Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions | Hacker News Reader

Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

bloomberg.com

291 pointsjatorre307 comments

The plan that was shelved was about carbon offsets, these have not proven to be particularly effective so maybe not too big a deal.

The greater loss is that the new CEO had already scaled down Shell's investment in renewables, setting a target of 4.5% of the total investments in renewables by 2025[0].

Some other Oil&Gas companies seem to be a bit more inclined to actually invest in renewables, or at least pay lip service to it, e.g. ENI aims at 30% by 2025[1].

Remains to be seen how much will actually be invested.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-boost-dividend... [1] https://www.eni.com/en-IT/media/press-release/2022/03/pr-cap...

If there are x offsets available, and demand is x + 100, then when Shell buys offsets, they're not really fixing the problem at all, they're just shifting blame right? They're saying "since we spent this money on the offsets, our carbon emissions were good (or at least 'less bad'), but the other company that couldn't afford or wouldn't bother with the offsets is bad even though there were only enough offsets for one of us".

Honestly, this upsets people?

The increase in demand drives up the price of offsets, which increases supply and investment in better carbon capture techniques and scaling. Im lumping in things like direct air capture, bioenergy carbon capture and storage, and enhanced weathering as offset generating technologies that are currently too expensive to be widespread, but with higher carbon prices would become practical.

> The increase in demand drives up the price of offsets,

Except there are limits which the demand, for the most part, can't overcome.

> Im lumping in things like direct air capture, bioenergy carbon capture and storage,

All of these things are energy intensive, aren't they? So as energy becomes more expensive, so do they. Demand never gets quite so high that it's worth it to pay for this, because the price is always rising. There's another alternative in such situations... "just don't buy carbon offsets". The PR hit's cheaper after all.

A lot of carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere, something needs to do it at scale. The IPCC says we’ll need global cumulative net-negative emissions of 380 GtCO2 from 2050 to 2100 to return to 1.5°C after a likely overshoot. Focusing solely on emissions reduction will lead us directly to a global warming induced dystopia.

the bigger problem with carbon offsets is that the underlying system that is supposed to be backing the units aren't actually offsetting any carbon. wendover has a nice video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY

Is anyone surprised by this?

Buying offsets is not shifting the blame, it's paying someone else to fix the problem. The reason for that should be that you either have no cost effective way to offset the carbon yourself, or there is a very attractive market for the offsets.

If demand were x+100, and theoretically some company wouldn't be able to afford to buy the offsets, it wouldn't somehow have ended up with the blame of Shell, they would just have found no one to solve their problem for them and would have to fix it themselves.

Of course this is assuming that whoever is selling the offsets is actually performing the task of carbon offsetting effectively, something that many believe is not actually happening so that puts things into even more murky waters.

It makes a ton of sense if your focus is only short-term profit. It makes absolutely 0 sense if your goal is to try to decrease the legal liability of knowingly causing global warming and actively suppressing those internal studies to increase profits.

Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years and the previous CEO was preparing their defense of "don't punish us for the sins of our fathers". Whereas Sawan is doubling down on "maximize this quarter, who cares about the future, not my problem".

That's all ignoring the: do you actually care at all if your great grandchildren have a habitable planet? (or maybe grandchildren at the rate we're going)

Some 40% of the population is actively pro big oil and actively denies the carbon footprint causal links with climate change and warming.

You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning?

Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion. If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.

I doubt we wil all be dead. It'll be awful but we will accept as the new terrible reality.

I think GP meant that in a hundred years WE will all be dead, not that our descendants won't be there.

I think 60% of the population is enough to pass laws such that it doesn't actually matter if the other 40% is willfully ignorant.

I also think as the climate becomes more and more inhospitable, that 40% number will continue to decrease.

The world isn’t just the USA and Europe, and their proclamations aren’t the law of the world nor are they the world police. Nor do the majority of the Earth’s emissions come from developed countries.

Go ask some people in developing countries if they think they should sacrifice economic growth for climate change. The answer is going to be overwhelmingly no. The developing world also has the majority of the world’s population, so the global consensus actually belongs to them, not us.

I think what you'll find is if all the developed nations believe their very existence is at stake due to actions of the un-developed, it will result in war/the end of the threat very quickly.

Case in point: the fabricated idea that Iraq had chemical weapons that could hit western Europe. There wasn't a lot of debate on whether or not the western world was willing to eliminate the threat if it existed.

(note, I'm not trying to turn this into a discussion of the fabricated information, simply using it as an example that war is always on the table if a country feels its existence is in danger).

> You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning?

20 years minus the latency inherent to the system. If I recall correctly the latency from "stopping to emit CO2" to "starting to see effects" is estimated to be 13 years.

The earth is getting warmer. To try to guilt people about it achieves nothing. The only action humanity can take at this point is to predict the effects of global warming and build infrastructure to slow it down, mitigate it or plan for the mass migrations.

I do believe that included in "only action" is: keep fossil fuels in the ground.

The idea that we can only mitigate is insane. Yes we've already signed up for a lot of pain as a civilization, but as long we keep burning fossil fuels we are looking at an increasingly worse future.

It's not like a smoker who has gotten lung cancer, where the best we can do is try to ease the pain, and more smoking won't really matter.

The biggest first step in preventing the worse case is to be able to point to an established oil field and say "that will never be extracted, and will remain in the earth for at least a 1000 years."

Every ton of carbon we can keep in the ground that way, the better of our future, even if that future is already slated to be bad.

We can slow down the use of fossil fuels, but as long as we are 8 billion people on the planet and we find no better way to produce ammonia, steel, concrete and plastics, we will keep needing huge amounts of fossil fuels.

Personally, I feel that the solution is to gradually raise the tax rate on fossil fuels in order to disincentives their use and incentivize the production of alternatives. We've done this for cigarettes and it has worked. However, you will probably have the vaping equivalent of petrol that will come out and gain more marketshare.

The second solution is to make energy so cheap and abundant that petrol becomes unattractive.

To massively and suddenly restrict petrol use is a great way to start riots and ensure that your government will either be overthrown or has to descend into tyranny.

> However, you will probably have the vaping equivalent of petrol that will come out and gain more marketshare.

I believe that's electric SUVs and solar roofs on single family homes :D

I would like to add a point that is rarely spelled out:

A shock-therapy style stop to fossil fuel extraction will kill millions of people through starvation, economic collapse and insufficient heating in winter. Depending how shocking the shock therapy is it could be billions.

Wait until you see what climate change does with continued carbon emissions!

But this has always been the problem with stopping climate change.

We are choosing between lesser, but certain immediate pain vs larger but less certain future pain.

In the 1880s we could have easily stopped climate changed, but been forced to slow growth. The pain would have been minimal for those living, but the probability of extreme catastrophe seemed remote so nothing was done.

As we move forward the probability of extreme catastrophe becomes more certain, but so too does the immediately pain.

Without modern fertilizers which heavily rely on fossil fuels to produce, roughly half of the world population cannot be fed. Further, agriculture becomes much more labor intensive and we pretty much revert to the past where the majority of the population on earth were farmers. If you don't know how to farm effectively using past methods, you probably also get added to the "cannot be fed" list. That is a substantial immediate pain. I would much rather work to gradually reduce carbon emissions while mitigating the damage done.

I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.

> I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.

Oh, much worse.

First off we, fertilizer or no, we're already facing crop failures in the US [0] and will continue to face even more extreme crop failures [1]. Even if we had unlimited fertilizer we've already signed up for massive famine.

But if you really want to talk about the unmitigated climate change path, which is what happens if we choose not to keep hydrocarbons in the ground, I really recommend reading Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky [2].

He's a respected geologist that makes a compelling case that the vast majority of mass extinction events were caused by rapid rises in CO2.

One of the realistic scenarios we're facing, he argues, is the break down of the AMOC ultimately leading to the oceans becoming anoxic and releasing hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen. The entire marine ecosystem is essentially wiped out except for some cyanobacteria. The oceans are the foundation of all of our food systems. It would make the planet uninhabitable my most complex life of today. This has happened before in Earth's climate history.

All of the "bad-awful" but not-extinction event scenarios assume that we do not burn all of the fossil fuel reserves currently leased. We are already looking at a grim future, but given that we're rapidly pumping millions of years of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, upper bounds for the damage we can do are tremendous.

0. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/us/kansas-wheat-harvest-d... 1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/4/scientists-warn-of-c... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Under-Green-Sky-Warming-Extinctions/d...

Sounds like the classic trolley problem where your choice is to pull a lever and immediately kill half the world's population because 100 million kilometres away, the entirety of life on earth is comfortably resting on the train tracks. You're saying, let's pull that lever. I'm saying, let's organize a project to move the trolley tracks since we have ample time to do so. Sure some people will get hit by the trolley as it races by while the track is still being moved, but it sure beats killing 4 billion people in one fell swoop.

> You're saying, let's pull that lever.

First off, I'm not saying "starting tomorrow now fossil fuels!", I'm saying you must keep fossil fuels in the ground to avoid worst case. And the start of that means you have to identify some fossil fuels that will never be extracted.

> since we have ample time to do so.

I seriously have no idea where you got that impression, but with climate change once you start feeling the effects you're already in the danger zone. We've already signed up for famine and potentially billions dead even if we had zero emissions today.

I do suggest you read up a bit more on the topic. No serious research around climate change would claim we have "ample time".

The bigger question is: how close are we to climate "tipping points". We do know that geologically it seems there are points where positive feedbacks start accelerating climate change rapidly. We just don't know where the line is for those tipping points.

If we seriously want to avoid extinction of the species we should already be starting to strategize a schedule of what fossil fuels reserves we promise to keep in the ground, and what we're going to do about future discoveries.

To be honest, I don't really think we will do this, but if we wanted to survive at all we should start talking about it very seriously.

Steel and concrete aren't necessary for the most part: other materials that don't emit (or even actively sequester) carbon are available and have been for a long, long time. It doesn't even preclude building densely either: just look at cross laminated timber.

We're going to build bridges and trains and rails and roads and ships out of cross laminated timber?

And yes, you can build pretty tall structures out of CLT, but there's still smaller than what you can build with steel and concrete. The tallest one built that I know of is 25 stories. But at least 6 or so of those floors are all concrete+steel, and it still uses concrete+steel emergency stairwells.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/apply/w...

But what is the foundation made from? What do you think the elevator shafts are made from? Its not like its 100% wood. I would like to see more CLT construction, and modern building codes are allowing taller and larger stick construction as well, but arguing that steel and concrete aren't necessary is ignoring all the rest of the things supporting that structure along with all the other things that still need steel and concrete. How did all the building materials arrive at the site? What harvested the wood? What were the machines making the CLT made out of? What are the fireproof stairwells usually made out of? Steel and concrete.

