BP’s Chief Executive Lord John Browne shocked the world in 1997 by becoming the first leader in the oil industry to acknowledge global warming. He then re-branded BP as an environmentally friendly company, complete with a green and yellow sunburst logo and the forward-looking tagline: Beyond Petroleum.

Through interviews with John Browne – and with his colleagues and critics, environmental leaders, spin doctors, rival oil executives—The Color of Oil asks whether the CEO of the world’s largest oil company can actually be the new face of environmentalism, or if Big Oil, namely BP, has another more rudimentary business agenda in painting itself green. The film poses the question: Is this substance or just better spin?

The Color of Oil attempts to put the BP story into context by looking at recent flashpoints between environmentalists and the industry – among them, BP’s drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and its continued development of an oil pipeline project in Colombia. It also takes a look at BP’s carbon emissions capping efforts, which have won praise from both camps and saved the company a whopping $600 million dollars at the same time.