The plan that was shelved was about carbon offsets, these have not proven to be particularly effective so maybe not too big a deal.
The greater loss is that the new CEO had already scaled down Shell's investment in renewables, setting a target of 4.5% of the total investments in renewables by 2025[0].
Some other Oil&Gas companies seem to be a bit more inclined to actually invest in renewables, or at least pay lip service to it, e.g. ENI aims at 30% by 2025[1].
Remains to be seen how much will actually be invested.
If there are x offsets available, and demand is x + 100, then when Shell buys offsets, they're not really fixing the problem at all, they're just shifting blame right? They're saying "since we spent this money on the offsets, our carbon emissions were good (or at least 'less bad'), but the other company that couldn't afford or wouldn't bother with the offsets is bad even though there were only enough offsets for one of us".
Buying offsets is not shifting the blame, it's paying someone else to fix the problem. The reason for that should be that you either have no cost effective way to offset the carbon yourself, or there is a very attractive market for the offsets.
If demand were x+100, and theoretically some company wouldn't be able to afford to buy the offsets, it wouldn't somehow have ended up with the blame of Shell, they would just have found no one to solve their problem for them and would have to fix it themselves.
Of course this is assuming that whoever is selling the offsets is actually performing the task of carbon offsetting effectively, something that many believe is not actually happening so that puts things into even more murky waters.
The increase in demand drives up the price of offsets, which increases supply and investment in better carbon capture techniques and scaling. Im lumping in things like direct air capture, bioenergy carbon capture and storage, and enhanced weathering as offset generating technologies that are currently too expensive to be widespread, but with higher carbon prices would become practical.
the bigger problem with carbon offsets is that the underlying system that is supposed to be backing the units aren't actually offsetting any carbon. wendover has a nice video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY
It makes a ton of sense if your focus is only short-term profit. It makes absolutely 0 sense if your goal is to try to decrease the legal liability of knowingly causing global warming and actively suppressing those internal studies to increase profits.
Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years and the previous CEO was preparing their defense of "don't punish us for the sins of our fathers". Whereas Sawan is doubling down on "maximize this quarter, who cares about the future, not my problem".
That's all ignoring the: do you actually care at all if your great grandchildren have a habitable planet? (or maybe grandchildren at the rate we're going)
If your view is that these companies are multi-decade sustainable businesses, then you want to invest in shoring up the firms' reputation and drilling new wells. If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders.
> If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders.
I can not locate the long piece article now but I read a piece from someone that effectively got invited into a Shell (UK) think tank and heard exactly that from some vp/executive at a dinner table.
That they aimed to diversify (think corn/algae based fuels, hydrogen infrastructure, charging networks), but that they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades.
Petrochemicals are never going to go to zero. We'll always need them. We won't always need to allow every person on the planet to burn them as fuel, but we will still need them to manufacture the many other products that aren't destroying the atmosphere.
Some 40% of the population is actively pro big oil and actively denies the carbon footprint causal links with climate change and warming.
You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning?
Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion. If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
> Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion.
Suppose for a moment that I completely agree with you on all points of substance. Even then, I would have to tell you that corporations are designed (not metaphorically, but literally designed) to deflect and shield liability. There never is anyone to be held accountable, because everyone who acts is an employee, and the ownership is divided among millions of people, through many layers of misdirection. None of whom make any decisions.
Unless you were careful, and if you have a 401K, you yourself may in fact be part owner. Or owner of an owner of an owner of an owner. Should you be held accountable?
You can't arrest a corporation. You can't put it in a holding cell overnight. You can't sentence it to prison for 10 years. You definitely can't give it the death penalty and execute it. And it's no accident this is the case. The major (and perhaps only real) difference between a corporation and simpler business customs is that the corporation is this magical wall between the owner and the business that can't usually be breached. If the business goes bankrupt, no one can seize the businessman's home as collateral. That's what a corporation is for. You live in a society that, however upset it might be over climate change, isn't upset at all over this "design". They like it. They revel in it. And it's not going away.
