Shortly before joining ClientEarth I found myself standing on a verge in Germany, hiding behind a tree, dressed as a carbon emission. To the average onlooker, I was a young man who had lost his mind. To the trained eye, however, I was protesting against loopholes in the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry strand of the UN climate negotiations that would allow developed nations to ‘hide’ emissions through logging. Luckily for me and my colleagues in the UK Youth Climate Coalition, all dressed as greenhouse gases, we were being passed by lots of trained eyes:  the negotiators attending the UN climate talks in Bonn in preparation for the Copenhagen follow-up in Mexico this December.

photo: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Reto Stöckli

Deepwater Horizon has spelled out in no uncertain terms the risks that extractive companies take with the environment and people's lives on a daily basis, and the impunity with which they are used to doing so.  It is long overdue that this recipe for disaster gets the degree of attention that Deepwater has, and Deepwater is a catastrophe worthy of attention.  But now we need to see the bigger picture.

I put to you that it is very difficult to overlook the following two implications from recent climate science:

· Greenhouse gases are not the only anthropogenic emissions that strongly interfere with the global and regional climate

· We are already in the danger zone, and given that CO2 lives in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, CO2 reductions alone are very unlikely to help us avoid near-term tipping points in the earth’s thermostat

pic: DigitalGlobe

The Deepwater Horizon disaster has been, and will continue to be, an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions.  But it is also a disaster for BP’s business, for all those who directly hold its shares, and for many more besides.