BP to slash green investment and ramp up gas and oil | Hacker News Reader

BP to slash green investment and ramp up gas and oil

bbc.com

58 pointszfg48 comments

This is a continuation of a trend for BP, nothing new. They started this bounce back to carbon fuels a few years ago. This is just a continuation of an existing trend that was already announced in public statements. It also has nothing much to do with recent electoral results. Given the choices at the ballot box in the US, there was no way to alter this -- better choices were not on offer. Neither candidate would have led the charge to do the necessary coordinating efforts to get the investments needed.

Similar with Shell indeed. From what I’ve heard, Shell electric car chargers are very unreliable. I think it’s a bit like Kodak. They know solar is going to eat (a part) of their lunch, but if they invest in solar then the oil revenue goes down even faster. So they don’t.

> Given the choices at the ballot box in the US, there was no way to alter this

The choice between the president who invested hundreds of billions in green energy, or "drill, baby, drill"? There was a very clear choice.

The false narrative that 'there wasn't a choice at the ballot box' needs to end. It is now abundantly clear that the two offerings in the US election were vastly different. Your vote matters and the candidates matter.

Biden was in favor of greatly expanded drilling. Harris barely articulated her positions, but it's best to assume she would be a continuation.

Oh really because if you ask republicans at any point before November 5th they would absolutely assure you that ~~~Biden's~~~Harris's plan was to make it illegal to touch or extract oil, and that we were all going to live in a new dark age.

Yes, both parties were disingenuous, one more egregiously so, but I care about results not messaging. Dems seem to think every problem is purely a messaging/PR problem.

This is why being a discerning consumer matters on a global level, eventually. Vote with your wallet and take the financial hit if you have to. Your choices today will matter tomorrow, even if it only matters to your kids.

If we all take the easiest path it will also be the slippery slope to the bottom.

Also worth trying to steer your career towards something meaningful. I get at least some satisfaction that I spend my days trying to make heat pumps better and cheaper

Bill Gates calls it the ‘green premium’ which I thought was a good way of highlighting that a green option is often there for those able and willing to afford it.

It's easy to demand this if you have enough resources/money to spare. Given that the wealth gap widens from year to year, this strategy does not work in the long run. People simply don't have that money to spare. The same issue already exists regarding cheap mass produced food. You only hear privileged people talking about more expensive choices, because they can. The bigger part of population buys the cheap food, because they have no other way to feed their family...

Your arguments are that it doesn't work in the short term, not in the long term. If you don't do this now then what is a choice of convenience eventually does turn into a choice of necessity. Wherever possible resist with your wallet. Resist with your words. Resist with your choices. Don't find ways to argue that you can't do something, find ways to do as much as you can.

No worries, as someone without a car who only uses public transport and walks daily to work, there aren't really many people with less CO2 consumption then me. In fact, I find your call for resistnce pretty hilarious.

That doesn't change my original argument. Calling for the rich to vote with their wallet doesn't make a difference when it comes to daily consumables. What the poor and middle class is able and willing to afford makes the difference. Missing infrastructure is also an important factor. You can call for more public transport and bicycle use as much as you want... Those outside of cities are pretty much stuck with what they have. And if they aren't wealthy, they can't by an EV either.

All in all, I am fed up with this hypocritical high-nose sort-of advice. It shows a general disregard for the day-to-day problems of most people.

....and stop buying rubbish from China, who dont care about the environment?.

If you live in Europe, precious little is domestically produced (ground-to-consumer) any more. We depend on South and East Asia for almost everything, increasingly including raw materials (steels, plastics, etc) for the tiny amount of secondary manufacturing we still do.

Going without (or reusing, recycling) isn't a wholly harmful strategy but it does take a lot of willpower.

Which investment funds didn't completely cave? The ones where you can specifically exclude companies like BP? That seemed to really bother them

The only way to even attempt to thwart climate change was to make green technologies economically viable. We have gone a long way with that; but we are not there yet. This shift could very well be the last nail on the coffin.

Another victim of the extreme politicisation of issues in the US.

We couldn't have had a worse hegemon. Saddening.

> We couldn't have had a worse hegemon. Saddening.

The other candidates for hegemon are worse IMO. The Soviet Union could have conceivably replaced the US as hegemon, and China might yet do so.

Maybe the EU would be a better hegemon, but never really had the capabilities to take on that role.

Why have a hegemon better there is none as that builds competition. And in my opinion for the world China might be a better hegemon as it is interested mostly in its own population happy and not interested in making the rest of the world in it's image.

The age of hegemony is over. At least until WW3 or a revolution in US or China.

Why? MAGA?

Absolutely not. The US is choosing to make an entirely unforced "error" (that part is up for debate) to withdraw from it's global dominance. China is watching with barely masked glee at their luck. With a minimum of work, they will thrive for a hundred years, even with their demographic downturn.

China gained A LOT of street cred last Trump admin, and this time is so fucking bad (we voted with Russia against Ukraine in the UN) that even our allies are nervously looking at options.

China has basically nobody to oppose them, nobody to stand up to their bullying behavior. Everything the US did through the mid to late 1900s, like coups and aggressive economic strategies and illegal wars to blow up some far away place are now strategies fully open to China.