> If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
But that's already true from a pragmatic standpoint. Even the CEO now, he was hired in a few years ago, He's just some schlub taking the jobs he knows how to do, without any real power to change what you want. If he tried, they'd fire him and get another. The people who set the ball rolling made sure of that. And even they aren't guilty in any real way, either, unless you want to pretend that someone in the early 1900s should have known better.
Price is set at the margin. Supply 100, demand 101 price goes up. Supply 100 demand 99 price goes down until supply and demand equalize.
75% of new electricity production is renewable. 10% of new car sales are EV's. A large fraction of new home heating installations are heat pumps. The three largest hydrocarbon demands are transitioning. That's going to have a meaningful effect on demand. It'll take decades to get anywhere close to zeroing demand, but it's going to have an effect on the margin quite quickly.
Can the companies & countries addicted to massive oil profits cut production quickly enough to stabilize prices? OPEC is trying but they're only a small and shrinking fraction of production and the gains from defection are so large...
Is it still 40 percent? Seems much more evident now what's happening.
Maybe 40 percent is still pro big oil but they don't deny the causal link.
I'm pro big oil because I still drive a gas car. In that sense if you use big oil products you are a supporter. I would put supporters at over waaaaay over 40 percent. 95% is a better estimate.
> You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning?
20 years minus the latency inherent to the system. If I recall correctly the latency from "stopping to emit CO2" to "starting to see effects" is estimated to be 13 years.
Even if 100% of the global population was on board with getting rid of oil it would take more than 2 decades to lower demand by even 30% without causing massive decline in living standards.
The earth is getting warmer. To try to guilt people about it achieves nothing. The only action humanity can take at this point is to predict the effects of global warming and build infrastructure to slow it down, mitigate it or plan for the mass migrations.
The future is pointing to the end of these companies. Shell is maximizing its returns before the end.
It is the most long term outlook you can get. What's more important?a future where my children are billionaires or a future with slightly less global warming? Shell is not the only source of global warming on this earth.
You need to think in terms of human scale choices. Not just simplistic right or wrong choices. If we were that ceo... You, I and all of us maximize our benefits and make the most rational and most logical choice by destroying the environment.
It's the tragedy of the commons pushed to the maximum extreme. I make a shit load of money participating in the destruction of the commons. We'd all be lying to ourselves if we didn't make that choice.
If you think about it from the corporate perspective it also makes sense. The company is heading towards a wall. Not just environment pressures, but a future where oil is dry. We are running out. In the face of an inevitable end what is the best most rational choice? It's obvious.
It's not the "tragedy of the commons," it's capitalism. They're opposite things. The "commons" were fenced in and taken from the public by private entities. In the same spirit, a healthy environment and stable climate system are being taken from all of us by private corporations. I would argue, in fact, that if the public had control over these resources, we would govern ourselves in a far different manner that would not lead towards such a bleak future simply because we are motivated by short-term profits.
Elinor Ostrom has written an excellent book called "Governing the Commons," and she was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work. I recommend it.
Big oil and big tobacco share a strategy of promoting false skepticism, shifting blame to consumers, using the legal system to harass and intimidate scientists, and lobbying to get support from elected representatives. Big oil is of course bigger, and the entanglement with politics, jobs and other companies in the private sector is much stronger.
These issues are widely documented, and the books that climate scientist Michael Mann wrote were eye opening to me.
The only sensible exit is to legislate at scale. These companies will not self regulate. The lag between cause and effect makes this extremely dangerous. A heavy carbon tax is an obvious way to do it.
I think you are missing something. Where is what they will do:
1. Spin off green energy products into their own company.
2. Pour money from oil business into Green energy.
3. When reckoning comes for gas, they let the oil biz take the fall, but the fall won't be much as they will have nearly bankrupted it already.
Of course, the board of shell can just delay the legal responsibility until all of them are ghosts – then they've won and their next generation can just inherit their yachts to stay on top of (literally) the rising sea.
