Schreef gisteren al over de topgraaier van Exxon Darren Woods deze hufter vindt de draai van collega
oliemaffialeden naar duurzame energie een vorm van ‘greenwashing’*,
ofwel een mooi beeld scheppen voor het wereldtoneel, terwijl het
niets voorstelt. Te zot voor woorden dat iemand die niets doet commentaar heeft op
anderen, ook al heeft Darren in feite gelijk.
Echter waar
Woods niet aan heeft gedacht is het feit dat er met duurzame
energie een hele bak subsidie is te halen en wat dat betreft is hij
dus een hele slechte CEO. Inderdaad er is met duurzame
energie vele miljarden aan subsidie binnen te slepen, niet voor niets dat Shell en nog een paar
andere oliereuzen zich op duurzame energiemarkt hebben gestort.
Malcolm
Harris, de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel kijkt verder
dan de neus lang is en stelt dat ook de oliemaatschappijen die zich
nu op de alternatieve energiemarkt storten, tegelijkertijd zoveel mogelijk fossiele brandstoffen
uit de grond willen halen, dat is voor deze bedrijven zelfs het allerbelangrijkste doel
voor de komende jaren, immers er zijn enorme winsten te maken en dat
is men voorlopig niet van plan op te geven….. Ofwel firma’s als
Shell proberen de wereld duidelijk te maken dat men op het goede pad
is, terwijl de werkelijkheid er totaal anders uitziet…. De werkelijkheid laat dan ook zien dat er jaar op jaar meer fossiele brandstof worden uitgestoten, waar politici hun doorzichtige valse beloften doen dat we teruggaan naar de uitstoot van 1990….**
Lees het
uitstekende artikel van Harris en geeft het door! Jaarlijks worden er
meer fossiele brandstoffen gebruikt, waardoor de uitstoot met het
jaar groeit, terwijl een groot aantal westerse politici zich voordoen
als begaan met de klimaatverandering en dan m.n. de negatieve
gevolgen daarvan, zoals de immer groeiende weergerelateerde rampen,
neem de maandenlange bosbranden in Australië, of de steeds vaker
optredende orkanen, die ook aan sterkte winnen (waar
men in de Filipijnen eertijds sprak over het orkaanseizoen, vinden
deze nu het jaarrond plaats…..***)
In het artikel besteedt Harris ook aandacht aan het stelen van grondstoffen in arme landen door de grote oliemaatschappijen, zoals Exxon Guyana op een gigantische manier heeft belazerd en waar onervaren politici akkoord gingen met ronduit diefstal…. (al moet je niet vergeten dat grote bedrijven als Exxon, Shell en Unilever politici in die landen omkopen, het is dan ook in het belang van grote bedrijven dat de corruptie in die landen in stand wordt gehouden…..)
Het
artikel van Harris werd eerder gepubliceerd op de Intellingencer, ik
werd erop gewezen door een mail van Unearthed (Greenpeace):
Shell
Is Looking Forward
The
fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to
a private planning meeting and took notes.
We think
democracy is better,” said
the jet-fuel salesperson. “But is it? In terms of outcomes?”
In a conference room
overlooking the gray Thames, a group of young corporate types tried
to imagine how the world could save itself, how the international
community could balance the need for growth with our precarious
ecological situation. For the purposes of our speculative scenarios,
everything except for carbon was supposed to be up in the air, and
democracy’s track record is mixed.
A graph from Chinese
social media showing how many trees the country is planting — a
patriotic retort to the Swedish
climate activist Greta Thunberg — had a real effect on the
room. Combine that with the Chinese state-led investment in
clean-energy technology and infrastructure and everyone admired how
the world’s largest source of fossil-fuel emissions was going about
transition. That’s what the salesperson meant by “outcomes”:
decarbonization.