We'll probably see more and more construction which looks like this, where some CLT offsets some concrete and steel, but chances are the whole building isn't entirely wood:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/styles/fs_wysiwy...

Using modern materials and building codes can let us reduce our usage of things like steel and concrete for more buildings, but its not going to fully eliminate their usage in our world.

For foundations, lime stabilised soil has been used in civil engineering projects for a very, very long time:

https://www.geoengineer.org/education/ground-improvement/lim...

As for the rest, I was referring to buildings. I don't think anything is so worthy of being built that wrecking the environment is a fair trade. Railways are an honourable exception, since they displace (far more wasteful) cars. Light rail is especially good for this.

The fact is that we need to question what we build, as well as the materials used to build it.

> Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion.

Suppose for a moment that I completely agree with you on all points of substance. Even then, I would have to tell you that corporations are designed (not metaphorically, but literally designed) to deflect and shield liability. There never is anyone to be held accountable, because everyone who acts is an employee, and the ownership is divided among millions of people, through many layers of misdirection. None of whom make any decisions.

Unless you were careful, and if you have a 401K, you yourself may in fact be part owner. Or owner of an owner of an owner of an owner. Should you be held accountable?

You can't arrest a corporation. You can't put it in a holding cell overnight. You can't sentence it to prison for 10 years. You definitely can't give it the death penalty and execute it. And it's no accident this is the case. The major (and perhaps only real) difference between a corporation and simpler business customs is that the corporation is this magical wall between the owner and the business that can't usually be breached. If the business goes bankrupt, no one can seize the businessman's home as collateral. That's what a corporation is for. You live in a society that, however upset it might be over climate change, isn't upset at all over this "design". They like it. They revel in it. And it's not going away.

> If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.

But that's already true from a pragmatic standpoint. Even the CEO now, he was hired in a few years ago, He's just some schlub taking the jobs he knows how to do, without any real power to change what you want. If he tried, they'd fire him and get another. The people who set the ball rolling made sure of that. And even they aren't guilty in any real way, either, unless you want to pretend that someone in the early 1900s should have known better.

Then civil forfeiture every dollar and every thing they own. For some reason police can do it to the poor, why not do the same for corporations and people making decisions there? Maybe executives are "not guilty", but their possessions doesn't have same rights as they do. So take it all away.

Everything who owns? The corporation?

What you think is a harsh fine, even "everything they own" is nothing more than the cost of doing business. Even if you seize a few tens of billions of dollars, what's that compared to the trillions they've earned and paid out as dividends over the last century?

> For some reason police can do it to the poor,

Which is an interesting discussion if you wanted to have it, but is not even slightly relevant to this one.

What do you expect the police to do with oil rigs and tanker fleets and refineries and gas stations? What do you expect them to do with office buildings filled with conference rooms and thousand dollar conference room chairs?

Do you want to pile it into a big bonfire and burn it ironically? Do you put it in a landfill and bulldoze them under the ground? Do you want to sell that stuff on Craigslist yard-sale style for the next 60 years at a penny on the dollar?

Not to mention now you've put a 100,000 people out of work, probably more. I guess making them starve because they took a gas station job is justice in your mind.

> but their possessions doesn't have same rights as they do. So take it all away.

The interesting thing about "just fuck their rights" apoplectic outbursts like yours is, someone's likely to take you up on it someday. You're just likely to be the target more than whoever it is you think you hate.

The sad fact is that none of this can ever be fixed until some large fraction of humanity understands the problem. I've done my part, but you insist on remaining ignorant.

I don't fully agree with parent poster, but the questions in your comments begged for some legitimate answers:

> What do you expect them to do with office buildings filled with conference rooms and thousand dollar conference room chairs?

Turn them into public housing, public spaces, publicly funded cafeterias, etc.

> Not to mention now you've put a 100,000 people out of work, probably more. I guess making them starve

Now with the excess in housing and all these public spaces and cafeterias, maybe it wont be as necessary for people to hang on to fulltime work.

> Now with the excess

Like, with just the corporate headquarters of Shell, you've somehow created an excess in housing?

> maybe it wont be as necessary for people to hang on to fulltime work.

... To the point that they won't have to work for a living?!

Price is set at the margin. Supply 100, demand 101 price goes up. Supply 100 demand 99 price goes down until supply and demand equalize.

75% of new electricity production is renewable. 10% of new car sales are EV's. A large fraction of new home heating installations are heat pumps. The three largest hydrocarbon demands are transitioning. That's going to have a meaningful effect on demand. It'll take decades to get anywhere close to zeroing demand, but it's going to have an effect on the margin quite quickly.

Can the companies & countries addicted to massive oil profits cut production quickly enough to stabilize prices? OPEC is trying but they're only a small and shrinking fraction of production and the gains from defection are so large...

> Can the companies & countries addicted to massive oil profits cut production quickly enough to stabilize prices?

If you look at the Brent Crude (oil) price chart and zoom out so you can see the last 10 years it's definitely not showing any sign of a long-term downward trend.

https://www.google.com/search?q=brent+crude+oil+price

Yes, price goes up when demand goes up. What's going to happen when demand starts going down?

Is it still 40 percent? Seems much more evident now what's happening.

Maybe 40 percent is still pro big oil but they don't deny the causal link.

I'm pro big oil because I still drive a gas car. In that sense if you use big oil products you are a supporter. I would put supporters at over waaaaay over 40 percent. 95% is a better estimate.

That’s a weird way to put it. Driving a gas car doesn’t make you pro-big oil. Most of us are beholden to market pressures and have no realistic option.

Everyone still has to make their living, and they have to do it inside the elites construction of the market.

The elites didn't construct the market. You're just looking for someone to blame. The market came as an emergent property.

The elites are at fault as much as you and I are at fault. The story of oil is a human crisis caused by humanity itself. We like to blame specific groups but that's just not reality.

If this was true, then the for-profit fossil fuel industry wouldn't spend so much money on PR and political lobbying. They'd return that money to their shareholders instead.

You and I enable that behavior by buying oil.

Even if 100% of the global population was on board with getting rid of oil it would take more than 2 decades to lower demand by even 30% without causing massive decline in living standards.

If your view is that these companies are multi-decade sustainable businesses, then you want to invest in shoring up the firms' reputation and drilling new wells. If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders.

> If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders.

I can not locate the long piece article now but I read a piece from someone that effectively got invited into a Shell (UK) think tank and heard exactly that from some vp/executive at a dinner table.

That they aimed to diversify (think corn/algae based fuels, hydrogen infrastructure, charging networks), but that they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades.

> public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades

I don't think it's public opinion so much as it is necessity to maintain current standards of living for the next few decades. Renewable energy is still a relatively small fraction of overall energy use, and net global oil consumption has been steadily increasing the past few years (likely to surpass pre-covid levels this year). Our society is still very much addicted to hydrocarbons.

Meanwhile companies with “climate pledges” forcing RTO.

Even when society wants to shift, the ones in charge say no.

We should have had a governmental mandate requiring companies over a certain size to allow WFH and justify why they can’t do it if they really can’t.

I think the bottom up approach to combat climate change is doomed to fail. We need to start top down. The most powerful institutions and people need to lower their living standards and resource extraction. Start with eliminating private jets for instance.

I fully agree with you but governments aren't exactly the ally on this one. Local and state governments in particular are losing out on tax revenue due to WFH. Lower attendance in offices (often in city centers) means less spending in those areas, so lower sales tax revenue. (I think New York City is projecting around $4500 less spending per worker annually.) Depreciating corporate property values means lower property tax revenue.

On the plus side we have the greatest effect on politics at the local level, if we get involved.

Oh definitely I know they’re not the allies. I’m just hoping and dreaming.

Global hydrocarbon consumption is down on a per capita basis. And that's despite the fact that renewable energy and electric vehicles had a negligible share. It's only the last year or two that renewable energy's share has become non-negligible. The EV transition is lagging the renewable energy transition, but it's happening too. EV's now have a non-negligible share of new vehicle sales, but since it takes ~20 years to turn over the global vehicle fleet, they still have a negligible share of the entire fleet. But that's changing, very slowly.

> And that's despite the fact that renewable energy and electric vehicles had a negligible share.

I could not disagree with this more. While China is a "developing" country, they are arguably making herculean efforts to move away from oil for transportation. They will drag the developed world along, as they will have built up all of this EV and electric scooter/bike/moped manufacturing capacity with only so much domestic consumption for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37307619 (China Reaches Peak Gasoline in Milestone for Electric Vehicles)

From the Bloomberg piece:

> Earlier this month, Chinese oil giant Sinopec made a surprise announcement that mostly flew under the radar. It’s now expecting gasoline demand in China to peak this year, two years earlier than its previous outlooks. The main culprit? The surging number of electric vehicles on the road.

> China has been the largest driver of global growth for refined oil products like gasoline and diesel over the last two decades. But EV adoption rates in China are now soaring, with August figures likely to show plug-in vehicles hitting 38% of new passenger-vehicle sales. That’s up from just 6% in 2020 and is starting to materially dent fuel demand.

> Fuel demand in two and three-wheeled vehicles is already in structural decline, with BNEF estimating that 70% of total kilometers traveled by these vehicles already switched over to electric. Fuel demand for cars will be the next to turn, since well over 5% of the passenger-vehicle fleet is now either battery-electric or plug-in hybrid. The internal combustion vehicle fleet is also becoming more efficient due to rising fuel-economy targets.

I said "had", past tense. Most numbers still end in 2021, and EV's were a negligible fraction of the 1.5 billion vehicles on the road in 2021. Still are, but it's changing fast. 6 million EV's per year is a huge fraction of one year's vehicle sales but a tiny fraction of the entire 1.5 billion fleet.

Fair, retracted. Words are hard. Leaving the comment for the datapoints.

> EV's now have a non-negligible share of new vehicle sales,

In only a few third world countries.

Incorrect. Ireland: "In the opening four months of the year, electric cars took a 17% share of new car sales, up from 13% the previous year "

In Norway, about 90% of new sales are EVs. They aren't a third world country.

https://insideevs.com/news/675163/norway-plugin-car-sales-ju...

The USA was at 14% last year and could hit 18% this year.

https://insideevs.com/news/675163/norway-plugin-car-sales-ju...

that was a typo, I meant first world countries.

Still not negligible.

but not enough to make a impactful dent in carbon emissions, especially if the electricity used charge them is produced by fossil.

When I ran the numbers off of the actual CO2 emissions of the actual California grid, an EV created something like half the CO2 for a trip in the equivalent gas car.

The calculation wasn't straightforward though. And varies widely by locale.

EV mileage is reported in eMPG. Which means, "The miles you get when you charge the battery with the same energy as is in a mile of gasoline." The problem is that to deliver that much to the battery, you have losses at the charger, losses in the grid, and losses during power generation. None of which are counted in that figure. If your electric car is running off of a coal power plant, that 120 eMPG Tesla can easily perform about like a 30 MPG Camry. But as soon as you have a significant fraction of your grid being generated by renewables, now the electric car is running on a fraction of the CO2 emissions of the gas car.

