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Comment by akho | Hacker News Reader

As an investor, I would very much prefer them to focus on what's profitable. I can invest my dividends/buyback cash into long-term successful renewable energy businesses, if that's what I want to be in. There's no need to have Shell make those decisions for me.

Now, if there's a synergy in there — somewhere where an oil company is uniquely positioned to implement renewables — that would be nice. I'm not sure if any such thing exists.

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If there were a company that turned literal murder into stock prices people would invest in it.

There are hundreds of such companies, and some are quite hot. Your point?

Also, oil/energy companies provide the foundation of modern technological civilization. We now see some downsides to that particular method, but “murder” is a jump of Olympic proportions.

Raytheon? Lockheed Martin?

As a fellow investor, I started investing in RDS a couple years ago because I liked the opportunity for them using their oil war chest to springboard into renewables. Being an "energy company" rather than an "oil company". It's been doing pretty good, up 20%, but if they're just going to be another oil company, I'll probably put my money elsewhere.

Why not ask them for the war chest money, and decide on your renewables allocation yourself? This whole “we're green now” approach is a very transparent plan of the management to remain in control of the “war chest”.

I'm starting to realize that wind farms are not profitable at all. GE has a good bit of that industry buttoned up but they are not pursuing it. There are other examples of companies walking away from it or avoiding it. It's not out of ideology, corporations scramble for profit.

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