Shell made a film about climate change in 1991
thecorrespondent.com
thecorrespondent.com
here are my cliff notes:
> human energy consumption, by means of burning fossil fuels, is the reason for green house gases, that in turn trap more heat, then our environment can sustain.
> technology to reduce CO2 emission, assuming the same level of electricity consumption -- is far from being available. They had talked about Nuclear, sun, geo, nuclear fusion.
>more efficient means to convert to electricity:
>35% of coal energy is transformed to electricity
> incandescent light bulb converts only 5% to light If larger city (NY, Moscow, Bombay etc) switch to better light bulb, 1 million ton of C02 emissions every year, each.
> simply changing from coal to gas cuts carbon emission by 40%
>half of worlds oil is used by 500mln road vehicles. 400 mln of those are private cars. each producing 4 times its weight in CO2, each year. Internal com engine is only 20% efficient. Cars can improve by 3 times (not clear, if they assumed electric only or not).
> when gas is not available option, coal can be gasified
> >Taxation can work both ways, already there is a talk of carbon tax. But how to achieve compliance across national borders.
>Global warming calls for global response. but world is not a common market. Examples they used is Easter Europe, other developing regions.
>How could this countries advance, but leap-frog energy developments?
Future must be different, developing countries cannot take the same path as the developed countries in the past.
Also I like the irony of showing Volkswagen cars when mentioning efforts from the E.U. to reduce car emissions :)
I understand that some governments have penalized car ownership by way of license plate restrictions and other tax situations (I've heard that license plates in China get auctioned for $12k USD because they're so rare). This turns owning a car into a vanity symbol for the wealthy. It may not even be an intentional symbol, but I'm sure that's the way it's perceived by those who don't own a car.
My point being that for some, car ownership isn't so bad. No need to go shaming people.
If you're courageous, you could live in downtown Dallas without a car (can move around a bit with DART). Making it harder to own a car (combined with more "dense-city" developments) doesn't seem like the worst idea. Mainly because we could recover the huuuge parking lots.
And when you want to go to Austin for the weekend you can rent a car.
In any case, even if the entire state is still very much "car necessary", you can still try to incentivise pockets of the state to be less so.
I've commuted by bike and public transportation for a number of years and I'd never want to ban vehicle ownership. A more workable solution would be to make driving tests less of a joke or to make dense areas of city centers car free zones. American cities are just too large and often times people drive without a destination in mind, like my Sunday drives down the California Public Highway along the beach.
Let's focus on the selfish car guy, that's the big picture all right in “saving” the world.
The "selfish car guy" is why the American lifestyle consumes twice as much as the Japanese lifestyle. Everything gets built around it.
And of course there's the fact that the American lifestyle gets exported to other places as well.
* Higher fuel consumption = some categories could be exempt, for example vans used by ONGs, firms and independent contractors.
* * Bigger cars = smaller cars are easier to park, take less space in traffic and make it overall more fluid, etc. I think exemptions could be made here for the categories I mentioned previously and for families with children, for example.
Plus, taxing per gallon is exactly proportional to the burden on society.
An extra 50 cents per gallon is quite a bit, but it doesn't seem to discourage this behavior. 40% on the price of the car instead... could make a lot more people think twice about the purchase.
For shorter distances, great bicycling infrastructure helps a lot. Buses are nice but cycling is often as fast, with the benefit of being completely door to door and leaving exactly when you want to. But this benefit only works if people feel completely safe on the road, which means mostly seperate cycle paths, and removing cars from the busy city centers. Not having cars there makes shopping more attractive, because it's now easier to walk from store to the store across the road.
That same infrastructure then also helps make trains more attractive, because you can set up cheap bike hire at stations. This then means your journey can be bike-train-bike door to door, rather than walk-bus-train-bus-walk (or worse).
It's a complicated connected mesh of things.
Also, many professions require high levels of mobility.