In the end using a car is using a car. It takes an awful lot of energy to build, and then to move, more so often to transport only one or 2 persons, in a very short trip. It needs huge infrastructure that are energetically and financially costly to build and maintain.

All these needs to be cut down and EV won't help us. People need to be able to reach safely schools, workplaces, shops, restaurants by foot or by bike regardless of their age and fitness level.

What we help us is better infrastructure for non motorized vehicles, better public transport (even if they are not financially profitable), walkable spaces, security (with a density of human presence making sure we are safe, not useless cameras), transforming suburbs, commercial and social areas so there is no physical separation anymore between people and where they need/want to go and spend time, effectively bringing back the village/small town paradigm.

EV goes way way way way down the list and we should focus first on EV for public transport and transportation of good rather than personnal toys and vanity possession.

Large energy plants are still more efficient than individual ICEs.

So China is first world?

Though I do admit, electric is less compelling where the electric grid is unreliable.

Well this whole first/second/third world nomenclature is not really pertinent in most cases but yes, I rank the parts of China that do buy cars as developped even though other parts of the same country is in a completely different state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country

Are you talking about China? I think they're considered a second-world country, as they were somewhat aligned with the USSR.

Per capita metrics are useless when it comes to climate stats. The ice caps don't care about how much hydrocarbons are burned per person, they are only affected by the net amount of hydrocarbons burned on a global scale.

True, but it disproves the narrative that oil consumption must inevitably go up.

And if per capita consumption can go down in the 2010's when we had negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps, what'll it do in the 2020's when we have non-negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps?

There were a lot of heat pumps in the 2010s (and before). There’s been a lot of attention and press about heat pumps recently, including some push for heat pumps as sole-source space conditioning, but they’re nowhere as new-tech as mass-market EVs or even the adoption of solar/wind/battery farms.

The EV crutch is getting really old. With current tech it is not a solution. Not even remotely.

It's great. I love the idea too. I would rather we stop driving around machines that belch out dangerous toxins but a mass migration to EVs will be disastrous. The manufacturers are going hybrid...which is a sensible transition. It should get people used to the freedom of producing/collecting their own energy. Hopefully they get addicted to that.

Disastrous? It's already happened. 38% of new cars in the largest car market in the world are EV's.

In Norway (I know it's a small market) it's over 80%. Over 20% of cars on the road are pure electric EVs.

https://elbil.no/om-elbil/elbilstatistikk/elbilbestand/

Parent is talking about China. Note that the number is not pure battery electric vehicles, it includes hybrids.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/02/38-plugin-vehicle-marke...

How are hybrids a sensible solution?

Condition people to view generating your own energy as "freedom." This will shift mindset about solar panels as "freedom." People will flock to hybrids, drastically cut C02 emmissions without spending more or needing decent charging infra. I'm sure others can go one and one with more advantages.

A lot of us are thoroughly enjoying our disasters.

> necessity to maintain current standards of living for the next few decades

You can't always get what you want.

I think we'll never stop extracting oil in the foreseeable future, we'll just be doing a lot less of it. There will always be corner cases where diesel or other oil derivatives (or NG) are the /only/ reasonable option for fuel.

Think generators for an antarctic station that can only use solar in certain months and wind isn't enough (or reliable enough)). Even if efficient electric commercial aviation at scale ever happens, you can bet military jets will still need jet fuel. I'm sure there's many others. Methane for rocket launches?

On top of fuel, there's also the use of some fraction of oil in industrial chemical processes to make lubricants and plastics. There may be other chemical processes that can do it without oil, but they may be too costly (in terms of other extractive processes for ingredients, or in terms of yield, not just energy).

Yeah, just seeing the axle grease requirements and inventory on an aircraft carrier is a wakeup call. Our military is 110% reliant on oil to even function at all. The economic scale of consumer oil consumption and the petro-dollar are a key military concern to enable warfighting ability. When that sinks in, Iraq and Afghanistan make a lot more sense.

The US has plenty of oil and didnt need to go to those places to get more of it. We destroyed Iraqs oil pipelines and infrastructure in that war and a lot of it still is in need of investment in reconstruction today. Likewise Afghan oil production is a recent thing like in the last 10 years, and today the taliban government sells those mineral and oil extraction rights to chinese companies. If the goal was to get at those resources for American companies, we clearly failed. It seems China’s belt and road imperialism works better than our bomb the civilians and overthrow the government for a puppet method.

Electricity is probably going to be an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper in 20 years, at least for bulk purchase in most fixed locations (not Antarctic winter.) The assumption that oil extraction is worthwhile is based on it being the cheapest way to get a unit of power. But if power is 1/10th what it costs now it is economical to do some process that has absurdly bad efficiency (10:1, even 100:1) to translate power into fuel that works in jets. That might just be making conventional jet fuel. But I doubt we will be extracting it from the ground.

I don't see any way electricity could fall anywhere near that much in 20 years. For that to happen, we either need a revolutionary decrease in the price of nuclear power, a radical improvement in the price of dependable renewable energy (probably involving a lot of batteries) or some hard AI takeoff that makes EVERYTHING cheaper.

Keep in mind that most countries are trying to electrify most parts of the economy, so we not only need to decarbonize the current electrical supply, but possibly 2-3 times that, if we are to replace NG for heating, steel and chemical industries, fertilizers and so on.

Keep in mind that even if the technology for producing windmills and batteries go down a lot, we still need a lot of new mining capacity to even have enough raw materials to produce those items. That alone could take 10-15 years to build out.

It's actually very likely.

As long as you only consume it while the Sun is shinning, at the place of generation. This set of restrictions is allowing enough for a surprisingly large set of industrial applications (anything where energy costs are larger than capital ones).

In fact, we are not far from that. Solar is already a few times cheaper than the grid energy on those conditions.

My post was that electricity prices would come back by a factor of 10 or more. While that was qualified by "not Antarctic winter", it did not say that it would be only while the sun was shining, either.

That was what I objected to.

And if the average price falls by 90%, there number of industrial application where it would make sense to consume only part of the day, drops by a lot.

How do you see electricity getting 10x cheaper in 20 years? It sounds like people saying fission electricity would be too cheap to meter, and yet its some of the most expensive electricity we have in the US.

tbf, I think that most new technology has been the most expensive and impractical thing ever around its inception.

The US military uses about 5% of the oil used in the US.

That's a lot, but if we only used oil in the US for the military, we'd still be using 95% less oil, and we'd also still be producing enough oil to have an economy of scale.

In any case, realistically speaking, we aren't coming for oil tomorrow. Instead, we need to come for coal immediately. If it takes us decades each time we cut our oil consumption in half, that's one thing... but the coal, that needs to stop sooner.

someone needs to tell China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe

> China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe were the only countries that both added new coal plants and announced new projects. China accounted for 92% of all new coal project announcements.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/coal-burning-capacity-cli...

> I don't think it's public opinion so much as it is necessity to maintain current standards of living for the next few decades.

Those are pretty much the same thing.

Possibly this article? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change...

My first thought as well.

Indeed it is.

I guess my question is at what point does the decline in fossil extraction become self-reinforcing. If extraction is going down, firms won’t invest in developing new resources. This means constraints on supply leading to higher prices. That in turn will drive less consumption (particularly as non-fossil alternatives become mainstream.) There is a potential feedback loop here that drives things towards zero much more rapidly than you might imagine. Anyway, one can hope.

That’s exactly what I think is happening.

Make no mistake, oil will always be needed for many purposes, but some of the big consumption drivers are starting to have price competitive alternatives.

It’s notable that half of all global oil consumption is used on roads.

You can’t turn back the clock on the fact that many of these alternatives now cost less.

There are also little oddities, such as the impact on gas stations along common commuter routes. There are a lot of marginal stations on those routes now. In some places, you'd only have to lose a couple of stations for commuting to be an annoyance.

And commuter traffic is an obvious easy target for EV automakers, once they move out of more premium segments.

"they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades"

And they are right. There are viable alternatives to gasoline cars now and people still buy gas powered vehicles. Most of Teslas success I think has not been so much due to the hunger for an electric vehicle but because of Tesla's cool factor, performance and design. The rest of the major vehicle manufacturers have essentially failed on the electric vehicle front.

Gas for vehicles is a very small part of the total demand of oil.

I think it is at least 50% for crude oil.

Yes, I've found that to be the case. There are certainly people who buy Teslas and other EVs to save the planet.

But I don't think it is the majority. Most enjoy the cars for other reasons (lack of vibration, high torque, reduced gas station visits, lower operating cost and burden, cabin overheat protection, dog mode, preconditioning, etc).

Even among the environmental types, that often ends up being more of a fringe benefit.

Petrochemicals are never going to go to zero. We'll always need them. We won't always need to allow every person on the planet to burn them as fuel, but we will still need them to manufacture the many other products that aren't destroying the atmosphere.

But those executives need to pay for their yachts today, so the extraction strategy makes sense. It won’t be as valuable tomorrow as it is today, so they’re shorting it.

The earth as well as the value of their own companies.

It will approach zero. It's not just a political thing to save the environment.

We are actually running out. What comes next after shale?

I think the notion is that if you control enough capital, you'll be able to relocate yourself and your family to those parts of the planet that are least impacted by the consequences of continued fossil-fueled global warming.

This also points to the problem with renewables from the capital viewpoint: they're just not as profitable, as you can't sell sunlight and wind or create artificial supply restrictions to jack up prices (which is the historical economic story of the oil & gas industry over most of the 20th century).

> That's all ignoring the: do you actually care at all if your great grandchildren have a habitable planet?

Their great grandchildren will be able to comfortably inhabit it alright, that's all that matters to them, at the very best.

The future is pointing to the end of these companies. Shell is maximizing its returns before the end.

It is the most long term outlook you can get. What's more important?a future where my children are billionaires or a future with slightly less global warming? Shell is not the only source of global warming on this earth.

You need to think in terms of human scale choices. Not just simplistic right or wrong choices. If we were that ceo... You, I and all of us maximize our benefits and make the most rational and most logical choice by destroying the environment.

It's the tragedy of the commons pushed to the maximum extreme. I make a shit load of money participating in the destruction of the commons. We'd all be lying to ourselves if we didn't make that choice.

If you think about it from the corporate perspective it also makes sense. The company is heading towards a wall. Not just environment pressures, but a future where oil is dry. We are running out. In the face of an inevitable end what is the best most rational choice? It's obvious.

It's not the "tragedy of the commons," it's capitalism. They're opposite things. The "commons" were fenced in and taken from the public by private entities. In the same spirit, a healthy environment and stable climate system are being taken from all of us by private corporations. I would argue, in fact, that if the public had control over these resources, we would govern ourselves in a far different manner that would not lead towards such a bleak future simply because we are motivated by short-term profits.

