For more than a decade, BP had flooded the media with advertisements showing solar panels, windmills and waving fields of grass without a drop of oil in sight. The company adopted a stylized green sun as its logo and rolled out the slogan "Beyond Petroleum."
But when the company's Deepwater Horizon offshore well began blowing tens of thousands of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico each day, no outlay of advertising dollars could change the cold, hard facts: BP still derived more than 99 percent of its revenues from gas and petroleum.
The BP blowout was the swan song of an old style of green marketing, one in which companies could make green claims and hope that no one would look over their shoulders.
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