Shell: AA
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...
Higher than TSLA
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...
Higher than TSLA
There's bits of their plan that seem dubious to me, like mentions of carbon capture but overall, since I believe that the problem of climate change wasn't "oh no, we can't do this, because it's impossible" but rather "we're not going to do this", that commitment and plan is all I'm really looking for.
It would be like the USA implementing a carbon tax. Is it instantly going to solve all the problems tomorrow? Will it magically fix all the previous carbon they've emitted. No, but it would be a really smart thing to do and just based on their size, would have a massive impact over time accelerating the transition.
How is this remotely possible in any real sense? It doesn’t hold up to any form of scrutiny. They would literally have to remove thousands of tonnes of carbon from the air every year and put it back in the ground. That is not possible.
No, they’ve built a few wind farms and intend to trade carbon credits. Pure greenwashing.
They don't need to remove it from the air, that's kind of the last resort, though some people do think that'll be part of the answer eventually and are investigating ways to do it. The simplest and cheapest option to reach their goal will generally be to avoid emitting carbon in the first place.
So yes, building wind farms is a good thing, as is running an EV charging network. Lots of things they can do to make money as a business that don't involve greenhouse gas emissions. Lots of ways they can save money as a business, which as a side effect reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon credits are a boring, sensible answer that economist like, it's basically equivalent to a carbon tax. It literally pays people to do the right thing, and charges them if they don't. It's one of the policies that enabled Tesla and EVs generally to succeed and get to the point where they are better than what we had before.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/tesla-electric-vehicle-regul...
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/gettin...
They also keep raising the ambitions of their goals over time. Basically, big corporations don't want to be the only one doing this, because their competitors would screw them. But if they all do it, then it's in everyone's benefit, you just need some system to make sure that the other corporations aren't cheating.
Do you think that BP deserves the same rating as an EV company?
Do you really think that Tesla deserves an average rating in the automobile industry?
The same score or lower than the automobile companies who were cheating on emissions tests!
Turns out you can just say you have a plan 30 years in the future and be good.
Besides, shell is apparently so green that activists investors are asking it to split out the green energy part from the oil part. The idea of activists is that oil lovers undervalue shell because of the green stuff, whilst green lovers undervalue shell because of the oil. Hence if you split it the parts have a higher combined valuation. Point being, shell has a very significant green energy investment.
isn't that criticism political in nature?
> 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium
> 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt
> 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, 25,000 pounds of ore for copper
> Digging up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust
> For just - one - battery.
https://twitter.com/brianroemmele/status/1503176565974216710
Would appreciate a fact check if this is anyone's business here
> washbrain
Ha, nice try.
We judge companies on their actions now, not on what they might do, or might be possible in the future.
Petrol is fuel. You dig it up and burn it into the atmosphere again and again and again for every mile you drive.
Meanwhile, I see numbers like this a lot and they always seem to trend high. You're talking 250 tons of ores to make perhaps 250-1000kg of the car; an efficiency of between 0.1 and 0.4 percent over some pretty straightforward, widely available ores. That doesn't really stack up with the numbers you get if you look at the efficiency of commercial ores for those minerals.
So I think the mining is comparable between battery and petrol, but as others point out, you can recycle the battery; the petrol had become problematic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
If nothing else, you could grind up the batteries and treat them as ore for any single one of the minerals used, and by your numbers you'd be way better off.
My calculation shows ~50,000 pounds. 200,000 mile lifetime at 25 MPG = 8000 gallons * 6.30 pounds/gallon fuel density[0] = 50,400
Also keep in mind that gasoline is a refined product.
Proper comparisons look at both sides.
They are harmful in that they are actively distracting from the proper solution: that people shouldn't have private cars.
The environmental cost to produce car, the space they take up in the cities, in the end private car ownership can not be made sustainable even if they run on electric. Tech wont solve the climate crisis, only societal change will.
And yeah every rule needs exceptions, of course there should be ways to rent cars for special occasion, I am just against general private car ownership for most people.