I think the notion is that if you control enough capital, you'll be able to relocate yourself and your family to those parts of the planet that are least impacted by the consequences of continued fossil-fueled global warming.
This also points to the problem with renewables from the capital viewpoint: they're just not as profitable, as you can't sell sunlight and wind or create artificial supply restrictions to jack up prices (which is the historical economic story of the oil & gas industry over most of the 20th century).
I think its deeper than that. Its not an oil company issue (I am not implying in anyway that they are the good guys here) What would happen to society if tomorrow all oil companies just said the risk of global warming is too great, we are all shutting down. Society would collapse.
Its not so much they are doing this for profits; which of course they are, but society as a whole very much needs them to continue to do so in order to assure our continued existence in our current form.
Do you realise that the Rockerfellers (famous oil scions) organised the environmental movement into what we have today, via people like Maurice Strong (himself an oil entrepreneur). There is a good argument to be made that the environmental movement is a creation of 'big oil'.
I seriously believe it. Climate change will almost certainly lead to food insecurity and political upheavals, leading mass migration and war, not to mention potential knock-on effects where, for example, photosynthesis reductions due to extreme heat at the equator, rapid rates of methane release as permafrost melts, mass death in a heating and acidifying sea...
. really there are just so many things that could go wrong, much more wrong. So yes, we should be very serious, and very scared.
> Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years
I think a lot of people feel that.
Personally, I think we may more or less have forgotten about "Global Warming" in 20 years, just like we forgot about the "Ozone Layer" or "Acid Rain".
If AI continues at anything resembling the current pace for another decade or two , there may be so much disruption, that Global Warming seems quite insignificant to most people.
Small difference: we banned chemicals responsible for ozon layer disruption, similar situation with acid rain (talking about 1st world with rain). So it's not like we forgotten, more like it's a non-issue now. Global warming is only going to get worse.
Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century.
You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.
8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.
The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.
We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.
It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century.
> Average life expectancy has increased because child mortality is down, do we stop medical research?
You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.
> Great. Let's keep investing in mitigation AND prevention. It seems to work!
8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.
> Climate change is not just global WARMING.
The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.
> At the cost of loss of biodiversity. We don't just need green, but diverse green.
We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.
> Agreed. (Surprise!) But I'd prefer to see fossil used for industry and not energy. Renewable & nuclear should be sufficient.
It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
> Agreed. Moving up people on Maslow's hierarchy also causes them to need to have less kids (in a sane environment with a good social safety net for old age) which should stabilise the population by 2060.
I guess I don't see what other option we have other than drill baby drill. Yes we're killing our planet but renewable aren't able to provide the energy we need at scale. Switching to 100% renewables and not drilling means increased oil prices and ultimately less consumption across the board. Less food, less driving, less heat, less AC. We'd all have to give up a lot and no one is signing up for that. There's this magical thinking that we can switch to renewables and keep everything the same or that it only be a minor speedbump but that's nonsense. Switching to 100% renewables means redefining modern life as we know it in a way that involves a whole lot less materialism/consumerism for everyone.
why can't we do nuclear with plugin hybrids in urban areas. the federal government , which, as an issuer of money, can afford anything, unlike states/municipalities, should massively fund nuclear to save the environment meet energy demands. seems like such a no-brainer.
I try to remain positive, but climate change is the one area where I have pretty much lost hope. People (and I include myself) are simply unwilling to accept that their lives have to change. Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.
The main thing I struggle to downsize or make sustainable is my work. As a programmer, I depend on an immense infrastructure of earth-harming systems to get my equipment (both in my possession or leased in the cloud). My employers use a lot of energy. In the scheme of things we aren’t the worst polluters, but it’s undeniably bad.
I’ve dramatically reduced my personal energy usage, I don’t eat animal products, my family has found ways to generate remarkably little garbage, and other “nice” things, but it’s pretty much meaningless. It’s all theatre compared to the damage we do with our car, jobs, community and provincial infrastructure we depend on, etc.
