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BP: BEYOND PARODY

Painted a quick one today after hearing BP are walking back their already water-thin commitments to renewable energy and investing billions more in getting as much oil and gas out of the ground as they can in order to set fire to your grandchildren. In 2000 BP rebranded itself from British Petroleum to “Beyond Petroleum” in an early attempt at obvious greenwashing. It also popularised the concept of the Personal Carbon Footprint with a $250 million ad campaign in 2003, just before the Iraq war opened up billions of dollars worth of oil reserves for BP and other US/UK oil companies to loot.

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COCA-COLA: “REUSE – REDUCE – BURN”

I spotted these stickers on the caps of Coca-Cola bottles in my local supermarket. Coca-Cola is the world’s largest plastic polluting company and over half of UK plastic “recycling” is exported to be burned or dumped abroad. The focus on “recyclability” of plastics is a marketing greenwash strategy. Most plastic is never recycled and is either burned or dumped in the global south where it breaks down over years and centuries into irremovable micro plastic pollution that is making its way into our environment, food, bodies and bloodstreams. Coke is also the target of a BDS boycott for operating factories on stolen Palestinian land, and a boycott called by workers of bottling plants in South America whose union organisers have been tortured and murdered by the company. If anyone wants a sheet of these stickers (in red and black) you can order them at cost price here: https://www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/product-page/please-export-me-to-be-burned-abroad-coca-cola-bottle-stickers

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COCA-COLA

First new work of the year in support of the ongoing BDS boycott of Coca Cola products, and in recognition also of Coca-Cola’s murderous repression of union organisers in South America. In 2017, Coca Cola donated $14000 to the extremist Israeli far-right organisation Im Tirtzu, which aims to “promote Zionism” by attacking and delegitimising Israeli left-wing and human rights groups and individuals. Coke also operates facilities in Atarot, an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Coca-Cola has been accused of having union organisers murdered in several countries. In Guatemala City, while workers at a company bottling planet fought for their jobs, including occupying the plant for 13 months, three General Secretaries of their union were murdered and five other workers killed. Four more were kidnapped and have disappeared. Torture and intimidation were also used against union members. Coke also had at least a dozen union organisers killed in Colombia.

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NIGER DELTA HELL BUS

Presenting the Niger Delta Hell Bus! A collaboration with Lekeh Development Foundation in support of Ogoni climate activists in the Niger Delta. I’m leaving Nigeria today so took a few photos for the road. There’s still things I want to add to the bus, a speaker system on the roof, ladders, and some sort of foldable stage would be great and it need a lot more sirens and lights (so it looks like a real Nigerian bus). Massive thanks to everyone who generously chipped into the crowdfunder to help make this version of the bus a reality, I’ve left the crowdfunder open until the end of the month to try and cover the bus’s running costs and also to fund a Hell t-shirt giveaway to activists out here since the shirts we printed for the march were so popular.

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HELL IN THE NIGER DELTA – DOCUMENTARY

I put together a short documentary about my visit to Nigeria for the first Niger Delta climate change conference organised by Lekeh Development Foundation (LEDEF). See my previous post about the trip here. One of the most polluted areas on the planet, the Niger Delta has a life expectancy of just 41 years due to decades of Shell oil spills & constant gas flaring. As part of the conference we visited two Shell oil spill sites in Eleme and K-Dere, Ogoniland, to see first hand some of the horrors that Shell has unleashed on this part of the world for over 65 years. The Eleme spill occurred in June 2023, K-Dere was in 2020, and is still untreated as of August 2023.

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SHELL IN NIGER DELTA

Yesterday I visited two Shell oil spill sites in the Niger Delta with Ogoni climate activists from Lekeh Development Foundation, local community leaders, and West African climate experts. It might be the saddest and most enraging thing I have ever seen. While there I filmed Ogoni community leaders, activists, students and doctors, explaining the situation and the suffering of these communities, and captured footage of the ecological devastation Shell and other oil companies have brought to their homes. See my story for one of these videos, the rest I need time to edit and upload.

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BMW / TOYOTA BRANDALISM CAMPAIGN

I designed this poster for a new Brandalism, Subvertisers International and XR Belgium takeover of 400 ad spaces in towns and cities across Europe targeting car advertising, polluting SUVs, and in particular Toyota and BMW.⁠ BMW and Toyota push their ‘green’ credentials in their advertising while simultaneously lobbying governments to delay and limit policies to end the sale of new fossil fuel cars.⁠ There were 11 other artists involved in the campaign including some good friends Michelle Tylicki, Hogre, Matt Bonner, and Merny. My poster was inspired by the fact that BMW was one of the car manufacturers who installed emissions test cheating devices in thousands of their vehicles, which meant they released far more toxic fumes than regulators and consumers believed. They also colluded with VW and Daimler in an “emissions cartel” to curb the use of emissions cleaning technology.⁠ More of my previous subvertising work here:⁠ www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/subvertising⁠ More images and details of the other artists works in this campaign can be found on the Brandalism website.

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DISCARD AFTER SINGLE-USE

Here’s a surfboard I painted for Project 0‘s art auction to raise money for mangrove restoration in the Caribbean. You can bid here. Unfortunately I had to pull out of the launch exhibition for the auction as I only found out last minute the show was sponsored by Sky TV. I’m against all attempts at corporate greenwashing because it promotes the idea that consuming one brand over another can save the planet and that corporations care about these issues when they don’t. But its the involvement of Sky in particular which is really galling as the company is part-owned (and soon to be fully-owned) by Rupert Murdoch, who uses his TV channels and newspapers to push climate-change denial and anti-renewable energy propaganda worldwide.

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