It sounds more like an excuse to continue to output oil while doing absolutely nothing to stop the further degradation of out environment.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-clima...
And replace this:
> while doing absolutely nothing to stop the further degradation of out environment
with:
> doing something to profit from the further degradation of our environment
Eat the cake and have it too
I don't understand how you're using this metaphor here. What's the cake? WRT the environment, they're just eating it.
The expectation that they’d pivot is far less likely than likely. This isn’t a sector known for disruption outside of new ways to extract.
I’ve never understood the obstructionist position of these oil execs. If you want to make a shitload of money, why not push for development of some emerging industry like renewables where all the infrastructure has to be built up from nothing? That could be money you are getting paid to build it. Instead, now it’s money going to some other company.
[0] https://www.desmog.com/s1ep1-bell-labs-energy/
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/30/763844598/how-big-oil-of-the-...
[2] https://www.bupipedream.com/news/49390/prof-whittingham/
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/14/archives/exxons-innovativ...
A long, slow transition that started in the 70s would have been, if not painless, then close enough to it that the pain was easily managed. Worries about stranded assets? By the time the transition was over, they'd have been near the end of their expected lifespans anyways. New, more nimble competitors popping up? They could just acquire them.
Lost revenue? Please. They convinced the world not to take action on climate change, and even managed to hoodwink one of the two major political parties in the US that climate change didn't even exist in the first place. Persuading politicians and the public to support mindbogglingly massive federal subsidies to fund the transition away from fossil fuels would have been easy in comparison. And probably cheaper, for that matter.
I mean, my god. I can just imagine the marketing and PR angle: The industry that chose to end itself to save humanity's future. We'd have shoveled money at them, and thanked them for the privilege.
Had they been willing, they could have pushed for an energy transition that, in the end, would have likely been as profitable or even more profitable than what they managed since they first understood just how catastrophic climate change would be. Instead, they chose to merely delay the inevitable. They'll still face the very consequences that scared them off of acting on climate change, only they'll be worse due to the shortened window of action.
The only difference is that the executives who first made that decision will likely not be around for it.
You see, companies get charged for the carbon they emit, not the carbon that their customers emit.
An oil refinery is an ideal place to implement carbon capture because it is a concentrated source of emissions and is already using technology such as amine strippers that one would use for carbon capture. Refineries burn a lot of fuel to produce hydrogen and process heat and those could be replaced with green hydrogen or pink hydrogen, heat could be derived from resistive heating, nuclear HTGR or adiabatic compression in turbines. What CO2 is produced can be pumped underground into saline aquifers.
The Biden administration is interested in subsidizing such development in the ‘Refinery Row” of the U.S. South and it is something they are equipped to succeed at because they have the geology, industrial concentration, skills and attitude to pull it off.
A net-zero Exxon would still have to decarbonize production and that is harder than the refinery but they could buy some offsets (or themselves implement with direct carbon capture, BECCS, etc.) It would be a lot cheaper than buying offsets for their customers but who knows they might sell those too.
We need to price the carbon emissions at the source. If they want to pass on the external carbon costs to their customers, so be it.
Get away with what, a talking point?
> We need to price the carbon emissions at the source. If they want to pass on the external carbon costs to their customers, so be it.
What if a power company buys a bunch of natural gas, with emissions already paid, then captures the burned carbon instead of emitting it?
Presumably the only reason they would is if they could get paid carbon credits for doing so.
But giving them credits seems pointlessly complicated to me, compared to just saying "no emissions, no charge".
But at the same time somehow storing nuclear waste in specially designed containers sitting inside granite mountains is somehow extremely irresponsible and not an option?
Do most people actually realize what happens when that stored CO2 comes back up for whatever reason in x amount of years (all the way up to 100's of millions of years). I mean both the short term (everything in a certain radius that doesn't fly dies) as well as long term effects.
Humans are contributing to climate change, but the climate had constantly changed throughout history. During the peak to the Roman empire, parts of the Mediterranean are estimated to have been 2°C hotter than today. The climate cooling is one of the likely contributing factors behind the collapse of the Roman empire, as agricultural output fell as a result.
Climate change is bad for current human settlement and farming, as what is currently primar land for living and farming will change. Such a charge would have dangerous global economic and political consequences.
That's not a change in global average tempreture though, that's a local variation.
> but the climate had constantly changed throughout history.
'History' is written history, and no, global climatic parameters haven't changed in written history.
I believe you might be thinking of geological time - and yes, on long time scales climate has changed - and changed with cause just as a stone moves subject to force.
In this particular moment of time climate has started to change within the past century after remaining stable for tens of thousands of years and the root cause of that change is human activity changing the insulation properties of the atmosphere.
I don't think there is any doubt that human activity is contributing to climate change.
It's ironic that modern civilization and population numbers aren't possible without fossil fuels, but their use will ultimately cause it's demise.