I feel like I’m willing to change my life, and I have already I guess. I’m just not willing to give up my livelihood when it means so little in the bigger picture. I’m no different from someone working on an oil rig or forestry or whatever. What I do looks nicer, but my rationale is no different.
I've hit a similar wall and one answer to hurdle over is to organize with more people to push for bigger, community wide changes. This can include making your roads safer for biking, getting your local governments to penalize local polluters, etc. Getting the right politicians to vote in your collective ideals helps, too.
It all takes work so you have to brace yourself to sacrifice your free time and balance everything. It's not easy, but there are countless people already trying to do it.
What percentage of global emmissions is spent on computing infrastructure? Last time I saw the numbers it was practically negligible if we exclude cryptocurrencies.
Anyone who drives a heavy vehicle alone is using immense amounts of power (hundreds of horses' at once, by approximation), it takes some infrastructure but with wind, sun, and water we can power that. What makes you say that your livelihood depends on an amount of energy so large that it's really bad? Why couldn't that be generated sustainably?
Why not talk to your employer about a step in that direction, given that solar panels are typically profitable within a handful of years for an average household, let alone if you can 100% offset the kWh generated because all the energy can be used in-house?
There is that classic western maxim that evil triumphs when ‘good men do nothing’, but I no longer think this is true.
Evil triumphs when ‘good men’s’ efforts fail.
Climate change represents an inherent risk to humanity, but some climate change mitigation strategies represent a risk to short-term profit incentives.
We are starting to see economic agitation globally as institutions everywhere begin to question the logic of our systems.
This and other factors has led us to a multi-polar world, which is itself creating new problems that inhibit global synchronisation on this issue.
It is a planetary scale problem. It needs a planetary scale solution.
COVID showed I think that people and institutions are quite willing and capable of concerted action if they understand there's real threat to human welfare. Imperfecly, sure, but far from hopeless.
You are always going to be unhappy if your goal is to change the rest of the world. If you focus on yourself you will accomplish more and likely be happier. Start adapting now and know that the rest of the world will adapt eventually. Figure out how to reduce your own impact.
I moved to a location that is not going to see negatives from climate change. Even if your location isn't great, just work on what you can do. Stop consuming junk on Amazon and start freecycling in your neighborhood. Spend more money to buy goods that have a lower environmental impact.
If you own a home, there's a lot you can do to improve the environment. Compost, install rain barrels, maybe solar panels, use native landscaping, plant more trees that will provide shade.
My thoughts exactly. Best one can do is plan for the worst. I bought a property at an altitude high enough so that if sea levels rise won't affect me (I am likely going to stay here that long anyway, but my goal is to develop habits), I de amazoned where possible and gave up habbits alltogether where not possible but can cope without, rain barrels and solar panels on their way and so on, playing around with microgreens, learning about plant seeds (I don't think i'll ever pick up farming but it's a good skill to have).
> People (and I include myself) are simply unwilling to accept that their lives have to change
The real tragedy is that a fair amount of this change would make people's lives better.
For example, more walkable human scale communities, less combustion in vehicles and homes, more comfortable, healthier, and cheaper to operate homes, reduced air pollution for communities in the vicinity of power plants and industrial facilities.
But on the other hand, yes smaller houses and cars, less meat, etc are hard to adjust to.
> Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.
Disagree on that. The technologies we need are all pretty ready or close. It's about bending cost curves and the rate of deployment.
If you embrace hopelessness and do nothing to make the transition away from fossil fuels, it’s your own life that will be grim as carbon is more heavily taxed and life becomes increasingly unaffordable.
I’m personally quite optimistic, because I’ve already made most of the necessary adjustments, and it wasn’t very hard at all.
If you embrace logic the trend lines point to an obvious future regardless of optimism or pessimism.
Unfortunately this future is inline with the the pessimistic viewpoint.
