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In 2020, BP told the world that it cared about climate change. Today, it is doubling down on oil and gas. This is the story of how financial markets gave up on net zero and how an aggressive US hedge fund helped pressure Britain's best-known energy company to abandon its green ambitions

- Alexi Mostrous Head of Investigations

As the great and the good filed into the Royal Lancaster hotel overlooking Hyde Park, London, in February 2020, Bernard Looney was feeling nervous.

BP's new chief executive had been secretly preparing for the presentation for weeks, huddled with a small team of internal advisers and McKinsey consultants in a rented office in Mayfair, a 20-minute walk away from the energy giant's headquarters in St James's Square.

But when the 49-year-old Irishman bounded on stage, he projected only confidence. "We need to reinvent BP," Looney told the packed ballroom of executives, top journalists and key shareholders. "It will require nothing short of reimagining energy as we know it." Flanking Looney, floor-to-ceiling screens scrolled through images of catastrophic weather events and showed social media posts lambasting BP and the oil majors, before fading to reveal BP's new slogan "Reimagining energy" written in warm cursive script. Looney's team originally wanted to use "Reinventing energy" but decided against because it made the company sound arrogant.

"We all want energy that is reliable and affordable, but that is no longer enough," he said. "We need a rapid transition to net zero. For BP to play our part, we have to change. And we want to change - this is the right thing for the world and for BP." Looney promised that by 2030 the company would boost investment in renewables tenfold to $5bn and build wind farms and solar parks with a capacity of 50 gigawatts roughly enough to supply two thirds of the UK's total grid capacity. Even more ambitious was his pledge the following August to cut oil and gas production from the equivalent of 2.6m barrels of oil a day to 1.5m. Britain's best-known energy company, responsible for pouring 55m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere a year, was going green. Greenpeace described Looney's promise to cut oil as "Christmas come early, decades too late".