Elinor Ostrom has written an excellent book called "Governing the Commons," and she was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work. I recommend it.

Ah yes. The famous capitalists who caused famine in Easter Island and told Chinese people to decimate the forests of China to fuel the smelting of small quantities of pig-iron.

Ostrom didn't debunk the tragedy of the commons. She merely suggests a framework that would avoid it, which has never been tested at the scale of 7 billion people trying to solve global warming.

The history of Easter Island is debateable: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter...

And yeah, sure I'm not here to defend Mao's policies. But an authoritarian state is not at all related to a collective of people managing resources, so I'm not sure why you're even bringing it up?

What's your vision of a better society?

> The history of Easter Island is debateable

That doesn't really change that there used to be a lot of forest and larger animals that could have supported a more fulfilling diet that were extinct by the time the Europeans arrived. If society as we know it collapses due to climate change, the people who do survive would also "practice resiliency, cooperation, and perhaps even a degree of environmental stewardship."

> But an authoritarian state is not at all related to a collective of people managing resources

Mao didn't exactly have the resources to enforce a 1984 style or even North Korean style authoritarianism. The authoritarianism was very much enforced by a collective of people. People genuinely wanted to support Mao, which is why they hid how terrible his policies were from him and continued their support for him afterwards.

> What's your vision of a better society?

I think overly reductionist ideas like "capitalism bad" and "Mao authoritarian" end up causing problems like the Great Leap Forward did. Any solution to any societal problem requires a deep understanding across multiple domains, which to be fair is what Ostrom suggests. To be clear, I don't think that it's really anyone's fault, but rather most people don't actually care about the issues to put the work into studying or taking action to them in any meaningful capacity.

Corporations don't make money unless the people purchase their products.

In fact who is actually causing emissions? They sell products and it's the end users who burn the product.

Every gallon of oil you use is equivalent to a democratic vote for oil ... we all can choose to vote in the other direction right now... but we don't.

I mean, I do, but that doesn't actually matter. I ride my bicycle and take the bus, but there are places I can't visit on a bike or a bus because, through a series of intentional policy decisions that primarily benefit capitalists, towns are designed with long stretches of road that accomodate cars over all other forms of transportation. Car manufacturers and oil companies have made a lot of money off of arranging society this way.

Not Just Bikes has a good video on the propaganda car companies were pushing in the 50s here, which played a large part in creating the unprecented design of suburban America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n94-_yE4IeU&t=1060s

I think you are missing something. Where is what they will do:

1. Spin off green energy products into their own company. 2. Pour money from oil business into Green energy. 3. When reckoning comes for gas, they let the oil biz take the fall, but the fall won't be much as they will have nearly bankrupted it already.

Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century.

You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.

8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.

The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.

We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.

It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.

These seem like ChatGPT’s response to the prompt “Give me a list of disingenuous points for dismissing anthropogenic climate change.”

This seems like ChatGPT's response to the prompt "Ignore all the facts and dismiss them out of hand to soothe cognitive dissonance"

I don't think they are dismissive points. I think specially the ending makes a whole lot of sense to me. I'd give negative shits about the environment if I struggled for food or housing or basic essentials.

The same way the best way to tackle crime is through better education for the people, getting the existing people out of poverty might be the single best thing we can do to have them realize the impact, reproduce less, and contribute to a solution. I also think this way ends up being pragmatic because it doesn't require "so we change everyone's minds" as step 1.

They're not just dismissive, they're pretty obviously bad faith arguments. "CO2 is plant food" is a classic climate denier talking point that you hear from your crazy uncle on Facebook, who's parroting something they heard from a pundit on Fox News.

Water is also plant food, but that's not a helpful piece of information if you're in a flood. The world is releasing 97 million barrels of gasoline into the atmosphere per day.

>Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century.

Wow, HVAC is an amazing technology.

Yes, thanks HVAC and all of the energy sources that produce the equipment and then power it.

Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century.

> Average life expectancy has increased because child mortality is down, do we stop medical research?

You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.

> Great. Let's keep investing in mitigation AND prevention. It seems to work!

8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.

> Climate change is not just global WARMING.

The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.

> At the cost of loss of biodiversity. We don't just need green, but diverse green.

We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.

> Agreed. (Surprise!) But I'd prefer to see fossil used for industry and not energy. Renewable & nuclear should be sufficient.

> Agreed. Moving up people on Maslow's hierarchy also causes them to need to have less kids (in a sane environment with a good social safety net for old age) which should stabilise the population by 2060.

I guess I don't see what other option we have other than drill baby drill. Yes we're killing our planet but renewable aren't able to provide the energy we need at scale. Switching to 100% renewables and not drilling means increased oil prices and ultimately less consumption across the board. Less food, less driving, less heat, less AC. We'd all have to give up a lot and no one is signing up for that. There's this magical thinking that we can switch to renewables and keep everything the same or that it only be a minor speedbump but that's nonsense. Switching to 100% renewables means redefining modern life as we know it in a way that involves a whole lot less materialism/consumerism for everyone.

The option is not 100% renewable or 100% fossil fuels. It's not a ridiculous goal that we can just reduce emissions

why can't we do nuclear with plugin hybrids in urban areas. the federal government , which, as an issuer of money, can afford anything, unlike states/municipalities, should massively fund nuclear to save the environment meet energy demands. seems like such a no-brainer.

> why can't we do nuclear

Because of environmentalists like Green Peace, Sierra Club etc.

> why can't we do nuclear

Because the free market is not willing to bear the risks - even when you ignore the whole "nuclear waste" and "meltdown" part. The construction costs are extremely high and basically guaranteed to wildly exceed initial estimates, while electricity price is highly volatile.

The only way companies are interested in building reactors is by having a guaranteed government subsidy. For example, Sizewell C in the UK has negotiated a guaranteed electricity price of £119 / MWh. The long-term electricity spot price in the UK for 2013-2021 is closer to £70, so taxpayers have to pay an additional £49 / MWh in subsidies. Good luck selling that to the nuclear-skeptic taxpayers.

Governments like the US federal gov, who are currency issues can afford anything . Where did the 7 trillion dollar covid spending come from ? What we cannot afford is to do nothing and maintain the status quo. Federally funded nuclear with plug in electric is the path to prosperity.

All of these changes that seem impossible that are routine when there is a large scale war on - production shifts + consumption is restricted.

The difference is that an existential climate crisis it just isn't treated by our leaders with the same importance as a good old fashioned war.

> Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years

I think a lot of people feel that.

Personally, I think we may more or less have forgotten about "Global Warming" in 20 years, just like we forgot about the "Ozone Layer" or "Acid Rain".

If AI continues at anything resembling the current pace for another decade or two , there may be so much disruption, that Global Warming seems quite insignificant to most people.

Small difference: we banned chemicals responsible for ozon layer disruption, similar situation with acid rain (talking about 1st world with rain). So it's not like we forgotten, more like it's a non-issue now. Global warming is only going to get worse.

> Global warming is only going to get worse.

How much net real harm to humanity do you think global warming causes today? (If we ingnore psychological harm caused mostly by the scare tactics used to prevent it)

According to this article, total excess mortality from cold weather is still an order of magnitude higher than from hot weather:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

As the world has been warming over the last decades, mortality from cold weather has been declining faster than the mortality from warm weather has increased.

This is from Europe, but prior studies have been conducted that produce the same results globally:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> more like it's a non-issue now

So my claim is that global warming is also in reality a non-issue right now, even though it could in theory become a big issue in about 100-200 years, if we don't do anything.

I think the reason why Global Warming gets so much attention right now, is partly that we have few other serious issues to worry about right now, and partly because some groups have chosen to put it on the agenda.

Few people alive today actually remember WW2, and even the Cold War and the Nuclear Scare is becoming a distant memory.

So my prediction is NOT that the real threat of Global Warming will necesarily go away, but rather that something (like AGI) will appear that makes it seem insignificant by comparison.

Climate change brings more extreme weather, not just warm but also more extreme cold weather. (And storms and floods and fires etc.)

(That's why I try to call it climate change instead.)

You can’t seriously believe that we’re in that grave of danger

I seriously believe it. Climate change will almost certainly lead to food insecurity and political upheavals, leading mass migration and war, not to mention potential knock-on effects where, for example, photosynthesis reductions due to extreme heat at the equator, rapid rates of methane release as permafrost melts, mass death in a heating and acidifying sea... . really there are just so many things that could go wrong, much more wrong. So yes, we should be very serious, and very scared.

Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03518-z

What are you using to measure "environmental knowledge"? Do the hundreds of scientists who drafted the IPCC report count as knowledgeable? Does the report sound anxious ?

That regression line is shit.

Take a look at atmospheric methane levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

Their entire plan is:

- Deny the existence of the problem.

- Pay for others to join the denialist movement.

- Pay others to say that individuals should fix the problem, not the company.

- If they cannot deny anymore, promise they will certainly do something in the future.

- When the future arrives, say they couldn't do anything for financial reasons.

- Finally, say that the harm is already done, and nothing else can be done about it (we already see this happening).

And:

- Convince weak minded but important influencers that there's no problem,

by forming "real" friendships (no bribes),

so they in turn sincerely honestly spread the manipulation themselves.

(Ive seen that & read that Putin uses this against the US and EU, and it apparently works great, but that's off topic)

I think its deeper than that. Its not an oil company issue (I am not implying in anyway that they are the good guys here) What would happen to society if tomorrow all oil companies just said the risk of global warming is too great, we are all shutting down. Society would collapse.

Its not so much they are doing this for profits; which of course they are, but society as a whole very much needs them to continue to do so in order to assure our continued existence in our current form.

> I think its deeper than that. Its not an oil company issue.

> Its not so much they are doing this for profits

Funding a massive climate change denial movement in the US for decades, consequently eating up our limited window of time to make the kinds of societal changes to avoid the worst consequences of climate change is very much an "oil company issue" that is done exclusively for profit.

They don't need to all shut down. They can stop interfering with regulation that allows for cleaner power generation, for example.

There is no regulation proposed, or method proposed, to substantively reduce how much co2 is emitted when you burn fossil fuels for power. That is why this problem is so hard. You can't put a filter in place like you can for heavy metals or particulates. There is no solution other than switching to nuclear/solar/wind/etc

And those solutions can be enforced by regulation. But when you get regulation like generation shifting, corporations and the political right wing collude to say that the regulations are unconstitutional.

This assumes that governments will trend towards more stability and the ability to enforce this regulation. The latter depends on alternative energy costs trending downward and competing for viability on a larger scale.

None of these things are necessarily true. In fact from the government stability perspective we've been in an unparalleled period of peace and stability that looks incredibly shaky into the near future.

Any climate commitments go completely out the window when conflict breaks out between nations.