Regional experts from
sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East–North Africa also
entertained the democracy question, pointing to Iraqi disillusionment
with voting and economic growth in Rwanda under Paul Kagame (“He’s
technically a dictator, but it’s working”). The China expert said
the average regional Communist Party official is probably more
accountable for his or her performance than the average U.K. member
of Parliament, a claim no one in the room full of Brits seemed to
find objectionable. The moderator didn’t pose the question to me,
the American expert, presumably because our national sense of
democratic entitlement is inviolable.
Actually, the
moderator didn’t ask me any questions during the plenary that
followed our regional-perspectives panel, either. That might have had
something to do with my talk, which included bullet points like
“Green growth is a myth” and “Your corporate existence is
incompatible with a livable future for cohorts that are already
born.” But I didn’t get that impression, not really. I was
repeatedly asked to be honest, and everyone was really nice about it.
Everyone was really nice in general.
Since
2017, when
I published a book
about American millennials, I’ve had the occasional cold call
from corporations to come talk about my work, all but one of which
I’ve turned down. But last fall, the Shell Scenarios team — as in
Royal Dutch Shell, one of the biggest oil companies in the world —
offered me £2,000 in exchange for a 15-minute talk and my
participation in a group exercise. Its internal corporate think tank
was holding a daylong conference about how generational change would
affect the hopefulness projected in what the company calls the “Sky
Scenario,” which it describes as “a technically possible but
challenging pathway for society to achieve the goals of the Paris
Agreement.” I’m not a climate expert, but apparently I qualify as
a generational whisperer, at least to Shell, and to talk to me about
global warming, the giant energy conglomerate wanted to fly me to
London from Philadelphia, business class. I warned them that I
couldn’t keep their money and asked if I’d need to sign an NDA.
When they said no, I saw an opportunity to report on the oil company,
undercover while in plain sight, without technically lying to anyone.
It was too good to pass up. I said yes, then I emailed my editor.
The October 2019
workshop, it turned out, was timely. Fossil-fuel divestment used to
be a fringe, college-campus concern, but over the past year, it has
become increasingly in vogue in the world’s financial centers,
including Davos, where it recently dominated conversation at the
World Economic Forum (WEF). In December, a couple of months after the Shell
workshop, the Bank of England proposed a new climate stress test to
measure the resiliency of its banks in the face of warming — a move
echoing that of Christine Lagarde of the European Central Bank and
reportedly being considered by the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve,
Jerome Powell. Germany announced major coal phaseouts in January with
coal-fired power generation scheduled to halt by 2038 at the latest.
In a much-celebrated letter the same month, Larry Fink, the CEO of
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, declared an
about-face on fossil fuels, saying climate change was now a “defining
factor in companies’ long-term prospects.” The entire country of
Finland proclaimed it would go carbon neutral by 2035. Even the
investor cartoon Jim Cramer, of Mad
Money,
got in on divestment, tweeting, “I am taking a hard pass on
anything fossil.” Now ExxonMobil is down $184 billion-with-a-b
since its 2014 peak.
From a certain
vantage, the momentum looks almost definitive, as though nothing
could stand in the way of a renewable future. But unlike coal, oil
and gas companies are still definitely profitable, even investable,
and more oil and gas are being produced, and used, every year —
which helps explain why carbon emissions keep rising too. There’s
little doubt that fossil-fuels are, culturally speaking, on the wrong
side of history. But there is still a lot more money to extract from
those wells, and the fossil-fuel businesses are intent on extracting
as much as they can. It’s not necessarily such a bad time to be an
oil and gas company, in other words, but it is a bad time to look
like one. These companies aren’t planning for a future without oil
and gas, at least not anytime soon, but they want the public to think
of them as part of a climate solution. In reality, they’re a
problem trying to avoid being solved.
Few organizations have
been paying as much attention to global warming for as long as the
companies that have helped cause it. Journalists at the Dutch
publication The
Correspondent
tracked down an educational video Shell released in 1991 called
“Climate of Concern,” which warned, “Global warming is not yet
certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be
irresponsible. Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.”