Finally, unless you introduce some kind of permit system and create serious beaurocracy for enforcing it, people will just pretend to have their own companies and drive "company" cars anyway.
Nature will find a way :)
And I say this while taking 50% of my trips with public transit (the rest with Uber). I seriously hope we get rid of gas cars one way, but banning private ownership would be crazy.
In Belgium we have busses that only drive if you call them up first https://www.delijn.be/en/belbus/
Public transport underdeveloped -> more people use personal transport -> public transport develops even less, city develops around personal transport -> vicious circle.
Of course the individual it's a purely not victim, but in certain contexts, using the car is a necessity. In such cases, a strong collective effort should be made to reverse the situation.
Cars, and houses, are to a degree used for status signalling. With products like that, heavy taxes increase total utility since you can still have a nicer car/house than your poorer neighbour, it's just that all cars/houses have been bumped up a rung of show-offiness. Compare Europe to the USA for example. Even the American electric cars are comically large by euro standards.
(Other co-benefits are improved safety, an analysis of CARB regulations suggested that they paid for themselves just by reducing death and injury by encouraging lighter cars, even if you ignore air quality issues)
We do that here in the UK. The difference between a small economical car and a giant SUV is a factor of 5 (£110 for a small car vs £515 for a huge car, plus a couple of lower bands for electric and 'green' cars). It really isn't enough make anyone who wants to drive a big car choose something else. It needs to be more like 50 times more for a big car rather than 5, but politicians are too scared to introduce that.
Of course politicians should be the one who decide the rules. That's how democracy works...
Keep in mind that the jet fuel that's used to transport all the world's hipsters to “experience the world” is not taxed at all – or does that hit too close to home even for a person who doesn't own a car? A life that's aimed at solely minimising emissions is a bleak one, which is why it's not the will of the majority.
What about the jet fuel that's used for the other 98% of people who fly on a regular basis? Is that less polluting, or are you just jealous of the people who travel internationally for leisure? You're not making any sense, unless you're deluded enough to think that those are the only people who fly. "does that hit too close to home even for a person who doesn't own a car?"
Again, that makes no sense. Why would car ownership affect the impact of jet fuel pollution? If it's the "hipsters" you're concerned about, wouldn't those be the people who are already offsetting the environmental cost of air travel by using public transport and/or unmotorised travel and thus polluting less than car owners?
In other words, you seem to be more interested at attacking a threadbare strawman than evaluate what's actually happening. It's pretty sad, when the actual reason for taxation is pretty clear (to encourage less polluting methods of transport where one reasonably exists, which may not be the case for many air routes).
The real kicker? Jet fuel is actually taxed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
> technology to reduce CO2 emission, assuming the same level of electricity consumption -- is far from being available. They had talked about Nuclear, sun, geo, nuclear fusion.
Solar and wind power are picking up steam (pun intendend :p).
> incandescent light bulb converts only 5% to light If larger city (NY, Moscow, Bombay etc) switch to better light bulb, 1 million ton of C02 emissions every year, each.
Incadescent light bulbs are largely obsolete. I'm sure they haven't been replaced 100% but they definitely are on their way out.
> simply changing from coal to gas cuts carbon emission by 40%
This is also happening cause gas is very cheap right now.
Yes, we produce more solar and wind power, but the level of electricity consumption has also increased. Are we outputting less CO2 for electricity, or does all the solar and wind just come on top of what we already had?
I expect China's emissions to be through the roof compared to 1990, on the other hand they've noticed the problem and unlike Trump's head in the sand approach, the vast majority of their energy investments are in renewables.
So things are bad but they're looking up.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/analysis.cfm?iso=CHN
Grandparent was talking about investments, though, not the status quo. Couldn't readily find figures relating to the distribution of investments, but it's easy to find articles about the large scope of their renewable ambitions, e.g. http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china-leaving-us-behind-clea...
http://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bul...
That's an interesting point, does someone have the calculation on what the net benefits of this process are?
