This month a biofuel start-up called Verdezyne announced an undisclosed infusion of cash from a pair of investors. That by itself wasn't unusual -- Verdezyne, a California-based company that engineers yeast capable of digesting plant sugars and excreting biofuels and biochemicals -- is considered one of the most promising firms in the crowded advanced-biofuels space. The company had already attracted capital investments from Silicon Valley stalwarts like Monitor Ventures and Life Science Angels, along with cash from the federal government. But this latest round of financing was different because the money came from BP. Yes, that BP -- the oil major better known lately for fouling the environment than saving it. For the small start-up, however, BP's status as an oil giant gave its financing special resonance. "This is the sort of funding that will help us move to the next level," Verdezyne CEO E. William Radany told me. "We view it as a vote of confidence."
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Verdezyne is hardly the only renewable energy company to benefit from Big Oil's interest. Amyris -- another advanced-biofuel start-up that has investors drooling -- gets more funding from BP than any other source. This month, French oil giant Total invested nearly $1.4 billion in the American solar firm SunPower, paying generously for 60 percent of the company and extending another $1 billion in credit. Shell has worked with Codexis and Brazilian ethanol giant Cosan on a $12 billion sugar-cane-to-biofuel project. Chevron has set itself up as one of the largest investors in solar power in California, and it recently agreed to start building wind turbines near its oil fields in Kyrgyzstan. Even ExxonMobil -- which has long remained aloof on alternative energy -- has a $600 million partnership with J. Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics, which is working to genetically engineer algae for advanced biofuels.
That might seem surprising, or at least suspicious. According to the standard green narrative, Big Oil's lobbying money is one of the major reasons that the United States still lacks a climate change or renewable energy policy. And that view is not exactly wrong. A recent analysis by the NGO Carbon Brief found that nine out of the 10 most prolific scientists denying the human origins of climate change had links to Exxon; the company spent millions in the 1990s funding think tanks like the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the Institute for Energy Research that spread doubt about global warming. You won't find any major oil players in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a loose organization of environmental groups and heavyweight corporations like General Electric and DuPont set up to call for legislation limiting carbon emissions. (BP and ConocoPhillips joined initially, only to drop out last year.) The oil majors' idea of a national energy policy is still first and foremost more oil, drilled and sold by them.
But climate change policy and energy policy aren't the same thing, especially in the United States. When it comes to renewable power, oil majors see that there is potentially money to be made -- and at the very least, some goodwill worth banking in the days of $4 a gallon gas.
BP was the first oil major to see this and act accordingly, in part because being seen as anti-climate change was far less acceptable in London than it was in Houston. John Browne, BP's former CEO, wanted the respect of the Davos elite, for whom climate change became an article of faith by the beginning of the 2000s. But by 2007 even Exxon was backing away from climate denial, promising to cut ties with global warming deniers. The message was clear: If you made your money drilling for climate-changing fossil fuels, you were expected to at least show a bit of remorse for it.
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