Edit: General private car ownership of people living in the cities that is
delivery here is unreliable and expensive. if I'm picking out wood I have to go through dozens of boards to find ones that aren't fucked up. I need to find ones that are suitable for the job that I'm trying to use them for. A delivery guy would just grab whatever and throw it in the truck. It's not like I'm ordering an iPod off of Amazon. no mileage savings would be had because it is unlikely that anybody else would be having something delivered in the middle of nowhere.
The thing is most people live in urban areas (and the general trend is for that to increase) and don't work in woodworking. So this caused me to be a bit dismissive as it doesn't really effect the main point that much.
As I said, there will always be exceptions. I think the more productive discussion is to find what would work for most people, that is people in an urban setting. Then we can figure out how to make it work for people farther out.
I am not sure what the best solution for your situation would be. I guess the biggest quick win would be just to get private cars out of the cities. It doesn't really matter if a few people farther out own cars as long as they are a minority. Maybe that is where electric cars would come in handy but then again they lack the range.
Again, most people live in urban areas and prefer to live in urban areas and once cities become more green they will become even more attractive furthering urbanization. Whether the few people living outside own a car or not will hardly matter.
The no-cars world requires a huge amount of political buy-in and you’d be going through the most politically annoying group in the US – homeowners. The transition to electric cars can be done through simple laws that change the incentives (like by implementing a federal gas tax so it’s cheaper to drive electric, or heavily subsidizing electric cars)
If anything, the last couple of decades demonstrate pretty convincingly and depressingly that putting together real momentum (read: won referendums on things like carbon taxes, _not_ push polls) is capital-H Hard. It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either. Consider [1]: this is in a constituency electorally dominated by one of the most avowedly socially-liberal cities in the US and year after year it goes down by similar margins, and that's incredibly anodyne compared to straight-up getting rid of private cars.
Conversely, supply-side energy mix changes have, over the same timeframe, made drastic improvements in emissions-per-capita without requiring much/any self-sacrifice. Martyrdom doesn't really scale in the same way.
So: what's your plan for gaining the power required to implement your scenario, taking into account the apparent ineffectiveness of decades of messaging? "just ban the cars" would be sensical if you were emperor for a day, but failing any miracles it seems to me that the real distraction is this sort of utopianism.
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[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1631,_Carbon_E...
Having finding trouble an apartment? Without all the wasted space for cars we could have much denser cities. Problem solved!
Want to have a place where children can actually play outside safely? Again, ban cars and you don't have to move to the country or suburbia.
Tired of how loud cities are? Oh boy, do I have a solution for that.
I am not preaching sacrifice, I am saying if we change some things we can achieve much better living conditions for everyone, a plus in living standard.
So it is more of a matter of getting people to be conscious about how things actually work.
So no, I am not Utopian. The point still stands that Tech wont solve the issues. It is sink or swim for humanity.
Don't you see any problems with that plan?
It is really not a big deal.
IMHO, big cities are dying, they're a relic of the past. The Internet had already killed physical retail. The pandemic killed off more businesses while WFH workers fled the cities. Soft-on-crime policy trends seem to be hastening the decline.
And in a digitally connected world there's simply fewer reasons to physically pack ever more people into small spaces.
It is just a matter for human instead of car-centric city planning. This will also help with poverty and crime.
Most of the noise in cities comes from cars, that is a fact. Even dense cities can be fairly quiet. I suggest watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
Plus China has probably not the best building codes, the problem can be further improved by having proper sound isolation in homes.
Dense cities mean you will have everything in walking distance. There will be much more space for parks and other areas of recreation.
It's not like your average American isn't aware of these arguments; they're just not broadly convincing (even if, from your or my perspective, they are). If they were, population flows would be headed in the other direction.
I'm pushing back here because your solution appears to be to continue to make the same arguments that have, so far, failed to convince enough people to deflect us from our current trajectory. More of the same, but louder? And given the urgency of the position, it's not like waiting on natural generational shift is much of an answer.
That's more or less why I take the exact opposite position and am bullish on anything that involves supply-side efficiency and bearish on anything that involves people having spontaneous moral awakenings.
https://ecology.wa.gov/About-us/Who-we-are/News/2021/Aug-6-S...