There’s good evidence Exxon knew a decade earlier. But not only did
these companies continue exploiting their reserves, not only did they
explore for new sources and develop new modes of extraction, like
fracking, but they funded politicians and groups that claimed not to
believe in global warming, agents that have worked to delay the same
action they knew was “our only safe insurance.” So far, the oil
and gas companies’ calculations — that delay would make them
money and that they could avoid consequences for misleading the
public — have been spot on. But denial-backed delay is no longer
sufficient, it seems. They’re now hoping to leverage their
incumbency, and fossil-fuel wealth, to lay claim to the world’s
clean-energy future as well. To do that, they’ll have to persuade
young people to forget who caused climate change in the first place,
or at least to let bygones be bygones. And if they can transition
their corporate profiles from fossil fuel to green energy without
missing a profitable quarter, that wouldn’t be a repudiation of
their delay strategy; it would be a vindication.
Of course, to judge by
the advertisements, the transition to renewables has already
happened. British Petroleum is now a solar-energy company called BP,
ExxonMobil brews giant swimming pools of cool green-algae fuel, and
Shell maintains mountain canyons lined with wind turbines floating in
fog. All these initiatives actually do exist, though they are a tiny
fraction of each company’s budget; so far, the main product of
Exxon’s algae program seems to be propaganda. Right now, these
companies have to convince governments and their publics to let them
run out the clock with fossil fuels, and they’ve decided the best
way to do that is to appear to be an essential partner for whatever’s
coming next. I was ostensibly there to help plan the timing.
Organizers
broke
the conference up into three parts: first, a panel on polling and
millennial politics; then the regional-perspectives panel; and
finally, a collaborative exercise in which “deductive” and
“inductive” groups imagined different paths to 2050. By gathering
millennial employees from throughout the company, along with experts
on the cohort and senior management, the strategies team surely hoped
to infuse the firm’s leadership with a drip of youth consciousness,
the way some oligarchs are rumored to inject themselves with young
people’s blood. It’s supposed to help them stay agile. Other than
the eight outside experts, there were a couple dozen people from
Shell, ranging from HR specialists in their 20s to senior global
executives (mostly Gen X and boomers). Staffers quoted me the figure
“90,000 employees” (roughly the size of the company as a whole) a
few times when explaining that virtually none of them knew one
another.
Some of the most
revealing insights came the night before the sessions at a group
dinner at a minor Gordon Ramsay restaurant. The venue had two party
spaces, and it wasn’t immediately clear where we were supposed to
go, but when someone suggested putting up a sign rather than having
wait staff direct the party one by one, the younger Shell employees
grimaced. “Extinction Rebellion,” one said, less than
half-joking. The climate-protest group has a major presence in the
city with flyers and volunteers everywhere. “XR” targeted Shell
locally in April 2019, smashing windows at the company’s London
headquarters. In the U.K., it has succeeded at creating an ambient
sense of fear or at least shame. We gathered in the mezzanine dining
area and milled around doing introductions, and I asked young workers
from the far-flung corners of the Shell empire, “Oh, what’s that
like?” I tried to remember not to talk like a reporter.
When they called us to
the table for dinner, I was lucky enough to be seated next to one of
the senior Shell participants, Steven Fries, the firm’s chief
economist. We met over arancini, the likes of which you might find at
an upscale food court in a baseball stadium. Based in Shell’s
global headquarters in the Hague, Fries pronounces his words with a
precision that defies accent; even after speaking with him, his
colleagues didn’t realize he’s an American until he told them.
Like many people who studied economics at elite Western institutions
between 1975 and 1986 would, he blames the lack of affordable housing
in London on too much government regulation, which is why his support
for big public investments to transition society away from oil and
gas surprised me. That is, until I realized that, in his mind, those
big public investments would be going to energy companies. When the
proverbial light bulb went on above my head, he gave me a look that
seemed to say, “Come on, man. What do you think we’re doing
here?”
In the corporate
sector, there’s still faith at the top that economic incentives and
profit-seeking behavior can manage the crisis that capitalism has
wrought. In such thinking, climate change is like a redux of the hole
in the ozone layer: potentially bad but solvable with the tools on
hand and without real changes to our lifestyles. Fries estimates that
we’ll be able to cost-effectively fill two-thirds of world energy
demand with clean sources within 20 years. (That’s ten years more
optimistic than the optimistic scenario of the International
Renewable Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization mandated
to propagate optimistic scenarios about renewable-energy transition.)
