Photo: The Climate Choir outside the British Museum.
Climate Choir witness at British Museum
Friends took part in a performance of the Climate Choir
Quakers were among a 200-strong choir that performed as witness at the British Museum this month.
The Climate Choir Movement, co-founded by Quaker Jo Flanagan, broke into a three-part harmony to sing: ‘It’s time to drop BP! Don’t take their dirty money!’ The singers then moved to the entrance of the museum’s Great Court to deliver a reworded version of ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ by Richard Strauss, denouncing the museum’s links to petroleum giant BP.
The concert was held to protest against the museum’s acceptance of a £50 million gift from the firm. Last year it was announced that the museum’s exhibitions would no longer be BP-branded after its existing sponsorship was not renewed.
Kai Honey, the choir’s musical director, who arranged the songs, said: ‘BP is contributing to the collapse of the world’s stable climate, out of which human cultures arose.’
The gift was ‘a strategic decision to look like a responsible company, to gain social consent for continued oil and gas exploration’, she added.
Jo Flanagan, from Redland Meeting, claimed that ‘recently unearthed documents [showed] all major oil companies including BP were alerted to the planet-warming effects of fossil fuels as early as 1954’.
The campaigners also criticised BP for scaling back climate targets while ‘making profits of billions of dollars’, against a backdrop of growing environmental threat. According to Reuters, when unveiled in 2020, BP’s strategy was the sector’s most ambitious, with a pledge to cut output by forty per cent while rapidly growing renewables by 2030. But Murray Auchincloss, BP’s CEO, scaled back the firm’s energy transition strategy to regain investor confidence, after a drop in BP’s share price.
The campaigners also highlighted questions over whether BP’s supply of crude oil may have fuelled violence in Gaza. In September the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) demanded urgent public clarification from BP regarding ‘the due diligence conducted on its crude oil supplies to Israel made since October 2023’. In particular, ICJP requested clarifications on ‘any review undertaken by BP regarding whether its supplies of crude oil may have been refined by Israel to use in attacks on Gaza’.
Earlier this year a report from Oil Change International called ‘Behind the Barrel: New insights into the countries and companies behind Israel’s fuel supply’ explored the ‘ongoing complicity’ of multiple countries and companies in fuelling the war in Gaza.