> But when you get regulation like generation shifting, corporations and the political right wing collude to say that the regulations are unconstitutional.

The argument wasn't that they're unconstitutional, it's that they weren't authorized by Congress. To have the law you have to actually pass the law.

First, "created in a way outside of the federal government's enumerated powers" is a kind of unconstitutionality.

But the argument was bullshit. Major Questions Doctrine just exists to say "nu uh, that authorization you have from Congress doesn't count" when it is politically expedient. The Clean Air Act exists. Congress passed it. Roberts just thinks that the law shouldn't be able to do anything controversial but there is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress' delegation authority is limited only to uncontroversial things.

> First, "created in a way outside of the federal government's enumerated powers" is a kind of unconstitutionality.

It wasn't that either. It was the courts saying that the law Congress passed didn't clearly authorize the EPA to do this, so if Congress wants it they need to say so unambiguously.

Notably this means that to change it doesn't require a constitutional amendment but only an ordinary law, which is not what is generally meant by "unconstitutional".

> The Clean Air Act exists. Congress passed it.

And then the courts interpret it and if Congress doesn't like their interpretation they can pass a new law which is more specific.

> Roberts just thinks that the law shouldn't be able to do anything controversial but there is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress' delegation authority is limited only to uncontroversial things.

There is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress even has delegation authority.

"Is unconstitutional" does not mean "would require a constitutional amendment to exist."

Yes, Congress can pass a new law. That doesn't make the supreme court's decision absolutely fucking rank idiocy based entirely in political goals covered in the thinnest veneer of jurisprudence.

Yes, Gorsuch thinks that Congress can't delegate at all and basically all execute agencies should be destroyed. We know. He'll ride out climate change in a mansion.

> "Is unconstitutional" does not mean "would require a constitutional amendment to exist."

It kind of does. Your version would make any interpretation of the law a constitutional question. The plaintiff in a civil case claims they're entitled to damages but the court found their argument unconstitutional because it's Congress and not plaintiffs who make the law?

> That doesn't make the supreme court's decision absolutely fucking rank idiocy based entirely in political goals covered in the thinnest veneer of jurisprudence.

It feels pretty consistent with a "separation of powers" interpretation of how laws get made. Do you really think they come to a different result if it was Trump's EPA saying they had to replace renewables with "reliable" generation methods over whatever pretext? And wouldn't that be the result you want?

> Yes, Gorsuch thinks that Congress can't delegate at all and basically all execute agencies should be destroyed. We know. He'll ride out climate change in a mansion.

They could exist without making laws. Agency drafts a bill, proposes it to Congress, Congress votes on it. It's democratic.

It seems like people have forgotten how to compromise. You want a climate change bill, Republicans don't. Republicans want school vouchers, or to reduce the number of federal employees, or immigration reform, or lower taxes. You give them something they want, you get something you want.

> It kind of does. Your version would make any interpretation of the law a constitutional question.

I don't think that's true. Consider a case that is doing statutory interpretation to resolve a conflict between two federal laws. There is no question about the constitutional authority of Congress or any other body here.

> Do you really think they come to a different result if it was Trump's EPA saying they had to replace renewables with "reliable" generation methods over whatever pretext?

Yes. The Supreme Court is a political body, like any other. Notably, West Virginia v EPA took on a regulation that had already been reversed by the Trump administration.

> It seems like people have forgotten how to compromise. You want a climate change bill, Republicans don't.

And yet, the Clean Air Act exists. Congress could edit it or repeal it if they wanted.

> I don't think that's true. Consider a case that is doing statutory interpretation to resolve a conflict between two federal laws. There is no question about the constitutional authority of Congress or any other body here.

There was no question about the constitutional authority of Congress in the other case. They were interpreting the Clean Air act and concluded it didn't enable the EPA to do this.

> Yes. The Supreme Court is a political body, like any other.

They generally try to avoid political issues and punt them to the elected branches.

> Notably, West Virginia v EPA took on a regulation that had already been reversed by the Trump administration.

'The case was not rendered moot when the Biden administration took over in 2020, as the EPA under the Biden administration stated their inclination to include "outside the fence line" controls, making the case still relevant to the authority the EPA had in interpreting their Congressional charter.' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA)

> And yet, the Clean Air Act exists. Congress could edit it or repeal it if they wanted.

You keep saying "the Clean Air Act exists" but the question is what it authorizes the EPA to do.

They could pretty easily impose costs on fossil fuel generators that make them uncompetitive and thereby cause a switch to other generation methods, but that would raise energy costs for consumers in the meantime, which would be unpopular. So they wanted to do something else, but the something else wasn't a thing the law authorized the EPA to do, so if you want that you need to change the law.

This is not an Oil company issue though, this is a voter issue. If voters were concerned about global warming and wanted everything electric they would vote that way. Instead it appears that only about half want it or at least vote in a way that supports it. Others may support it as well but see other issues as more important and vote accordingly. Until the voting public actually acts like this is a major deal, it will be business as usual.

Exactly. You me and everyone who drives or consumes basically anything are part of the problem. You can’t put all the blame on them. However where they are to blame is denying the science to the public for years. Had they invested in clean tech years ago we would be much better off.

Do you realise that the Rockerfellers (famous oil scions) organised the environmental movement into what we have today, via people like Maurice Strong (himself an oil entrepreneur). There is a good argument to be made that the environmental movement is a creation of 'big oil'.

- Profit!

Of course, the board of shell can just delay the legal responsibility until all of them are ghosts – then they've won and their next generation can just inherit their yachts to stay on top of (literally) the rising sea.

Your analogy with big tobacco is on point.

Big oil and big tobacco share a strategy of promoting false skepticism, shifting blame to consumers, using the legal system to harass and intimidate scientists, and lobbying to get support from elected representatives. Big oil is of course bigger, and the entanglement with politics, jobs and other companies in the private sector is much stronger.

These issues are widely documented, and the books that climate scientist Michael Mann wrote were eye opening to me.

The only sensible exit is to legislate at scale. These companies will not self regulate. The lag between cause and effect makes this extremely dangerous. A heavy carbon tax is an obvious way to do it.

I try to remain positive, but climate change is the one area where I have pretty much lost hope. People (and I include myself) are simply unwilling to accept that their lives have to change. Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.

The main thing I struggle to downsize or make sustainable is my work. As a programmer, I depend on an immense infrastructure of earth-harming systems to get my equipment (both in my possession or leased in the cloud). My employers use a lot of energy. In the scheme of things we aren’t the worst polluters, but it’s undeniably bad.

I’ve dramatically reduced my personal energy usage, I don’t eat animal products, my family has found ways to generate remarkably little garbage, and other “nice” things, but it’s pretty much meaningless. It’s all theatre compared to the damage we do with our car, jobs, community and provincial infrastructure we depend on, etc.

I feel like I’m willing to change my life, and I have already I guess. I’m just not willing to give up my livelihood when it means so little in the bigger picture. I’m no different from someone working on an oil rig or forestry or whatever. What I do looks nicer, but my rationale is no different.

Anyone who drives a heavy vehicle alone is using immense amounts of power (hundreds of horses' at once, by approximation), it takes some infrastructure but with wind, sun, and water we can power that. What makes you say that your livelihood depends on an amount of energy so large that it's really bad? Why couldn't that be generated sustainably?

Why not talk to your employer about a step in that direction, given that solar panels are typically profitable within a handful of years for an average household, let alone if you can 100% offset the kWh generated because all the energy can be used in-house?

> Why couldn't that be generated sustainably?

It very likely could, and I'd happily pay for it. Like, my Mac Studio with an M2 Max in it probably took, all said, and absurd about of resources to create... But it only cost me $3k or something. Well, if it works as long as it should, it'll easily help me earn over half a million dollars. I'd rather pay far more for the computer and cover the expenses of the externalities of its production, but I don't have the choice.

Otherwise, a lot of the energy used in the production could be sustainably produced, but it's not incentivized enough in the countries (or any countries, I suppose) in order for that to occur.

Perhaps I could make improvements by switching to different computers. I know the framework offers opportunities to reuse the same chassis such you can use mostly-the-same hardware for a very long time, and that could be the right path forward. I love the philosophy.

As for the driving issue, that's very hard to overcome. I personally ride an electric bike just about all the time, but at the moment I'm on vacation in Whistler, BC, having driven through 2 full tanks of gas so far on my way from Victoria, to Squamish, now Whistler, and all the little stops in between. My Toyota Highlander produces more pollution than any other single thing in my life. My wife drives it for work and we both regret the purchase quite a bit. Yet, something electric would take a very long time to "break even" on the footprint before improving on our situation, even with how clean our electricity is here in BC. I need to do more research to understand how I could purchase my way out of this problem.

I can look up the study if you want but a little under ten years ago the Dutch government had a full well-to-wheel analysis done to figure out the advantages (as far as pollution goes) and it includes the break even point for their chosen EV (a classic Nissan Leaf.)

IIRC the break even point when powered by renewable energy was about 60k kilometers.

Depending on where you live and your driving habits that could be seen as a lot, but considering that after those ~40k miles every mile can be considered 'clean' I don't think it's all that bad.

Edit:

Source in Dutch: http://publications.tno.nl/publication/34616575/gS20vf/TNO-2...

TL;DR: Assuming a car lifespan of 220k km (136k miles) and including emissions for fabrication, repairs, etc. emissions will be 70% lower for an electric vehicle powered by renewables. When powered by non-renewable energy it's still 30% less total emissions than a regular petrol car. Other than that you also emit less of various other pollutants. And (personal opinion alert) it's just a way nicer drive ;-)

> Yet, something electric would take a very long time to "break even" on the footprint

Of course, replacing a fossil car that is still nearly new is the greater evil. I fully support driving on gasoline if that's genuinely the better thing to do.

What one can do in the meantime is use one of the available options to suck the CO2 back out of the air. It's expensive, but if you say you're happy to pay the premium given your income if only there were options, well, that's an option, and can be applied to the computer purchase or electricity production, too. It does get prohibitively expensive when including every emission, but it's not all or nothing, and also, with solar panels reducing the electricity need, a green energy provider covering the grid demand (that's the best one can reasonably do after solar panels), etc., it should be possible to reduce the need for carbon capture quite a bit already today, and more in the future as more industries greenify

What percentage of global emmissions is spent on computing infrastructure? Last time I saw the numbers it was practically negligible if we exclude cryptocurrencies.

This is the tragedy of the commons. Every industry contributes a negligible amount. It is logical and rational to maximize your own benefites by contributing negligible damage to the environment.

The tragedy arises in aggregate. When every industry contributes negligible amounts at the same time the aggregate contribution is no longer negligible. Rational individual action leads to total destruction.

Yeah we are all guilty. Even when we contribute negligible amounts.

> Every industry contributes a negligible amount.

What? No.