This is known as Jevon's paradox.
That said, I felt that some of Trump's efforts to lower EPA approval times from 6 years to 4 years could be good...I'm just not qualified to say.
I agree though that anyone who read the story about the PFOA will agree that the EPA needs DRAMATICALLY more power and probably more funding not less.
Otherwise the goal of the company is to make profit for shareholders - anything else would be illegal (against the law)
Need to change the "operating system of economy" to that environment is included in the balance sheets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Bottom_Line
As a child I learned that many metropolitan cities would be underwater by the year 2000.
The year 2000 seemed way off then, so people felt pretty comfortable predicting doomsday scenarios.
I believe in climate change now, but I also take every underwater city the BBC shows with a grain of salt.
For instance, a 1988 article says scientists warn that pollutants already have committed the planet in "30 years to 50 year to its highest temperatures in 10,000 years"; in 2017 I would say that (based on our reconstructed temperature estimates) this prediction is likely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past...).
There is an article in 1983 predicting a 3.6 degree rise by 2040 (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1928&dat=19831019&id=...) and one in 1982 predicting a 4 to 5 degree temperature rise in 50 years (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19820326&id=...). Being American articles, you convert Fahrenheit to Celsius; this seems very consistent with modern predictions on the climate. The current temperature anomaly is about 1C (https://www2.ucar.edu/climate/faq/what-average-global-temper... an additional 1C by 2040-2050 is within the scope of current climate change models, as far as I know.
I don't doubt that there were some people that projected overly pessimistic doomsday scenarios of flooded cities by the end of 2000 (though to be honest most of the articles I'm encountering more warn of 2100), but for me this is actually is an interesting confirmation; even 30 years ago, the scientists had a model in place that has proven to be way more resilient than some of the deniers would have it.
Please support companies like that.
However I don't know if they're unique in this aspect, e.g. Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Total are all huge oil companies that are pivoting into solar and wind. At this point it just makes pure business sense; renewable energy has (or will soon, depending on which tech) become profitable even without subsidies. These companies have a lot of engineering talent and money they can invest in projects. They see that oil and gas long term future prospects are bad (production costs are going up while demand is going down). Renewables are the opposite, costs going down and demand increasing. They are already energy production companies.
You can also see they're playing on their strengths, like Statoil doing offshore wind because of their experience with offshore structures in adverse weather, while Saudi Aramco know lots about building and operating production equipment scattered around the desert so they focus on solar, etc.
Statoil is 67% owned by the Norwegian government directly, and another 3% is owned by the Government Pension Fund Norway (which is the "small one" of the two Norwegian sovereign wealth funds - the biggest one which usually gets all the attention only invests outside of Norway)
Edit: XOM stance: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/exxon-s-n...
Imagine if some nerd had spoke up at a Shell meeting and said his analysis of the American voter suggested that they could just claim it was a Chinese hoax and that would be accepted. Most intelligent people would find it hard to take that seriously, so they only found out by continually pushing the boundaries of what they thought the public would accept.
Unfortunately for the world, there was a certain group of Republican voters that were very susceptible to their propaganda and so they could keep pushing into the absurd.
What is wrong with people.
For example, it's well documented that DuPont fought to continue using CFCs until they had secured patents on replacement products and suffered public humiliation by our government.
Companies will not generally act in the best interests of the citizens, which is why we have a government which should be independent of influence by leaders of companies.
Use logic and talk about what they did do that's bad.
Shell is a mega corp full of different people and different departments.
Why are we using the fact part of the mega corp tried to make a positive change against them?
Why are we being negative about positive behaviour?
Lastly, warning labels do not absolve a company of all responsibility.
Also people dont care about the best interest of humanity, if it doesnt line up with their personal interest (ex: car sales, car usage etc)
If we all dies out they do to.
If the world changes for the worse, that is also bad for corporations.
They made a film, but they made trillions in making the problem so much worse.