Accusations of 'greenwashing' by big oil companies are well-founded
npr.org
npr.org
Often people don't make distinctions. Very often, companies will use present tense rather than future tense because it sounds better. Or they might be "transforming" when not much has been accomplished yet.
I've only skimmed a bit, but it looks like the report itself [1] is a good summary.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Demand for energy is rising; demand for premium-priced energy covering the reduced efficiency and new capital costs of greener technology is not rising as quickly. In the markets where genuinely massive shifts are both politically necessary and possible (Hi, China!), the state will be the driving force.
At the oil companies themselves, management has a singular duty to shareholders -- anything else is just PR blah-blah. We can debate whether that's a feature or bug of capitalism, but pearl-clutching news reports that ignore that basic fact aren't helpful in the public debate.
I wonder how different things were before Jack Welch became chair of General Electric and the deregulation of the ‘80s.
Do you mean after Justice Brandeis? After one of the Presidents Roosevelt? Do you mean the previous gilded age? Do you mean some other time entirely? It's not as though greed over time grew monotonically with a particular inflection point on Neutron Jack.
I agree with this, however, we know that energy harvesting potentially has negative side effects, often from byproducts such as methane production. Which can then lead to methane off-gassing.
From an investment perspective this really ticks me off, because I want that methane captured, brought to market, and sold. We should fight the idea that energy companies should be in the business of bad practices. Now, that raises a new set of questions around incidental methane capture, and the technologies needed for capture, to prevent off-gassing.
The key to this is trending - are we heading in the right directions, or not? What major and minor course corrections do we need to correctly steer the behemoth that is the energy industry?
"Greener technology" does not have "reduced efficiency and new capital costs." Solar and wind cost a fraction of any hydrocarbon-based energy sources and solar in particular has been plunging in cost. Coal plants for example, are being shut down left and right while solar and wind deployment is skyrocketing.
Carbon is a building block of life... and for the few billion years life has been around, we've been losing atmospheric carbon to fossilization because it is being trapped as oranic matter under the earths surface. There are no good natural processes to release it back to the atmosphere consistently. The "carbon-cycle" is net negative over longer periods.
In the 4 billion years that life has been around, no other species has even come close to doing this very important work of bringing dormant carbon back into circulation... and if history is any indication, if something happens to us, it may be another billions of years before something like this happens... or never.
If there is a "Gaia", humans using as much fossil fuels over a long period is the ONE thing it wants. To ensure long-term sustainabilty of life, we should be building self-assembling and reproducing autonomous robots to dig out carbon as a contingency plan in case humans dissappear or lose this ability... or what is much more likely that we're are no longer interested because some other energy sources become cheaper.
It is lunacy to keep repeating the CleanTech era marketing material. Corporations and governments which have no future in oil have or have huge investments in alternate energy will try to vilify cabon and shut it down. But it is important for intellectuals to take the longer view and remember how important digging out trapped carbon is for long-term sustainability of life.
Besides, carbon is not the limiting factor for organic growth in most places (nitrogen and iron tend to be more scarce).
Lack of biodiversity in the short term is a much smaller problem in comparision... specially considering that divergent evolution is a thing. Biodiversity is just a function of life, biomass and time. Hence, in the longer term, if nothing is done about this, biodiversity is going to be lost... because biomass will be lost... because of fossilization of carbon.
Useful nitrogen is not scarce compared to useful carbon. Remember that carbon has to be suspended in the air as CO2 for plants to capture it, trap solar energy and make it usable for the rest of the living beings. Carbon just happening to be on earth in other forms is not enough. So, we have 0.05% CO2 and 75% nitrogen in the atmosphere. We are definitely not running out of nitrogen. Similarly, earth is made up of 80% iron. We're not running out of it either. It's the CO2 that in danger of being lost because of fossilization.
Within 300 million years life may not even be able to exist on land, and by 1 billion years the oceans will be evaporating [0]. So the timeline you have given for depletion of bioavailable carbon is already muted by unavoidable solar expansion. Do you have a source for a shorter timeline?
> Lack of biodiversity in the short term is a much smaller problem in comparision
Where do you think coal comes from? That carbon was sequestered during the "Carboniferous" period---a time when the trophic web lacked the diversity of organisms capable of recycling carbon in the form of cellulose. Biodiversity is the reason carbon can be reprocessed and keep circulating. A major simplification in the trophic web is precisely what allows carbon to stop cycling and become trapped in sinks. The fewer organisms in a trophic web, the more likely dead organisms will sink into anaerobic reservoirs before being recycled.
Similarly, Snowball Earth: a case of high biomass and low biodiversity. Nearly all life on earth went extinct because of a lack of organisms capable of offsetting the byproducts of other organisms.
> Useful nitrogen is not scarce compared to useful carbon.
The opposite is true, which is why you will see nitrogen fertilizer and not carbon fertilizer. Inorganic nitrogen is common but is energetically expensive to fix into organic compounds. Nitrogen fixing organisms are at the base of the trophic web and they limit the biological productivity of ecosystems.
> Similarly, earth is made up of 80% iron. We're not running out of it either.
It is not evenly distributed. There are vast areas of ocean whose productivity is limited by the scarcity of iron available [1]. This is seen in ocean blooms caused by iron oxide transported from the Sahara by wind. This in turn causes atmospheric carbon to circulate into the ocean through the formation of diatomaceous matter.
[0] https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/venus/q79.html
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4899-0762-...
First of all, the supersized national oil companies are far worse than the multinationals
Exxon, for example, is now controlled to an extent by activist investor hedge funds that want energy giants to pursue greener energy, and to think more about the future [1]
However, for right now, green energy is not self-sustaining, and cannot provide the energy we need [2]. The question then is, how do we transition in a meaningful manner? How do we curtail methane emissions, and others, which are among some of the worst problems stemming from oil/gas production? Are the energy giants making the right investments now into potential future energy sources that could lead to a greener future? Do we have the right options, or are we missing big ones, that, properly funded, could result in potentially quadrillions and quintillions of BTUs? [3]
Please keep in mind that producing energy on the massive scale required for geo-level requirements is a decades to centuries, and trillions to tens of trillions type of engineering problem set.
What many people consider green energy such as mega-dams and hydro have had horrible impacts on flora & fauna. Technology is both the problem, and, potentially, a set of solutions [4]
Caveat: I am investor in Exxon, and a number of other companies in both green and transitioning to green areas.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/business/exxon-mobil-engi...
[2] https://greeninnovationindex.org/2021-edition/energy-efficie...
These oil companies are going to try survive as long as possible by a astroturfing, throw out misleading studies, bribing public officials, any means necessary to make as much money as possible. Because at the end of the day for a corporation its about making money nothing else.
What we got do is get the government to stop subsidizing oil/gas/coal. At this point we have made less then zero impact on carbon emissions. We're still going up in carbon emissions at the beginning of covid we saw a slight reduction but we're well above pre-covid levels.
The issue I see is the money that being made from oil/gas/coal is peanuts compare to the damage thats being done and the damage thats going to occur.