Practically yes. You have to look at it more granularly. Likely you're looking at it by economic sector.

You need to look at it by sub industries in industries. That's more closer to the logical perspective people are acting on.

What stumbles me is information like the following [1]

> Indeed, making the much bigger model, the GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters, emitted over 550 tons of CO2e while consuming 1,287 MW hours of electricity, per computer scientist Kate Saenko. It’s the same amount of emissions as a single person taking 550 roundtrip flights between New York and San Francisco.

Specifically, I struggle with the interpretation where this is presented as significant amount. To me, training GPT-3 at the cost of about a SINGLE New York-San Francisco return flight is practically negligible. I wonder whether for example at a conference like NeurIPS the carbon cost of all the experiments is exceeded by the carbon cost of participant travel to the conference. My guess is that probably yes.

[1] https://carboncredits.com/how-big-is-the-co2-footprint-of-ai...

As I recall it's about 2%, but I'd need to dive much deeper to get numbers I can trust.

Computing infrastructure is one thing, but then there's also the enormous waste footprint of electronics in general. So many billions of people are now cycling through devices, and our recycling story is disturbingly poor. My job is quite close to this problem, whether it directly supports it or not. My livelihood more or less depends on humanity using connected devices, so this problem works in my favour (so to speak).

I've hit a similar wall and one answer to hurdle over is to organize with more people to push for bigger, community wide changes. This can include making your roads safer for biking, getting your local governments to penalize local polluters, etc. Getting the right politicians to vote in your collective ideals helps, too.

It all takes work so you have to brace yourself to sacrifice your free time and balance everything. It's not easy, but there are countless people already trying to do it.

There is that classic western maxim that evil triumphs when ‘good men do nothing’, but I no longer think this is true.

Evil triumphs when ‘good men’s’ efforts fail.

Climate change represents an inherent risk to humanity, but some climate change mitigation strategies represent a risk to short-term profit incentives.

We are starting to see economic agitation globally as institutions everywhere begin to question the logic of our systems.

This and other factors has led us to a multi-polar world, which is itself creating new problems that inhibit global synchronisation on this issue.

It is a planetary scale problem. It needs a planetary scale solution.

COVID showed I think that people and institutions are quite willing and capable of concerted action if they understand there's real threat to human welfare. Imperfecly, sure, but far from hopeless.

I would rather die than be slightly uncomfortable.

The above is my mockery of how I expect we will in 40 years

If I'm going to die anyway why not be comfortable before I die?

If I change my own behavior but everyone doesn't then my actions are negligible.

Rationally my best course of action is to not change.

Remember it is each individual acting extremely rationally and logically that in the end contributes to global warming in aggregate. That is why it's so hard to reverse this. The tragedy of the commons.

If you embrace hopelessness and do nothing to make the transition away from fossil fuels, it’s your own life that will be grim as carbon is more heavily taxed and life becomes increasingly unaffordable.

I’m personally quite optimistic, because I’ve already made most of the necessary adjustments, and it wasn’t very hard at all.

If you embrace logic the trend lines point to an obvious future regardless of optimism or pessimism.

Unfortunately this future is inline with the the pessimistic viewpoint.

It's not about pessimism or optimism in the end. It's about logic. He's right. It's done. Likely the worst case scenario for global warming will play out. We already crossed the permanent threshold.

The trend line to look at is that renewable energy is growing exponentially, while world fossil fuel usage has peaked (and is declining in developed countries).

The next trend line to look at is that without pulling co2 out of atmosphere, just quitting fossil fuels still gets us to 3.2 degrees of warming (this is IPCC modelling). This is climate armageddon. So the growth in renewable energy means nothing if we dont get real good at offseting emissions.

You are right. People won’t change. But solar is cheap, storage is getting cheaper and nuclear is always an option too.

So we don’t have to change we live, we just have to change the way we generate our energy.

> People (and I include myself) are simply unwilling to accept that their lives have to change

The real tragedy is that a fair amount of this change would make people's lives better.

For example, more walkable human scale communities, less combustion in vehicles and homes, more comfortable, healthier, and cheaper to operate homes, reduced air pollution for communities in the vicinity of power plants and industrial facilities.

But on the other hand, yes smaller houses and cars, less meat, etc are hard to adjust to.

> Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.

Disagree on that. The technologies we need are all pretty ready or close. It's about bending cost curves and the rate of deployment.

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

There is only one thing that will work: we need a price for CO2 emissions and we need a collective of economically powerful nations that push that through at the same time. Other nations who refuse to take part need to pay for market access.

You are always going to be unhappy if your goal is to change the rest of the world. If you focus on yourself you will accomplish more and likely be happier. Start adapting now and know that the rest of the world will adapt eventually. Figure out how to reduce your own impact.

I moved to a location that is not going to see negatives from climate change. Even if your location isn't great, just work on what you can do. Stop consuming junk on Amazon and start freecycling in your neighborhood. Spend more money to buy goods that have a lower environmental impact. If you own a home, there's a lot you can do to improve the environment. Compost, install rain barrels, maybe solar panels, use native landscaping, plant more trees that will provide shade.

My thoughts exactly. Best one can do is plan for the worst. I bought a property at an altitude high enough so that if sea levels rise won't affect me (I am likely going to stay here that long anyway, but my goal is to develop habits), I de amazoned where possible and gave up habbits alltogether where not possible but can cope without, rain barrels and solar panels on their way and so on, playing around with microgreens, learning about plant seeds (I don't think i'll ever pick up farming but it's a good skill to have).

For those interested in how a Dutch non-profit sued Shell for climate goal compliance and won (they've appealed):

https://en.milieudefensie.nl/climate-case-shell

Correct me if I'm wrong but even the original plan only covered carbon footprint of Shell's operations?

Which I presume are pretty much a minor fraction of the carbon footprint of their products and kinda makes the whole exercise a PR campaign.

Even when it would cover pipeline leaks and the like it's still nowhere near their total impact.

Were you expecting Shell to increase the efficiency of every existing internal combustion engine?

It's what I wondered at the headline as well. Sounded ambitious, but with how much profit they make it's not immediately obvious whether it's infeasible, especially if you can convince a government to then be exempt from a part of the fuel taxes because you don't have to pay for the pollution aspect

It sounds not just infeasible, but comically infeasible. For the sake of argument, let's assume that it's easy to improve ICEs in general by 5%. You still have to apply that upgrade to all the existing engine designs, ideally as drop-in replacements, and then swap all those engines in the wild.

I assume the biggest polluters are not cars but big industrial operations or shipping. That seems like a smaller perhaps even realistic number of sites to target for some amount of efficiency gains. Especially if margins are too low in these industries for them to invest in their own efficiency.

I was rather thinking of buying a tree seed that magically absolved you of a few tons of CO2, never mind that most don't grow to maturity, that it takes a century, and that after that century it falls over and releases that CO2 again. With that kind of math, you can make jet flights fully offset for something like 2% added ticket cost.

Just look at the greenhouse gas compensation airliners offer for an example of what Shell could reasonably have been up to.

I may also have had a classmate that worked at Shell and put on a really good show of how they're not all evil but also spending <insert objectively huge number> on good things. The last strand of that is severed now at least...

Idk, we could illustrate this a bit with: "hey, we are in the business of murder, we switched from machine guns to sniper rifles, our murder is now much less wasteful (in terms of bullets used)".

That is not to say you are wrong, it was maybe just that when a fossil fuel company tells you it's reducing it's carbon impact then the whole premise is going to be cynical at best.

I wonder what the percentage is. Refining alone is ludicrously energy-intensive, plus end-to-end transport costs.

It’s ridiculous.

https://archive.is/G0ULZ

Appropriate shortlink there...

> important was what he omitted: any mention of the company’s prior commitment to spend up to $100 million a year to build a pipeline of carbon credits, part of the firm’s promise to zero out its emissions by 2050.

Not counting the CO2 output of its product obviously.

Then there should be consequences for destroying environment and making earth inhabitable for humans. Oil industry knew that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming. Plastic industry knew that recycling is a total sham, and most of it will at best end up on a landfill at worts everywhere including our food. They knew but then they lied to us to make more profits. Maybe we should take that ill gotten profits from them and if it will bankrupt them so be it. Because we're slowly getting out of time to do anything.

I think developed nations collectively bought into fossil fuel-driven civilization, so it seems like scapegoating to lay all the blame at the feet of the producers.

But like you say, it is appropriate to blame the producers for hiding what they knew about the greenhouse effect and well-funded lobbying and propaganda campaigns to deny and minimize it.

I think is the uncomfortable truth is we're all to blame for a certain extent. People def hide evidence and acted to their own benefit but to a certain extent so many of us were known accomplices.

It is true that the people demanded the lifestyle provided by fossil fuel emissions. But corporations didn't just say "oh if you insist." When new policies and regulations are attempted that will not affect the lifestyle of the people but will eat into corporate profits, they fight tooth and nail.

An honest corporation that was just acting to serve the needs of the people wouldn't do something like fight to reduce the exxon valdez spill fine by 100x or raise a fit when regulatory agencies mandate generation shifting.

I think we've KNOWN what this shit does to the air and water for at least, what 40 years?

At what point do we blame ourselves to increasing fossil fuel usage, even in the what, past 5 years?

All boats float:

Let’s partner with oil companies to collectively solve carbon capture at planet scale? They get to keep functioning, citizens & government helps with subsidization and research programs. Put a time limit on progress and penalize the oil companies by making fines exponentially rise by time if possible and unmet. A select subcommittee can oversee the process and politicians can coordinate partnerships with other countries.

You need BOTH the carrot AND the stick to get behaviors to change.

I think that we can also reasonably blame people who use a disproportionate amount of electricity for their harm caused to the planet. I don't think that some sort of redistribution effort that accounts for past harm is impossible.

But I also think that the effect of even a megamillionaire who takes a private jet everywhere is dwarfed by the effect of corporate leadership, lobbying, and legal teams who successfully undo regulation via the courts and legislatures so that they can make more profits.

> we blame ourselves

So I buy shrimp that was grown locally.

Then I read up that shrimps were transported to the other side of the world, peeled there, and shipped back, travelled 20,000 miles, before landong on my plate.

I buy canned pairs, and turns out the same story. What am I suppose to do, starve?

The capitalist machine prioritises fictitious resource of money, over real resource of oil. It wastes huge amount of enegy just to take advantage of a poor country's low wages.

I drive an ebike to work. You can go vegan, quit heating your house, take cold showers, none of it will make any difference if the industry does not change it's practices.

People forget that as consumers we arent free to be choosey. We only can chose among options the market has already made available to us, options that are presented in the first place because economies of scale have been developed to put them in front of every consumer. All of that cannot be unwound overnight or restarted with some alternative since it took so much iteration just to reach this point at all.

