‘BP polluters, unfit art sponsors’

This video from London, England says about itself:

Anti-BP performers bring 40-foot sea monster into British Museum

29 September 2016

On Sunday, theatrical activists BP or not BP? pulled off our most ambitious performance to date. Two hundred performers took over the British Museum’s Great Court with an hour-long, multi-act, musical performance to flood the museum’s dirty sponsor, BP, out of the space. The unsanctioned theatrical action culminated in a climactic battle with a 40-foot BP-branded sea monster that we managed to smuggle into the museum.

We were there in response to BP’s controversial and ironic sponsorship of the museum’s current ‘Sunken Cities’ exhibition, and to challenge the museum’s decision, in late July, to renew its sponsorship deal with BP for another five years. This unpopular new deal – set to start in 2018 – would see the British Museum continuing to promote a climate-wrecking oil company until 2022. This decision looks even more farcically irresponsible in the face of new research from Oil Change International: their latest report confirms that to keep global warming below two degrees we must halt all new production of oil, coal and gas, and begin to phase out existing sources, putting the fossil fuel industry into “managed decline”.

The idea that a publicly-funded national museum could still be providing PR for a fossil fuel company into the 2020s is ridiculous enough, even before you consider the name of the latest BP-funded exhibition: ‘Sunken Cities’. By lobbying against climate laws, blocking clean energy and pushing to drill for ever-dirtier sources of oil, BP is doing more than almost anyone to push us into climate disaster and create the sunken cities of the future.

Read the full story here.

Watch the full performance here.

By Peter Lazenby in Britain:

Actors call on museum to dump BP after Trump win

Monday 28th November 2016

ENVIRONMENTAL activist actors performed unofficially in the British Museum at the weekend in protest at the prestigious institution’s continuing sponsorship by oil giant BP.

The campaigning thespians performed for four hours to deliver their message of opposition to sponsorship by the company, which campaigns against regulations tackling global climate change.

Saturday’s performance was an international collaboration, with performers from Britain, the United States, Argentina and India among the 40 taking part.

They argue that the election of climate-change denier Donald Trump to the US presidency makes the fight against global warming and the fossil fuel companies who contribute to it all the more urgent.

The performance was staged in the museum’s Great Court under the slogan “BP or not BP?”

Group member Olivia Knight said: “The only way the British Museum could sign a new sponsorship deal with BP was by ignoring the company’s role in driving the climate crisis, from drilling new oil wells to lobbying against crucial climate legislation.”

Referring to a current exhibition at the museum, Ms Knight added: “When it allowed BP to sponsor Sunken Cities, the museum invented a whole new kind of climate denial.

“Now the museum needs to get on the right side of history, draw a red line and drop BP.”

Monica Hunken, a theatre performer and activist from the US, said: “My home city of New York will sink beneath the waves by 2060 unless bold action is taken on climate change — and that’s only possible if the anti-science stance of Donald Trump is challenged and overridden.

“With a genuine climate denier about to enter the White House and anti-science lobbyists in the ascent, it is more crucial than ever that the British Museum joins the cultural shift away from fossil fuels.”

On Saturday, BP or not BP? Scotland gate-crashed the opening of the BP Portrait Award ceremony in Edinburgh.

Activists dotted around the gallery launched into an unsanctioned toast calling for BP to be dropped, while protesters dressed as oil workers greeted guests outside with flyers.

Donald Trump Still Thinks Climate Change Is ‘A Bunch Of Bunk’. His presidency will likely be disastrous for global efforts to mitigate climate change: here.