It's not about pessimism or optimism in the end. It's about logic. He's right. It's done. Likely the worst case scenario for global warming will play out. We already crossed the permanent threshold.
If I'm going to die anyway why not be comfortable before I die?
If I change my own behavior but everyone doesn't then my actions are negligible.
Rationally my best course of action is to not change.
Remember it is each individual acting extremely rationally and logically that in the end contributes to global warming in aggregate. That is why it's so hard to reverse this. The tragedy of the commons.
There is only one thing that will work: we need a price for CO2 emissions and we need a collective of economically powerful nations that push that through at the same time. Other nations who refuse to take part need to pay for market access.
Idk, we could illustrate this a bit with: "hey, we are in the business of murder, we switched from machine guns to sniper rifles, our murder is now much less wasteful (in terms of bullets used)".
That is not to say you are wrong, it was maybe just that when a fossil fuel company tells you it's reducing it's carbon impact then the whole premise is going to be cynical at best.
It's what I wondered at the headline as well. Sounded ambitious, but with how much profit they make it's not immediately obvious whether it's infeasible, especially if you can convince a government to then be exempt from a part of the fuel taxes because you don't have to pay for the pollution aspect
> important was what he omitted: any mention of the company’s prior commitment to spend up to $100 million a year to build a pipeline of carbon credits, part of the firm’s promise to zero out its emissions by 2050.
Not counting the CO2 output of its product obviously.
Then there should be consequences for destroying environment and making earth inhabitable for humans. Oil industry knew that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming. Plastic industry knew that recycling is a total sham, and most of it will at best end up on a landfill at worts everywhere including our food. They knew but then they lied to us to make more profits. Maybe we should take that ill gotten profits from them and if it will bankrupt them so be it. Because we're slowly getting out of time to do anything.
I think developed nations collectively bought into fossil fuel-driven civilization, so it seems like scapegoating to lay all the blame at the feet of the producers.
But like you say, it is appropriate to blame the producers for hiding what they knew about the greenhouse effect and well-funded lobbying and propaganda campaigns to deny and minimize it.
It is true that the people demanded the lifestyle provided by fossil fuel emissions. But corporations didn't just say "oh if you insist." When new policies and regulations are attempted that will not affect the lifestyle of the people but will eat into corporate profits, they fight tooth and nail.
An honest corporation that was just acting to serve the needs of the people wouldn't do something like fight to reduce the exxon valdez spill fine by 100x or raise a fit when regulatory agencies mandate generation shifting.
I think is the uncomfortable truth is we're all to blame for a certain extent. People def hide evidence and acted to their own benefit but to a certain extent so many of us were known accomplices.
What amazes me is that you just can't opt out, short of jumping off a cliff. Everything you do involves the destruction of non-renewable resources. If you look at what you produce in terms of garbage and other waste every month it is completely insane. Everything is packaged in plastic, high grade cardboard, glass etc. The amount of energy and materials required is ridiculous. And yet, not a month goes by or something that used to be packaged in paper suddenly is only available in plastic, something that was available in re-usable glass is only available in plastic and so on. The hold-outs seem to be beer bottles but I don't drink beer...
> If you look at what you produce in terms of garbage and other waste every month it is completely insane. Everything is packaged in plastic, high grade cardboard, glass etc.
This has bothered me since I was a child and drove by a landfill and realized just how much trash we produce. I met someone that went a month without using one time use plastic and she couldn’t really avoid it. It’s everywhere.
It is unfortunately very hard to address this with suits and getting even harder. Rules around standing can be leveraged to deny suits and the power of administrative agencies keeps getting hamstrung by the new major questions doctrine. Montana is the only state that guarantees a right to a clean environment in its constitution, but conservatives are seeing how this can be leveraged against polluting industries and are mobilizing to remove this right.