Yep. Even if consumers want environmentally friendly products, this only achieves the advertisement of environmental friendliness unless there is associated regulation. Companies can find a way to convince consumers that their products are environmentally friendly without actually changing the effect they have on the world. Consumers have minimal access to information to see through this effect. We need help from governments.

> Companies can find a way to convince consumers that their products are environmentally friendly

For some reason, whenI lie to the insurance company, its fraud and I am a criminal.

But when a company lies to me about my environmentally friendly product, it's just business.

If the world stopped consuming fossil fuels today, overpopulation would no longer be an issue in about a year or two.

Because 90% of the population would die.

Well you don't have to stop in a matter of one day, because that's impossible and unrealistic anyways, but we could at least finally start with reducing our consumption, with the goal to land as close as possible to 0 as soon as possible.

Then again, we missed the window to stop long ago. So why bother anyways, right?

My main point is that demonizing the use of hydrocarbons is absurd. Our use of them is one of the main reasons we've been going from a world where most people was incredibly poor 200 years ago, to most of the world's population living in relative prosperity today (compared to 200 years ago).

Now that we're developing alternative energy sources, we should start/continue to move away from fossil fuels, but if we try to do it too quickly, the price may be higher than the benefit.

That seems to be an excuse that's been in use for decades. Meanwhile, we're just dragging our feet about stopping oil use and kicking the can down the road for the next generation to deal with.

Ultimately, it's a very poor excuse to state that because we can't stop immediately, that we might as well continue digging as much oil as possible out of the ground for burning.

There’s no credible path for reducing carbon emissions enough to reverse warming under current models that doesn’t involve gigadeaths.

I suppose that's what happens when we leave it as late as possible to even start to do anything.

Unfortunately, we're going to have far more gigadeaths when crops fail due to the climate becoming unpredictable and wars over clean water become ubiquitous. It always surprises me that people claim that deaths will result from cleaning up our act when that's a small fraction of the deaths that will be caused by climate catastrophes.

"As late as possibe" might be something like year 2200-2300, after global temperatures have already risen 5-10 degrees.

> crops fail due to the climate becoming unpredictable and wars over clean water become ubiquitous

Currently, we're facing what can become the worst famine in decades because of a single war that was NOT caused by global warming or access to water. Just simple nationalism.

The food supply 50-300 years from now is really hard to predict. If the birth rate stays at current levels, and also reach such levels in the few countries where the birth rate is still high today (mostly Africa), there will be a lot fewer mouths to feed in 2100 than today.

And if the birth rate goes back up, and exponential population growth resumes, no amount of food production will ensure that we never run out.

Right now (or rather, before 2022), the amount of food produced per capita globally, is probably higher than at any time before since the dawn of time.

Thanks in very large parts to fossil fuels used for farm machinery and in fertilizers.

I have difficulty believing any of what you are claiming.

e.g. how is Africa going to have a high birth rate when it'll be largely inhabitable due to the high temperatures?

Also, what famine are you referring to and why does it not feature here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

I'm talking about the potential famine of 2024, it didn't really start yet. Caused mostly by reduced food exports from Ukraine and Russia.

Also, about Africa: That's the only continent where birth rates remain really high today, and they have very far to go before the continent becomes uninabitable due to temperatures.

Anyway, my point was that UNLESS Africa continues to have such birth rates, the population seems to be falling sharply globally in the next century. In other words, the main assumption is that global pupulation is going down, with the Africa part only being a qualifier.

so you think its a collecrive decision made by all of us with full knowledge, and fossil fuel companies are just doing what the consumer wants?

Then why do journalists investifating recycling sham, oil spills, etc. frequently end up dead or in prison?

It is unfortunately very hard to address this with suits and getting even harder. Rules around standing can be leveraged to deny suits and the power of administrative agencies keeps getting hamstrung by the new major questions doctrine. Montana is the only state that guarantees a right to a clean environment in its constitution, but conservatives are seeing how this can be leveraged against polluting industries and are mobilizing to remove this right.

Megacorps have a tremendous amount of power in our political system and that makes it very very very difficult to hold people to account for anything.

As Jacques Ellul says (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOCtu-rXfPk): when the bridge collapses, who is to blame?

Someone is trying to do that https://www.stopecocide.earth

Why do fewer climate related deaths; down 98% the past century

and a more green planet than a century ago

and far fewer people in poverty

all lead you to believe it's becoming uninhabitable?

because half of bees are gone, half of barrier reef is gone, 75% of insects are gone, UK has like 10% tree cover left, emperor penguins, had zero chicks survive

Do you think you can survive if the biosphere is gone?

In 2022, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) reported the highest levels of coral cover across two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in over 36 years.

Why is the planet more green today than a century ago?

Perhaps because of all the chemical-induced algae blooms turning previously blue water into murky green?

There were an estimated 750 billion trees worldwide in the 1920s. We now have approximately 3.04 trillion trees in the world.

What amazes me is that you just can't opt out, short of jumping off a cliff. Everything you do involves the destruction of non-renewable resources. If you look at what you produce in terms of garbage and other waste every month it is completely insane. Everything is packaged in plastic, high grade cardboard, glass etc. The amount of energy and materials required is ridiculous. And yet, not a month goes by or something that used to be packaged in paper suddenly is only available in plastic, something that was available in re-usable glass is only available in plastic and so on. The hold-outs seem to be beer bottles but I don't drink beer...

> If you look at what you produce in terms of garbage and other waste every month it is completely insane. Everything is packaged in plastic, high grade cardboard, glass etc.

This has bothered me since I was a child and drove by a landfill and realized just how much trash we produce. I met someone that went a month without using one time use plastic and she couldn’t really avoid it. It’s everywhere.

Shareholders will be shareholders and demand value. CEO performs to increase shareholder value regardless of any negative outcomes that won’t directly impact shareholders

Entirely predictable result of the narrow view of the CEO shareholder relationship.

It doesn’t sound like it is about shareholder value here. They can’t find enough carbon credit programs that meet their internal quality requirements and they are trying to actually not greenwash, so rather than go with a quantity of low quality carbon credits, they scrapped the program altogether.

I view this as more of an indictment of carbon credits than anything.

>It doesn’t sound like it is about shareholder value here. They can’t find enough carbon credit programs that meet their internal quality requirements and they are trying to actually not greenwash

That's just not accurate. This is the CEO who basically cut all of their plans around renewables.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/shells-renewables-boss-leav...

I don't think it's particularly surprising that a company would try, fail, and move on from a market segment where they don't have first mover advantage and are playing catch up in an already fast moving industry. The only thing they would really have to contribute is a financial play and I can't say, "all these renewable energy companies are actually owned by oil companies" is an incentive structure I like.

See also "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders." [0]

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

The “radical plan” was bullshit carbon offsets, and it only applies to Shell’s own emissions, not the emissions from burning the oil/gas Shell produces.

This plan doesn’t even deserve being shelved. It deserves being shitcanned.

As both a Python developer and Energy (oil and gas) engineer, I am a regular reader of Hacker News and enjoy the quality of discussions in the comments on the HN Top articles. This thread however disappoints me. The news of any producers potentially reducing their CO2 targets in any form is upsetting. However, painting them as bad guys vs good guys or using the tobacco industry analogy is too simplistic in my opinion. Doomberg is a great newsletter to start with to have a more educated discussion around these topics. The articles below, give great background to mature this discussion and moving it passed Oil company boss wants to be rich, they shut down all the other alternative rubbish. 1. https://doomberg.substack.com/p/where-stuff-comes-from (if you time to read only one of these, make it this one) 2. https://doomberg.substack.com/p/got-milk 3. https://doomberg.substack.com/p/tour-de-farce

Article below is an example of challenges facing rolling out renewables. They are not all Oil and Gas related as generally perceived: https://archive.md/udhVH

There are also couple of really good books on the topic, which I am happy to share if the interest is there.

Good. Any implementation of carbon offsetting is a sham anyway and Shell's plan didn't even offset its product's emmision but only its own business process(because offsetting the emissions of the products would be many times more costly than the product itself)

Even if it's mostly a sham, that's better than nothing

No, it’s worse. It takes money and focus away from things that work.

What "things that work" does Shell otherwise spend the money on if not half-assed offsets? Besides executives and peak oil I mean, since those aren't going to work against climate change either

Shell is building wind parks and investing in renewables.

If that's where the money now goes instead, then of course I fully agree with you. They wouldn't need offsetting if they could just spend the money on that instead (which is a lot cheaper per ton CO2 because it's a sham indeed)

It's worth understanding how disruption works in business. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma)

Generally, established companies have a lot of trouble, and often fail, adopting when the rules of business change.

In this case, Shell is having a lot of trouble adopting to carbon-free (or neurtral) energy.

IMO: I think the best approach is to seek out carbon-free (or neutral) energy business models and disrupt Shell out of business. From Shell's POV, the best thing they can do is invest in the disrupters and have them organically displace their existing fossil-fuel based businesses.

Xerox's copierheads. Except the copiers are also Dutch oven-ing the planet, a good chunk of our copiers are made in regressive absolute monarchies operated in league with far-right religious conservatives, and the most powerful country in the world is politically captured by the need to provide cheap copiers to businesses.

Agreed, Shell is f'd. Increasingly I wonder if Apple is in the same boat. An AI-based phone from SpaceX with Starlink connectivity, or from Nvidia, would disrupt their entire business model. And they don't really seem to get AI.

Huh? Apple already partnered with Globalstar for satellite connectivity which I think will come to fruition for more general connectivity long long before any of Elmocorp figures how to make phones at the quality of iPhones or even $Galaxy_Flagship.

And no one has figured how to make AI work for the kinds of tasks people ask phones to do. It might be possible but no one's yet made it work so it's hard to argue that anyone is "behind" on this front when no one has brought even a commercial AI-based voice assistant to market which is has the lowest barrier to entry and the highest user tolerance for failure.

So I think you're right that a lot of old-guard tech is becoming too big to be agile but I'm less sure about the thing that will actually disrupt them.

> And they don't really seem to get AI.

To say this is to not know how Apple operates. They have been shipping local AI in phones for a decade now. Every phone has one of the best neural processors out there. Apple is better prepared than anyone. And that's before considering their remarkable restraint to not release something until they are happy with it. They are 100% working on LLMs and I'm sure they will do it their own way. This isnt some sort of fanboy post, it's their story. From OLED to the Mac transition to Apple silicon. Slowly, then all at once.

Best neural processor in the world but how is it even being used? Not by Siri thats for sure.

Search for 'car' in your iOS photos library, or any specific word. tap on an animal and let it tell you what breed it is. The recognition is amazing.

The same way that you wouldn’t accept your elderly relatives trying to burn down the house you both happen to live in, every fossil fuel based company should be nationalized and shutdown as quickly as possible, while reducing the impact on society’s poorest who depend on that type of energy.

