The oil CEO who was actually an environmentalist: Beyond Petroleum, the fuel-strike week, and a vision Wall Street refused to fund
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Sir John Browne — created a life peer as Lord Browne the following summer, which the record dates precisely because Jonathan Hare's dictation does — was BP's chief executive and, personally, Consilient's executive sponsor: he assigned the working team, kept the sponsorship himself, and directed the Hayward mentorship. In September 2000 he was meant to be in Asia; the nationwide petrol-tanker strike emptied Britain's pumps, Tony Blair called him back, and the Gulfstream turned around. When the crisis settled, Hare got a private, unscheduled dinner.
They talked sustainability and alternative energy. Browne had rebranded BP as Beyond Petroleum under the green flower, was the first oil-industry chief executive to state publicly that climate change was real and that the industry bore responsibility, and was investing heavily in wind and solar. Then the bubble burst, 9/11 hit, the stock fell with everything else, and the board and investors forced the vision back — Wall Street gave him no choice, in Hare's account, and it contributed to his losing the job a few years later. Hare's assessment, marked as his and published unhedged: the world and BP are much poorer for losing him. The existing BP page records the other half of this relationship — Browne proposing crowdsourcing on the Consilient platform in 2001, years before the word existed.
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A $10m lead investment in crowdsourced solutions — in 2001
Open →asked Hare to mentorThe geologist in line for the top job, met privately at Browne's request — and the safety application they worked on together carries the record's heaviest irony
Open →personal executive sponsor toConsilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
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