Megacorps have a tremendous amount of power in our political system and that makes it very very very difficult to hold people to account for anything.
because half of bees are gone, half of barrier reef is gone, 75% of insects are gone, UK has like 10% tree cover left, emperor penguins, had zero chicks survive
Do you think you can survive if the biosphere is gone?
Readit News
The greater loss is that the new CEO had already scaled down Shell's investment in renewables, setting a target of 4.5% of the total investments in renewables by 2025[0].
Some other Oil&Gas companies seem to be a bit more inclined to actually invest in renewables, or at least pay lip service to it, e.g. ENI aims at 30% by 2025[1].
Remains to be seen how much will actually be invested.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-boost-dividend... [1] https://www.eni.com/en-IT/media/press-release/2022/03/pr-cap...
Honestly, this upsets people?
If demand were x+100, and theoretically some company wouldn't be able to afford to buy the offsets, it wouldn't somehow have ended up with the blame of Shell, they would just have found no one to solve their problem for them and would have to fix it themselves.
Of course this is assuming that whoever is selling the offsets is actually performing the task of carbon offsetting effectively, something that many believe is not actually happening so that puts things into even more murky waters.
Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years and the previous CEO was preparing their defense of "don't punish us for the sins of our fathers". Whereas Sawan is doubling down on "maximize this quarter, who cares about the future, not my problem".
That's all ignoring the: do you actually care at all if your great grandchildren have a habitable planet? (or maybe grandchildren at the rate we're going)
I can not locate the long piece article now but I read a piece from someone that effectively got invited into a Shell (UK) think tank and heard exactly that from some vp/executive at a dinner table.
That they aimed to diversify (think corn/algae based fuels, hydrogen infrastructure, charging networks), but that they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades.
You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning?
Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion. If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
Suppose for a moment that I completely agree with you on all points of substance. Even then, I would have to tell you that corporations are designed (not metaphorically, but literally designed) to deflect and shield liability. There never is anyone to be held accountable, because everyone who acts is an employee, and the ownership is divided among millions of people, through many layers of misdirection. None of whom make any decisions.
Unless you were careful, and if you have a 401K, you yourself may in fact be part owner. Or owner of an owner of an owner of an owner. Should you be held accountable?
You can't arrest a corporation. You can't put it in a holding cell overnight. You can't sentence it to prison for 10 years. You definitely can't give it the death penalty and execute it. And it's no accident this is the case. The major (and perhaps only real) difference between a corporation and simpler business customs is that the corporation is this magical wall between the owner and the business that can't usually be breached. If the business goes bankrupt, no one can seize the businessman's home as collateral. That's what a corporation is for. You live in a society that, however upset it might be over climate change, isn't upset at all over this "design". They like it. They revel in it. And it's not going away.
> If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
But that's already true from a pragmatic standpoint. Even the CEO now, he was hired in a few years ago, He's just some schlub taking the jobs he knows how to do, without any real power to change what you want. If he tried, they'd fire him and get another. The people who set the ball rolling made sure of that. And even they aren't guilty in any real way, either, unless you want to pretend that someone in the early 1900s should have known better.
75% of new electricity production is renewable. 10% of new car sales are EV's. A large fraction of new home heating installations are heat pumps. The three largest hydrocarbon demands are transitioning. That's going to have a meaningful effect on demand. It'll take decades to get anywhere close to zeroing demand, but it's going to have an effect on the margin quite quickly.
Can the companies & countries addicted to massive oil profits cut production quickly enough to stabilize prices? OPEC is trying but they're only a small and shrinking fraction of production and the gains from defection are so large...
I also think as the climate becomes more and more inhospitable, that 40% number will continue to decrease.
Maybe 40 percent is still pro big oil but they don't deny the causal link.
I'm pro big oil because I still drive a gas car. In that sense if you use big oil products you are a supporter. I would put supporters at over waaaaay over 40 percent. 95% is a better estimate.
20 years minus the latency inherent to the system. If I recall correctly the latency from "stopping to emit CO2" to "starting to see effects" is estimated to be 13 years.