Start learning Mandarin I guess.

Related to this I'm surprised how expensive still Tesla Powerwall is: ~$10k for 13.5kWh. Even Segway these days sell cheaper Portable Power Station Cube that is modular and stackable (upto 5kWh but IMHO much better design and useful) for $1k for 2kWh - and segway it's still kind of premium brand.

Not sure why Tesla still qualifies for 30% Federal Tax Credit if they been operating and getting this for a decade and didn't bring price down. Some people on youtube were buying Tesla Car battery and retrofit them to have equivalent of 5x such Powerwalls for the same price. It seems ironic that they made DOGE to reduce government spending but still running this tax credit that in Powerwall situation benefits only higher income class.

All those greedy western companies doing EV cars and residential batteries IMHO deserve to be eaten by chinese competition.

> economically viable

Or just regulation.

China and India are outperforming most of the developed nations in meeting their committed climate goals.

You cannot possibly compare the climate goals of countries with vast swaths of pre-industrial populations to western ones.

It would make more sense to compare the impact of Delhi to a US state for example.

Why? The challenges are quite similar.

It’s only economically viable because we don’t price externalities correctly.

It should be cheap and easy to live a bike ride away from work in a well insulated home. Instead we’ve priced things completely backwards

I'd say "economically viable" is not useful pharsing. It's of course economically viable to slow down the climate catastrophe as the costs will be so vast also economically (in addition to humanly, morally, etc) and we have the policy tools to do it. But it's a collective action problem and it needs a lot of international trade coordination and govenrment regulation.

Wind and solar are the cheapest forms of generating electricity that we currently have and consequently they are growing very quickly.

"Fuck the future, we're just livin' for today's...profits"

Still installing solar on all the buildings I own.

Yip, I've also installed a heat pump and solar in my house, insulated well, removed my gas connection, etc. Not the most economically viable decision I guess, but it felt like the right thing to do.

Same here, heat pump and massive DIY cellulose fiber insulation job. Gas has been disconnected.

We quite comfortably sit in our house in our underwear with a very modest electricity bill. We're lucky because we have a stream near our heat pump unit which apparently feeds off the water vapor.

Luckily it doesn't get quite cold enough here for the stream to freeze.

A heat pump should be the cheapest single family house option in the long run though. I had gas heating for a while and that certainly adds up in the winter

This makes perfect economic sense, without any environmental arguments.

Rooftop solar now produces 11.2% of the electricity in the Australian market [1], as it's the cheapest source of electricity. That percentage is not a peak value, but averaged across the year. On some summer days, rooftop solar is effectively powering the entire grid and is having to be throttled.

That 11.2% only includes the power that enters the market. It does not include power which houses generate and consume on-site, which does not pass through the meter, so the actual percentage is higher.

[1] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/australia-solar-2024-mb3...

Im about to invest in enough battery that even in summer i should be able to save all my solar without exporting any back to the grid. 20-30kw i think is where its at.

Awesome, blog about it? How much of it are you doing yourself?

I'm doing a renovation on our barn, which is almost a rebuild, I'm changing the roof design so it will be a massive solar array, directly south facing no less!

I wish I was able to like you, but I'm in Australia and our laws around building codes and electrical work are very restrictive.

That's the funny part about all this "drill baby drill" talk. This isn't going to be stopping people from charging ahead with renewables and renewable investment. Really looking forward to seeing how it will play out but I feel the oil barrons are on the wrong side of history here.

The other obvious reason is air quality, apparently lung cancer is on the rise globally, nasty shit.

>I feel the oil barrons are on the wrong side of history here.

Why would they care? They are all dead in a couple decades anyway and will be stupidly wealthy the whole time. Shame never worked on the capitalist class which is why we had to literally start murdering them to get basic things like "You can't work more than 40 hours a week without a slight premium in price"

Yeah I really don't get it. They've gotta know better than anyone right?

And they're the ones with arguably the most power to change it.

So they're knowingly and intentionally choosing money now over burning up our planet AND THEMSELVES.

I just don't get it.

Unless they've somehow rationalized it to themselves that oil isn't accelerating climate change. Which brings me back to my first point -- they gotta know, and better than anyone, right?

Psychopathy + Capitalism = Destruction

What climate change?

I guess that's the new world of politics. Just pure power, no sugar coatings anymore. Liberalism is dead. It's socialism or barbarism, no in-between that retains a livable planet.

The doomer take that I try to push out of my mind is that maybe the building's really burning now and they're trying to loot out all they can WHILE they still can, optics be damned.

This reads like something out of The Onion. The British Petroleum Company has to refocus on petroleum because they pivoted to something else and it turns out that that cheap energy is wildly profitable.

Maybe the UK government will have to step in and refocus BP on windmills or something.

I don’t know which company you’re referring to because British Petroleum hasn’t existed for nearly 30 years.

Clearly they mean BP

Following the Deepwater Horizon / Macondo incident, Obama used the phrase "British Petroleum" consistently, despite the company having been called "BP" since the 2000 rebrand post BP Amoco. It was a deliberate, and successful, tactic that drew attention away from criticism of the federal government and regulator, who had so clearly been captured by the industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com