Carbon taxes etc., are fairly subtle and boring technocratic method to achieve a goal. The reaction to them is almost entirely based on false impressions, a nested series of false impressions actually. There is no problem, there is no solution, this solution would make things worse, this solution would hurt me personally. this solution is just a scam and so on.
"I don't want to do the thing that economists say is most efficient, because it would be painful" as a democratic opinion doesn't really make any sense. If it's efficient then you can use the efficiency gains to compensate anyone who loses out.
And then that deliberately misinformed reaction is somehow raised as yet another reason for not doing the most sensible thing, and to talk about how "painful" it would be to stop polluting and incentivize efficiency.
And the only reason we appear to need to talk about what people want in this weird, third-hand, circular way, is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change. And since that answer isn't acceptable to some people, they need to come up with elaborate ways to prove that people don't actually want what they say they want, and that economists say is the best thing to do.
I guess I should have said "popularly perceived to be personally painful" - which I think you'd agree with? Carbon taxes are fantastic measures that are one of our best shots at success, and I think it's a shame the referendums didn't pass. The actual harm to voters would objectively be pretty low, but again, perception is what matters. Fact can obviously feed into perception, but in a case like this where we're explicitly dealing with misinformation campaigns correctness is necessary but, alone, insufficient.
And yeah, of course that reaction is deliberately misinformed - I tried to catch that in my original comment:
> It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either.
The proponents of these bills had their shot. So did the deceptive oil majors. So far, hasn't worked out. What's the new plan - cede the fight for public opinion and try to do everything via administrative rearguard actions? I'm sticking to this point because the implicit response usually seems to be either that or "wait for a utopian mass moral awakening" - and neither is much of a strategy.
> is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change.
Well, kinda, and that's what I was getting at by mentioning push polling. If you position addressing climate change as a common-sense positive-balance deal requiring zero self-sacrifice, then sure. However, the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do is well-documented. If you drill down a little into what that willingness to incur change actually looks like, you get results like [1]. This is why referendum results are interesting as indicators of revealed preference. What I'm trying to avoid here is taking the push-poll cheap idealism as deep commitment, and using that to inform commitment to dead-end policy choices.
The core of my argument here is
1) real climate action is essential, and carbon taxes are one of the best means of implementing this from a technical perspective
2) voting outcomes and polling suggest that public support for changes that are popularly perceived as personally painful is limited, even in cases of subtle and boring technocratic methods like (1)
3) given (2), attaining the popular support necessary to wholesale ban private cars appears wildly unlikely
4) therefore, maybe focus on the stuff that we're actually somewhat close to (2016 vs 2018 referendums gained ~4%) instead of utopian pipe dreams that inspire fierce opposition
I may have been unclear because I feel like a lot of your point is addressing arguments I didn't make - I agree that carbon taxes are great and that opposition to them is largely not substantive. The problem I'm trying to point out is that if _even in this case_ things are ropey, talking about banning cars is beyond pie-in-the-sky. There's a strong need to focus on interventions that are minimally disruptive to lifestyles in order to maintain the degree of popular support necessary for long-term change. Convincing someone of the (true facts!) that a supply-side intervention like carbon pricing will have a minimally negative or positive impact on their day-to-day is way easier than talking that hypothetical person out of their car.
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[1] https://apnews.com/article/8e6baa6c2d3badeb4e91b6e6d078a5c0
Removing peoples autonomy might start with “why can’t they take the bus” but where it ends is something very different.
(I'm not weighing in on their validity, but it's absolutely truthful the allegations and lawsuits are there.)
I want to make sure I understand you. You don't know if people's accusations are true, but you do know that they are making accusations. Is that correct?
There's absolutely no evidence Tesla is more racist or unsafe place to work than Shell. If anything, Shell should be, in theory, more risky, safety-wise - they are much bigger, so more opportunity to screw up, and they do some things that are inherently risky, like mining and extraction. But I have a serious suspicion that the score has much less to do with safety statistics than with politics and donating to certain people and NGOs, somehow.