It is the most long term outlook you can get. What's more important?a future where my children are billionaires or a future with slightly less global warming? Shell is not the only source of global warming on this earth.
You need to think in terms of human scale choices. Not just simplistic right or wrong choices. If we were that ceo... You, I and all of us maximize our benefits and make the most rational and most logical choice by destroying the environment.
It's the tragedy of the commons pushed to the maximum extreme. I make a shit load of money participating in the destruction of the commons. We'd all be lying to ourselves if we didn't make that choice.
If you think about it from the corporate perspective it also makes sense. The company is heading towards a wall. Not just environment pressures, but a future where oil is dry. We are running out. In the face of an inevitable end what is the best most rational choice? It's obvious.
Elinor Ostrom has written an excellent book called "Governing the Commons," and she was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work. I recommend it.
Big oil and big tobacco share a strategy of promoting false skepticism, shifting blame to consumers, using the legal system to harass and intimidate scientists, and lobbying to get support from elected representatives. Big oil is of course bigger, and the entanglement with politics, jobs and other companies in the private sector is much stronger.
These issues are widely documented, and the books that climate scientist Michael Mann wrote were eye opening to me.
The only sensible exit is to legislate at scale. These companies will not self regulate. The lag between cause and effect makes this extremely dangerous. A heavy carbon tax is an obvious way to do it.
1. Spin off green energy products into their own company. 2. Pour money from oil business into Green energy. 3. When reckoning comes for gas, they let the oil biz take the fall, but the fall won't be much as they will have nearly bankrupted it already.
Their great grandchildren will be able to comfortably inhabit it alright, that's all that matters to them, at the very best.
This also points to the problem with renewables from the capital viewpoint: they're just not as profitable, as you can't sell sunlight and wind or create artificial supply restrictions to jack up prices (which is the historical economic story of the oil & gas industry over most of the 20th century).
- Deny the existence of the problem.
- Pay for others to join the denialist movement.
- Pay others to say that individuals should fix the problem, not the company.
- If they cannot deny anymore, promise they will certainly do something in the future.
- When the future arrives, say they couldn't do anything for financial reasons.
- Finally, say that the harm is already done, and nothing else can be done about it (we already see this happening).
Its not so much they are doing this for profits; which of course they are, but society as a whole very much needs them to continue to do so in order to assure our continued existence in our current form.
- Convince weak minded but important influencers that there's no problem,
by forming "real" friendships (no bribes),
so they in turn sincerely honestly spread the manipulation themselves.
(Ive seen that & read that Putin uses this against the US and EU, and it apparently works great, but that's off topic)
Dead Comment
I think a lot of people feel that.
Personally, I think we may more or less have forgotten about "Global Warming" in 20 years, just like we forgot about the "Ozone Layer" or "Acid Rain".
If AI continues at anything resembling the current pace for another decade or two , there may be so much disruption, that Global Warming seems quite insignificant to most people.
You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.
8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.
The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.
We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.
It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
> Average life expectancy has increased because child mortality is down, do we stop medical research?
You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.
> Great. Let's keep investing in mitigation AND prevention. It seems to work!
8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.
> Climate change is not just global WARMING.
The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.
> At the cost of loss of biodiversity. We don't just need green, but diverse green.
We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.
> Agreed. (Surprise!) But I'd prefer to see fossil used for industry and not energy. Renewable & nuclear should be sufficient.
It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
> Agreed. Moving up people on Maslow's hierarchy also causes them to need to have less kids (in a sane environment with a good social safety net for old age) which should stabilise the population by 2060.
Wow, HVAC is an amazing technology.
The difference is that an existential climate crisis it just isn't treated by our leaders with the same importance as a good old fashioned war.
I’ve dramatically reduced my personal energy usage, I don’t eat animal products, my family has found ways to generate remarkably little garbage, and other “nice” things, but it’s pretty much meaningless. It’s all theatre compared to the damage we do with our car, jobs, community and provincial infrastructure we depend on, etc.
