Greenpeace shuts down 50 BP petrol stations

LONDON - Greenpeace activists protesting British Petroleum’s (BP) “reckless” oil pursuit, shut down 50 petrol filling stations in central London Tuesday morning.

The environmentalists claimed to have stopped the fuel supply by flipping safety switches on the forecourts and then removing them to prevent the petrol stations from reopening. They also hoisted signs saying: “Closed. Moving beyond petroleum.”

The protest is an attempt to urge Bob Dudley, expected to replace the outgoing BP chief executive Tony Hayward, to move away from “his predecessor’s obsession with high risk, environmentally reckless sources of oil,” reports the Telegraph.

BP has faced fury from environmentalists over its muddled handling of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

At one station in Camden, north London, Greenpeace climbers replaced BP’s logo with a new version showing the green sunflower disappearing into a sea of oil.

The BP logo was similarly defaced at a petrol station in New York recently, when the sunflower sign was daubed with brown paint.

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace, said: “The moment has come for BP to move beyond oil. Under Tony Hayward, the company went backwards, squeezing the last drops of oil from places like the Gulf of Mexico, the tar sands of Canada and even the fragile Arctic wilderness.

A BP spokesman said activists had only managed to close down around a dozen service stations, adding that they would be reopened as soon as it was safe to do so.