No, wait, private ownership and corporate freedom have actually been proven to be the pinnacle of human economic organizing, so please hand back the lighter and petrol to your demented grandparents and their delusions ideas.

Unfortunately, the people running and investing in these companies will be long dead when their decisions come back to bite us all in the ass.

To clarify, this article is mainly a criticism of the lack of effectiveness of offsets. This is why Shell shelved it. They were spending a ton of money on this, and getting almost no actual carbon footprint reduction. That is a waste by almost any measure. Hopefully, they are investigating better ways to shrink their catastrophic carbon footprint contribution.

Almost NONE of the comments in this forum so far reflect this observation, which I find concerning. If you are angry about the state of affairs here (which I would completely understand), at least read the article (and take a deep breath) before commenting

Study the carbon cycle a bit and then come back and tell me I’m wrong about this:

Offsets do not work. The best application of that funding would be to stop destruction of the ocean habitat. Short explanation: Almost all surface and atmospheric carbon ends up in the ocean by rivers or rainfall. Geological-timescale sequestration is performed by zooplankton et al in the form of CaCO3, but something has to eat them or they will block the light for their own food supply, and the rest of the ecosystem follows from there. And yes, surface habitats also matter, but their destruction is more localized.

The whole world suffers from an extremely deep lack of vision.

Why does a utility like PG&E fight so hard to hurt solar installation? If I were CEO I'd buy or start a foundry to make solar panels. Then I'd start an installation and service org. People need energy, why should I care where they get it so long as they get it from me? The grid isn't going away so stop trying so desperately to protect that revenue stream.

Why can't oil companies do the same sort of thing? If Shell were smart they'd be making and selling wind turbines, solar panels, inverters, batteries, etc. Use your stupid lobbing arm to get subsidies passed that make the electric utilities pay part of the cost of these products. Instead they're just giving those markets away because they don't know how to do anything beyond oil and jealously try to protect every scrap of oil revenue.

Even ATT focused so much on long-distance revenue and milking people for tiny data pipes they let cable companies and new ISPs waltz in and takeover huge chunks of what had literally been their monopoly business. Bell labs invented VoIP and could have owned that space... but they didn't dare threaten long-distance revenues. Then a few years later competitors evicerated those revenue streams anyway.

It all comes down to a lack of vision and a focus on protecting existing revenue streams. I guess my brain just doesn't work that way. I see change as inevitable so I'd rather try to own a piece of the new market than worry about protecting the old one.

Hello, i am big oil exec. I make money when people buy oil, not solar panels. Id like to give you big money personally if you dont buy solar and only buy oil from me. Then you get money and i get money. We both get big money and you dont have to do any new hard work. You can just coast now. Big money. Sign here.

TL;DR: this article is mainly about Shell rowing back on its offset development targets, not for the oil it produces, but for its operational emissions.

Having worked in the sector, albeit not with Shell, my guess is that the board were advised that offsets increasingly carry massive legal jeopardy, including director’s liability.

This is an interesting summary of the problem:

https://www.clientearth.org/media/nq4jnyww/ce-offsets-legal-...

In other news, the local union of serial killers scrapped their plan to fund an independent homicide unit.

Remember folks, you can strike back: ditch your car, ditch your gas cooker, get solar panels, get batteries, use less energy, get a heat pump. Change your life to be healthier and deprive these animals of profit.

You don't even have to ditch your car (an absurd proposition for most people), you could just get an EV.

Do you realize how they get batteries for an EV? And where the electricity comes from? And what every part of the EV are made out of?

Please enlighten us as to where the electricity comes from

A large part comes from coal and natural gas

A diminishing part. In my state only 1/3 of electricity generated is from fossil fuels and that number is falling quickly.

If you have a cogent point, I invite you to make it explicitly.

Too bad theres 8 billion other potential consumers

Carbon offsets credit programs and fossil fuel emissions capture schemes fall into one of two categories: technical failures or economic frauds.

The technical issue for fossil fuel carbon capture schemes involves conservation of energy. Simply stated, a diesel truck that captures all its emissions as it drives down the road is an obviously implausible scheme, as anyone with even a vague appreciation of how engines work should realize. Clogging the exhaust is the first problem, separating the CO2 (and incomplete combustion products and particulate & inorganic contaminants) from the exhaust stream is the next, and storing the concentrated CO2 is the third.

The only reason these carbon capture systems have been built in practice is to generate a stream of CO2 for enhanced oilfield recovery, a process in which CO2 is injected into aged oil wells because it facilitates recovery of oil from these wells. The CO2/oil mix that comes out is refined as usual and most of the injected CO2 just escapes back to the atmosphere.

The economic fraud all revolves around the technical fact that 'carbon credit' schemes don't offset anything, and in a warming world so-called 'carbon stores' like British Columbian forests have been going up in smoke due to increased wildfires. Similarly cap-and-trade doesn't work; it was originally based on a scheme to clean up sulfur in diesel fuel but the sulfur just ended up in ship bunker fuel (although cities are somewhat cleaner due to the introduction of ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel).

What's particularly egregious about these schemes is the degree of dishonesty demonstrated by their political and industrial promoters - they know they don't work. For example, production of natural gas is booming to record levels at present while the very politicians and executives responsible for the boom are running around proclaiming how concerned they are about climate and running ads stating their dedication to net-zero. Similarly, even if some coal plants are retired in the US, exports of coal to Asia are rising and production is barely falling.

The fact is there's not a single major fossil fuel producing country or corporation on the planet that has any intention of shutting down production in the forseeable future. This is why countries like China, that have to import most of their fossil fuel, are so far ahead in renewable energy production and technology.

Carbon offsets are total bullshit, so really this changes nothing.

Perhaps now they will report their true carbon emissions.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/24/carbon-c...

The rising BRICS dominate hydrocarbons and they aren't giving them up, selling or using.

We should be focused on mitigation strategies and superior technology that wins conversion based on market forces and not government mandates and long term subsidies.

The Green Suicide of the West isn't going to help climate change, and will probably make it worse.

Give a couple of years for the professional managerial class to start to understand this. Meanwhile, consider the advantages of learning to speak Chinese.

> The rising BRICS dominate hydrocarbons and they aren't giving them up, selling or using.

Surely you’re looking at the wrong statistics. Brazil is a leader in renewable energy, with fossil fuel use already on the decline for the last decade.

China is the world’s largest producer of solar and wind power products, and their renewable energy ramp up has only been slowed down by the rest of the world buying up half their output.

The risk to western economies is that they are too slow to transition away from fossil fuels and suffer from their dependence on ever more expensive oil and gas.

Brazil is making ethanol from its vast sugar plantations. They are a special case, and ethanol isn't great on a full lifecycle basis. It doesn't make sense without agricultural surpluses or subsidies, as there are in the USA.

China is the world's mass manufacturer. They will happily make whatever they can sell. If the West is demanding solar panels and windmills due to top down energy policy directives China will happily make and sell them.

There is plenty of fossil fuel available and a huge installed base of ICE's around to use them, especially in the developing world and BRICS. If the West stops buying fossil fuels it only makes them cheaper for those who will happily consume them.

The West needs to use its technological edge to develop market winning sustainable technologies and cheap, safe, electricity production. Crippling itself with unrealistic sustainable energy policies is going to be counter productive to climate change solutions.

There isn’t plenty of cheap fossil fuel available, it’s becoming more expensive to extract what’s left with each decade that goes by.

The high price of oil is a huge drag on economy, with every spike causing inflation and reducing economic growth.

The USA has already developed technology needed, and renewables are now the cheapest energy source. The countries that scale them up quickly will enjoy smooth economic growth and cheaper energy than ever in history, and the countries that keep using oil will stagnate.

Tell that to Putin. There's plenty of oil. They've been saying its going to run out for 50 years. Dead fields have replenished themselves.

I’m not talking about some peak oil collapse theory, but the actually reality that the return on investment of extracting oil is steadily eroding. Have a look at the data yourself:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2013.012...

Yes. EROEI. Very familiar with that. This is an anonymous forum so you won't believe my credentials ( as is wise!), so I'll put it this way: do you think that the idea that oil is a precious and rare resource is good or bad for the major producers (i.e. state producers)?

The oil supply chain is logistically demanding. Once oil is pumped out of the ground it's got to go somewhere, and once it's there it has to move or be burned, because storing oil gets expensive. What oil producers care about is predictability of demand, price is important but it's secondary to that. If the whole world knows that there's plenty of oil it's much harder to set the price where you want it. If the world thinks oil is a rare and precious commodity the price is natural.

“We’re going to get as much out of [oil and gas] for as long as we can,” he said: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change...

Large organizations have a lot of inertia. They don't want to change what has been working, even if the signs it'll stop working are clear.

They have the brains. They should branch out and create a moonshot division that starts to make money and shows stakeholders they can bet on them.

In my area, their EV charging network has built several sites in the last few years. They are all terrible due to severe limits on peak amps (200A, IIRC).

TBH, it is pretty surprising, considering that they should clearly be seeing the opportunity.

Meeting with C-suit.

COO: "This is turning out to be hard"

CEO: "F*it, let the planet burn".

CFO: "I'm down with that, I'm retiring rich and have a good 10-20 years of cocaine and hookers before my house on the coast gets washed away"

This reminds me of this part of the "Death to 2020": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yUW9iiU6R8

How much of the corporate virtue signaling was in response to a jobseeker-oriented market? Now, with all the layoffs, employers have their pick of white collar workers.

As one of the thousands who planted one of the million trees within Sacramento, California during the 1970s, I did my part toward reducing CO2 and added cooling of urban areas.

You should too. It's not that hard.

I am doing it again, but in another city.

The average lifetime co2 emissions per person seems to be in the tens or hundreds of tons (probably on the higher end of the spectrum for Americans, especially those decades in the latter half of the 20th century). Most trees weigh a single digit number of tons when fully grown, and many trees don't survive to full growth and in any case they may release much of that carbon through decay or combustion. It seems pretty unlikely to me that planting a tree actually offset your carbon emissions.

ah, yes, a throwaway account.

At least, provide for some citation to be worthy.

https://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archiv...

1. My account is older than yours and has far more reputation. It's no more a throwaway than yours--it just contains the sequence of characters "throwaway".

2. Your link is about co2 exhaled which is a tiny fraction of a person's overall co2 emissions.

3. According to https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-solutions/carbo..., the average American's carbon footprint is about 16 tons of co2 per year multiplied by the average American's lifespan of 77 years equals 1,200 tons of co2. According to every source I could find, the overwhelming majority of trees in the United States weigh a single digit number of tons fully grown, and trees aren't pure-carbon either. Further, many trees don't reach maturity and of those that do many release their carbon via decay and combustion.

Thanks for the update.

Due diligence was needed ... by me.

(Then again, I often read about a trillion trees on this surface of this ball of mass, but quantization approach of this scale isn't my cup of tea).

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