Shell Oil and Climate Change
Here’s a video made 26 years ago by Shell Oil, showing that, at some time before that point, they had become completely aware of the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and rising temperatures of the Earth’s atmosphere. What have they done in the interim? Yes, they’ve invested in renewables (mainly wind) to some small degree, but that is dwarfed by huge sums of money they’ve poured into oil exploration, including its dirtiest form: tar sands.
Is this as despicable as ExxonMobil’s decision to fund enormous disinformation campaigns to the effect that climate change is a hoax? It doesn’t appear so. Is it nauseating nonetheless? Yup.
Thank you for telling us what has really been happening.
Maybe a book so that we can learn and not repeat harmful histories would be helpful. A book about what the fossil fuel interests have known about climate warming and how they promoted disiinformation, paid politicians….. Please include
how, in 2016, the electric companies in Florida wrote and spent millions of dollars on a referendum that sounded like it would promote solar energy but really would have stopped solar energy.
I would say that continuing to invest in energy is fine… society needs energy. So long as a company isn’t deliberately supporting disinformation or anti-regulation campaigns, it’s just competing in the real world while trying to fund alternatives to create a better one.
We are not going to wean ourselves from fossil fuels in a year, even with the most aggressive policy imaginable, and if the policy is too aggressive (note, far more so than what was seen under Obama and far more so than what was proposed under Clinton), then the economic downturn would create a pushback that would have slowed progress far more than simply creating a modest regulation environment for renewables to grow and replace traditional energy platforms.
Of course, all that is out the window because tantrum-throwing infants refused to support Hillary since she wasn’t their dream candidate, and now Trump is doing everything he can to reverse all progress made in the past 40 years… But at this point we will still be crawling forward, because market forces are all aligned with continued expansion of renewable energy.
But I have sympathy towards companies that were just competing, and not deliberately trying to wreck progress. That said, the fact that Shell didn’t make a video like this every year shows they weren’t really being responsible, they were just not being horribly irresponsible.