of the bonus, the remuneration … was about performance. Five per cent was about HSE.
Moment Six
Isabelle (ex-BP). Isabelle was the only interviewee who had left the company for ethical reasons. In some respects, particularly as she’d always been a strong advocate of human rights, it was surprising she’d joined in the first place and then lasted thirteen years. We discussed the difference she perceived between herself and her colleagues:
They had a different view. It wasn’t the fact that they didn’t have any morals, but they were able to … seemed to be able to leave them at the door, right? So … often, they were Christian people, you know, deeply religious, go to church and all of that, and they’d be doing this stuff at the … you know, ‘I’m on the PTA,’ doing all this stuff with kids and all of that, and yet, when they came through the door, they were able to sort of push that aside and they became … different people, in a way. But I’ve never been able to do that because I bring everything in … So, that was quite difficult, erm, because they couldn’t quite understand it. They’d say, ‘Well, that’s fine, but, you know, you mustn’t …’ One person said to me, ‘Leave your conscience at the door.’
By the end of her time, she’s challenging this culture more and more, but also feeling more isolated:
By the time I was leaving, [they used to] dread me coming to the meetings because I’d actually … have real debates with them and … and tell them that they were talking a load of bullshit, basically, and that they didn’t know what they were doing. And, erm, you know, they … how could they sort of talk about things like the UN Charter of Human Rights … and have this stuck up on their wall, when they were breaking all of it, you know?! … But I got more and more isolated. It was quite lonely. It was quite lonely, yeah.
She was one of only two interviewees to speak directly about how disturbing she found the experience of witnessing the impacts of the oil industry on the ground. And again, as with Paul, the more she spoke about what she’d actually seen on the ground, the more her language broke up, and hesitations multiplied:
Erm, you’d see pollution, you’d see erm … you know, for instance, in the Delta, it never used to get dark in parts because of the gas flaring. I mean, gas flaring is quite extraordinary, I mean, it is … it’s just poverty, and the fact that there is so much wealth, and that extreme in how they lived as expats – you know, the sort of gated community. I found that very hard and I wanted to go out all the time, and I would actually go out, and that drove them mad. They, you know, they saw me as a security risk, in that sense, because they didn’t want me to just wander off because I – I’d do anything to get rid of my drivers and things like that, so I could just go and walk and … it’s very hard to do that, so … But poverty … you know, you’d look out of your window and you’d see kids, you know, or adults, going through the dustbins looking for things, erm, and you know, awful stories you’d hear as well from other colleagues – you know, people being shot. You know, they’d actually seen that outside, and bodies being carried off … You know, it was, you know, you know, you would see these sorts of things happen, erm, and … and to me, at that stage of it anyway, because I got so immersed in Africa and was seeing all of this, that I just kept thinking, you know, oil has just destroyed this country. So my … I started to blame everything on oil, which, you know, maybe that wasn’t completely right, but I started to blame everything on oil, because, to me, it was fuelling everything, the conflict, because these are really big oil-dependent countries, like Nigeria and Angola, so you start to blame everything on the oil.
Just before she finally leaves, she speaks to a colleague who’s retiring:
He said to me, ‘I’m so glad I’m going now, because,’ he said, ‘working in Angola has bothered me for so long, and I feel, you know, that’s good – I can sleep better at night.’ I found that quite extraordinary.
What had she learnt? How had her views on morality and ethics changed in this time?
I think you just have to stand your ground, and you have to behave how … you have to treat others how you’d want to be treated, and I always want to put myself in other people’s shoes all the time, and I’m not afraid to say that to people, wherever, you know … I think you … you have to. You have to have morals.