I feel like I’m willing to change my life, and I have already I guess. I’m just not willing to give up my livelihood when it means so little in the bigger picture. I’m no different from someone working on an oil rig or forestry or whatever. What I do looks nicer, but my rationale is no different.
It all takes work so you have to brace yourself to sacrifice your free time and balance everything. It's not easy, but there are countless people already trying to do it.
Why not talk to your employer about a step in that direction, given that solar panels are typically profitable within a handful of years for an average household, let alone if you can 100% offset the kWh generated because all the energy can be used in-house?
Evil triumphs when ‘good men’s’ efforts fail.
Climate change represents an inherent risk to humanity, but some climate change mitigation strategies represent a risk to short-term profit incentives.
We are starting to see economic agitation globally as institutions everywhere begin to question the logic of our systems.
This and other factors has led us to a multi-polar world, which is itself creating new problems that inhibit global synchronisation on this issue.
It is a planetary scale problem. It needs a planetary scale solution.
I moved to a location that is not going to see negatives from climate change. Even if your location isn't great, just work on what you can do. Stop consuming junk on Amazon and start freecycling in your neighborhood. Spend more money to buy goods that have a lower environmental impact. If you own a home, there's a lot you can do to improve the environment. Compost, install rain barrels, maybe solar panels, use native landscaping, plant more trees that will provide shade.
The real tragedy is that a fair amount of this change would make people's lives better.
For example, more walkable human scale communities, less combustion in vehicles and homes, more comfortable, healthier, and cheaper to operate homes, reduced air pollution for communities in the vicinity of power plants and industrial facilities.
But on the other hand, yes smaller houses and cars, less meat, etc are hard to adjust to.
> Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.
Disagree on that. The technologies we need are all pretty ready or close. It's about bending cost curves and the rate of deployment.
I’m personally quite optimistic, because I’ve already made most of the necessary adjustments, and it wasn’t very hard at all.
Unfortunately this future is inline with the the pessimistic viewpoint.
It's not about pessimism or optimism in the end. It's about logic. He's right. It's done. Likely the worst case scenario for global warming will play out. We already crossed the permanent threshold.
The above is my mockery of how I expect we will in 40 years
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If I change my own behavior but everyone doesn't then my actions are negligible.
Rationally my best course of action is to not change.
Remember it is each individual acting extremely rationally and logically that in the end contributes to global warming in aggregate. That is why it's so hard to reverse this. The tragedy of the commons.
So we don’t have to change we live, we just have to change the way we generate our energy.
https://en.milieudefensie.nl/climate-case-shell
Which I presume are pretty much a minor fraction of the carbon footprint of their products and kinda makes the whole exercise a PR campaign.
Even when it would cover pipeline leaks and the like it's still nowhere near their total impact.
That is not to say you are wrong, it was maybe just that when a fossil fuel company tells you it's reducing it's carbon impact then the whole premise is going to be cynical at best.
Not counting the CO2 output of its product obviously.
But like you say, it is appropriate to blame the producers for hiding what they knew about the greenhouse effect and well-funded lobbying and propaganda campaigns to deny and minimize it.
An honest corporation that was just acting to serve the needs of the people wouldn't do something like fight to reduce the exxon valdez spill fine by 100x or raise a fit when regulatory agencies mandate generation shifting.
Because 90% of the population would die.
Then why do journalists investifating recycling sham, oil spills, etc. frequently end up dead or in prison?
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This has bothered me since I was a child and drove by a landfill and realized just how much trash we produce. I met someone that went a month without using one time use plastic and she couldn’t really avoid it. It’s everywhere.
Megacorps have a tremendous amount of power in our political system and that makes it very very very difficult to hold people to account for anything.
and a more green planet than a century ago
and far fewer people in poverty
all lead you to believe it's becoming uninhabitable?
Perhaps because of all the chemical-induced algae blooms turning previously blue water into murky green?
Do you think you can survive if the biosphere is gone?