Even if that kind of turnaround is unrealistic, the Shell plan isn’t
so different from the mainstream climate left’s agenda. A recent
paper from Stanford professor and renewable advocate Mark Z. Jacobson
calls for $73 trillion in spending to transition most of the world’s
power grids no later than 2050, and he and his co-authors figure
it’ll pay for itself in energy savings alone within a decade. In
the analysis of Jacobson and other Green New Deal supporters, how
many of those trillions end up going to Shell is largely beside the
point. But for Shell, that’s the whole ball game.
In the meantime, I
asked Fries, if Shell is serious about transition, then couldn’t it
voluntarily speed it up by leaving some of its wells fallow,
constraining oil output and thereby driving the price relative to
renewables higher, faster? Sure, it would have to take some losses in
the short term, but we’re talking about the future of the planet
here. He dismissed the idea, telling me it’s important not to
artificially withhold supply, which would introduce price shocks that
could turn public opinion against environmentalist policy. Besides,
it would only end up sending money to the Saudis anyway.
“We’re going to
get as much out of [oil and gas] for as long as we can,” he said.
“That’s an
extremely frightening thing for you to say,” I said.
“It doesn’t mean
every drop,” he said, failing to reassure me.
Shell would apparently
prefer us not to think about how to reduce carbon emissions by
raising the costs of fossil-fuel development. Which makes sense: No
matter their green branding, fossil-fuel companies do not want their
projects rendered uneconomic. Instead, they want to talk about how
their new projects can be rendered economic faster. Even planned
production from existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, it’s been
estimated, will push the planet past the Paris targets, and Shell is
still “exploring” for new oil deposits to exploit. “In terms of
emissions, it’s one of the cleanest ways to go,” a Shell employee
in deepwater strategy seated across from me explained about deepwater
drilling as compared with other kinds of drilling. “Of course, when
you put it in your car and burn it, it’s oil, but,” he said,
trailing off. Although the slice of revenue energy firms derive from
fossil fuels is by all accounts scheduled to shrink, Shell foresees a
sizable enduring demand. No one has viable plans for a
battery-powered container ship, and the world’s militaries aren’t
about to give up jet fighters pending the development of an electric
model. Not to mention that all this clean technology requires a lot
of energy in advance for manufacturing.
Deepwater wells operate on
a ten-year schedule, I’m told, so my dinner companion doesn’t
expect the ones he’s looking at now off the coast of Brazil to even
yield product until the 2030s, at which point it will take more time
just to earn back the initial investment and even longer to turn a
profit.
In February, Shell
announced the purchase of a 50 percent operating stake in three
deepwater blocks off Colombia’s Caribbean coast under an agreement
with Colombian state-controlled Ecopetrol. And Shell’s not the only
one looking in the water off South America: In January, based on
exploration in late 2019, Exxon revised its estimate upward for its
blocks off Guyana, from 6 billion barrels of recoverable crude to
8 billion. (A week later, the nonprofit watchdog Global Witness
released a report
estimating that Exxon’s 2016 agreement with the country, negotiated
with inexperienced government counterparts, had deprived the Guyanese
people of $55 billion compared with international contract norms.)
Fossil-fuel companies claim they’ve got one eye on 2050, but
they’ve clearly got the other on next week. “If these activities
are positive, these discoveries could be developed and potentially be
a substantial increase in gas supply in the medium term,” a Shell
spokesperson said of the Colombian offshore blocks, as if that would
be a good thing.
But if short- and
medium-term profit considerations are still driving plenty of
decision-making at Shell and the other energy companies, employees
are trying to think ahead when it comes to their careers. During the
cocktail hour before dinner, I met a geoscientist who has been
attempting his own transition (to the finance side of the business),
preparing to move from the declining subsurface field to clean tech.
I asked how he got involved in oil exploration in the first place. A
little embarrassed, he told me he liked rocks as a kid. When he
graduated from college, he saw two career paths: the energy sector or
academia, where he would just be training others for the energy
sector anyway. He said he was worried about the next generation of
Earth-science students, who are graduating into a shrinking industry.
Maybe they’ll be mining asteroids, suggested the deepwater
strategist.
According to the
geoscientist, one of the ways Shell incorporates climate change into
its calculations is that when it looks to develop a new fuel source,
it tries to figure out how much it’ll be able to sell it off for
when the company transitions out of fossil energy — when the
reputational costs start to exceed the returns. Whoever buys it will
almost certainly continue extracting but at a lower cost of
production, maybe because it has better technology or, more likely,
because it cuts corners on labor and safety. What this means:
Unregulated fossil-fuel production might come to look a lot like the
narcotics trade, with its brutal criminal organizations that thrive
in conjunction with corrupt state elements regardless of
international agreements. The problem is that once reserves are
discovered, there’s no way to undiscover them. “We don’t plan
to lose money,” the geoscientist turned finance analyst said, and
he meant it in the most general way.
The whole session was
conducted under “Chatham House Rule,” which means participants
are allowed to repeat what they hear but not who said it. The idea
behind the rule is that it creates circumstances under which
subordinates can speak freely to higher-ups about the company without
endangering their career path. (As an American reporter, I am
ignoring the rule when I see fit, having technically never agreed to
anything.) The deepwater strategist put it to the test, prodding the
senior executive Fries about the generational implications of green
regulation. Was Fries, he wondered, going to help pay for the new
electric car he’ll have to buy if the internal-combustion vehicle
he just saved up enough to purchase is banned?
At a pub after dinner,
away from the executives, the deepwater strategist confessed that he
often thinks about what he’ll have to tell his child someday about
the job he’s doing now. “I don’t have any kids, but, yeah,”
the geoscientist agreed. He didn’t know how to describe the people
to whom he owes an explanation, but he knows they’re out there.
The biggest
gap in politics
right now is generational, the Harvard polling expert told us. “This
is a two-thirds generation in a 50-50 country,” he said, meaning
that millennials are much more reliably progressive than the country
as a whole. This makes sense. Young people are fearful, they have
little trust in institutions, and they’re dealing with high levels
of stress and anxiety. This has led to generational tension,
especially around the existential challenge of climate change. One of
the session’s recurring themes was that millennials and Gen-Zers
have a stronger moral and ethical drive than their elders, and they
expect us to use our values to help force companies to do the right
thing. But Shell doesn’t seem to fear attacks on its brand from
consumers, since most of its business is with other companies, and
even when it comes to customers, most people don’t make choices
about where to buy gas based on the relative climate villainy of the
respective oil companies. On top of which, its product is not very
recognizably branded. “Jet fuel is jet fuel,” I was told.
Instead, it’s worried about being left behind by the curve of
social change, that if it doesn’t become more than an oil company,
it’ll stagnate, wither, and eventually die.
We were tasked with
trying to come up with ways Shell could see what’s coming, and
participants began by imagining various ways Shell would feel this
“rise of a new ethics,” as one of the experts called it:
millennial politicians forcing harsher regulations, millennial
investors divesting from fossil fuels, millennial potential recruits
who don’t want to be embarrassed about their work, and millennial
protesters who push everyone else. Shell strategists used the phrase
“long march through the institutions” — coined by the German
communist Rudi Dutschke for the ’60s student movement — to
describe the way they expect left-wing climate radicals to become
part of the Establishment.
===================================
*
Zie: ‘Exxon ‘topman’ vindt klimaatdoelen najagen een onzinnige bezigheid‘
** Waarschijnlijk zal e.e.a pas worden bereikt als de
mensheid door bijvoorbeeld een enorme pandemie wordt getroffen, zo is het Coronavirus
nu al verantwoordelijk voor een enorme vermindering van uitstoot, een
vermindering zo groot dat politici zich de oren van de kop zouden moeten
schamen dat er zo weinig is bereikt terwijl er al zoveel overleg is geweest op de vele klimaattoppen (waar die toppen zelf ook al een fikse aanjager zijn van de klimaatverandering…)… Politici die nog steeds oliemaatschappijen laten plaatsnemen aan de
onderhandelingstafels en dat voor meer dan 90% van de tijd, terwijl milieuorganbisaties blij mogen zijn als ze 6% van de tijd mee mogen doen aan de onderhandelingen…..
*** Deze
bosbranden moeten gevolgen hebben voor de rest van onze kleine aarde,
als je ziet dat de ‘rookwolk’ van die bosbranden zo groot was als een
fiks deel van Europa…..
Zie ook:
‘Australië: film ‘Dirty Power: Burnt Country’ maakt gehakt van regeringsbeleid en media misinformatie‘
‘Australië: steenkoollobby werkt samen met de regering nog veel meer bosbranden in de hand‘
‘Groot Barrièrerif voor 60% verbleekt‘
‘Shell scherpt klimaatdoelen aan, ofwel greenwashing op ‘topniveau’‘
‘Groot Barrièrerif voor 60% verbleekt‘
‘Houtstook professioneel en voor huishoudens moet worden verboden‘
‘Australië: steenkoollobby werkt samen met de regering nog veel meer bosbranden in de hand‘
‘CDA wenst geen EU ‘green deal’ en ‘klimaatambassadeur’ de Boer weet niet waar hij over spreekt‘
‘Siemens heeft lak aan de klimaatverandering en haar slachtoffers‘
‘Australië slaat alarm over koraalriffen…….. AUW!!!‘ en zie wat het rif betreft ook:
‘De bosbranden in Australië zullen hun weerslag op de hele wereld hebben‘
‘10.000 dromedarissen worden in Australië afgeschoten vanwege droogte‘
‘Australische bosbranden: 500 miljoen dieren dood en een rookpluim die groter is dan Europa’
‘Greenpeace stelt dat de klimaatverandering is te stoppen ha! ha! ha! ha!‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht over de klimaatverandering enz.)
‘Australië staat olieboringen toe in de Grote Australische Bocht, inclusief seismische ontploffingen‘
‘Duitsland stelt CO2 belasting op € 25,– in plaats van € 10,– >> heibel in de deelstaten‘ (terwijl die € 25,– per ton CO2 een veel te lage belasting is…)
‘Remco de Boer (‘klimaatambassadeur’) wil de Nederlandse kolencentrales openhouden‘
‘Filipijnen geen orkaanseizoen, maar het jaarrond tropische cyclonen‘
‘BP stelt in milieuplan dat een olieramp op zee goed is voor de lokale economie……….‘
‘Australië geeft toestemming tot uitbaten enorm grote kolenmijn‘
‘Redt het Groot Barrièrerif, zet uw handtekening a.u.b.!‘
‘Het Groot Barrièrerif, dreigt te worden gesloopt voor een grote kolenhaven……..‘
‘Australië heeft VN gedwongen een passage uit een klimaatrapportage te verwijderen………..‘
‘Australië exporteert dagelijks één miljoen ton steenkool, dit i.h.k.v. de klimaatverandering en de afgelopen klimaattop……..‘ (daar wordt jaarlijks nog eens 10 miljoen ton aan toegevoegd….)
‘Coca-Cola betaalt wetenschappers om haar producten te promoten en voor weerleggen kritiek……‘
‘Bas Heijne weet, geenszins ‘onbehagelijk’, niet wat te denken van de klimaatverandering……. OEI!!!‘
‘ExxonMobil vervolgd voor ‘misleiding…’ Nou zeg maar het op grote schaal bedonderen van de kluit!!‘
‘Shell was al in 1989 overtuigd van klimaatverandering………….‘
‘Exxon lobbyist (politicus) dagvaardt milieugroepen voor kennis bij Exxon over klimaatverandering…….‘ (ongelofelijk ook…..)