Shell Scraps Its $100 Million-a-Year Carbon Offset Plan 175
Shell PLC has quietly abandoned its plan to spend $100 million a year on carbon credits, "which is the largest offset program among corporations," notes CarbonCredits.com. The move comes six months after its new CEO Wael Sawan took office. From the report: In June, Sawan announced a major shift in Shell's strategy -- to maintain its current level of oil production until 2030, not to reduce it as initially declared, while reducing costs and increasing shareholders profits. What the CEO missed to reveal at the time is the energy giant's plans for investing in carbon credit projects. These credits are part of Shell's offsetting program in line with its 2050 net zero emissions goal. Shell has made a commitment to cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. It managed to reduce total emissions from all scopes (Scope 1, 2, and 3) in 2022 compared to 2016 levels. A big part of the oil major's carbon reduction strategy is the use of carbon credits to offset emissions.
Originally, Shell aimed at spending $100 million each year on carbon offsets. The oil company also targeted to generate 120 million carbon credits yearly by 2030 from natural carbon sequestration projects. These targets would have offset about 10% of Shell's carbon emissions. But with the company's recent revelation, they confirmed that they're putting an end to those plans. However, the company hasn't revealed publicly any new plans for carbon credits or how they now intend to meet their climate targets. According to Shell, those prior goals weren't attainable due to the lack of carbon offsets that meet its quality standards. [...]
As what [Flora Ji, a 17-year Shell veteran confirmed], Shell's long-term approach to carbon reduction toward net zero follows the Science-Based Targets initiative. That means avoiding emissions first and reducing them before resorting to carbon offsets. If Shell stays loyal to its net zero pledge, it will still need carbon offsets eventually, according to BloombergNEF analysis. The Dutch energy giant will be needing the offset credits for the residual emissions on its way to net zero. Indeed, Shell is not totally abandoning its carbon offset efforts; only the $100M and 120M credit targets. And though it's prioritizing its short-term goal of maximizing profits, it has yet to disclose new plans for its long-term climate targets.
Originally, Shell aimed at spending $100 million each year on carbon offsets. The oil company also targeted to generate 120 million carbon credits yearly by 2030 from natural carbon sequestration projects. These targets would have offset about 10% of Shell's carbon emissions. But with the company's recent revelation, they confirmed that they're putting an end to those plans. However, the company hasn't revealed publicly any new plans for carbon credits or how they now intend to meet their climate targets. According to Shell, those prior goals weren't attainable due to the lack of carbon offsets that meet its quality standards. [...]
As what [Flora Ji, a 17-year Shell veteran confirmed], Shell's long-term approach to carbon reduction toward net zero follows the Science-Based Targets initiative. That means avoiding emissions first and reducing them before resorting to carbon offsets. If Shell stays loyal to its net zero pledge, it will still need carbon offsets eventually, according to BloombergNEF analysis. The Dutch energy giant will be needing the offset credits for the residual emissions on its way to net zero. Indeed, Shell is not totally abandoning its carbon offset efforts; only the $100M and 120M credit targets. And though it's prioritizing its short-term goal of maximizing profits, it has yet to disclose new plans for its long-term climate targets.
People are starting to realize the scam (Score:5, Informative)
"Offsets" in practice have been either about paying PRC to keep running Three Gorges Dam, or paying Turkey to run some wind power.
It's a hilarious scam, aimed at buying indulgences for status purposes.
Re:People are starting to realize the scam (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot the ones where they pay landowners to not cut down trees, or tree farming groups to plant the trees they were already going to plant anyway.
Carbon Credits is just industrial theater meant to placate people demand governments enforce change. To employ a pun, it's a shell game of "hide the problem."
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It's a good delaying strategy. Hey, we decided to go nuclear, don't have to cut back on fossil fuels right now as once we go nuclear climate change will be solved. Without mentioning the 20,000+ nuclear plants required and the timeline to build them and where the uranium will come from, actually that is explained away by new thorium technology that doesn't exist, at least commercially.
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Yes, there's a role for nuclear, it's just the time scales mean not much will get done in time. Personally, I feel that things are actually going backwards, profit and comfort right now seem the most important to too many, including what seems like half the politicians
Re:Nuclear cheapest and least limiting now (Score:4, Informative)
There are no "skyrocketing wind and solar costs". You cited an article about a short term rise in materials costs for offshore wind--a rise that affects the cost of building nuclear plants too--and then pretended it was also about onshore wind and solar (it isn't), and then asserted without evidence it had somehow erased the cost difference between renewables and nuclear.
Here in the real world [wikipedia.org], wind and solar cost only a fraction as much as nuclear, and their costs continue drop, especially utility scale solar whose cost fell by 82% [nrel.gov] between 2010 and 2020, a trend that is expected to continue [cnet.com].
Re:Big Whoopsie there (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? I provide lots of links to specific sources with detailed cost information. You reply with personal insults and no data at all. Just made up fantasies about how wind and solar projects "keep getting cancelled more and more often", when in the real world renewable installations are up by a third this year [iea.org], the largest increase ever.
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Why only nuclear? That seems rather specific, limiting, expensive.
Nuclear is no longer expensive compared to skyrocketing
It's still expensive. The differential might be slightly reduced at present but one of the really skyrocketing changes in the UK at least was with regards to finance cost. This could also affect nuclear. Indeed, the big limiting factor for nuclear for the last thirty years has been finance
It's limiting because it needs fuel that is available from only a relatively few places. If everywhere goes fully nuclear there will not be enough and what there is will become very expensive. As such, it's useful as pa
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You know, if a supervolcano blows at some point, all of your solar panels, wind turbines, they will be useless.
Nuclear power wouldn't save us in such a scenario. Massive power does not mean time for adaptation. A volcano doesn't mean no sun or no wind. If it does, nuclear won't help. Nuclear power needs many other resources, not least mining uranium - a catastrophe that blocked out 100% of light and stopped all wind would stop mining too
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Tax any fossil fuel extraction (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, exactly.
Paying someone random to pollute more does not bring anything good.
We should tax any fossil fuel extraction by an exponential amount instead. At least it will go to infrastructure, less corruption.
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"exponential" has a precise meaning. Hint: it's not "a lot"
Math (Score:2)
exp(t) with t >>1
Re:Tax any fossil fuel extraction (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not possible to make the road to net zero cheaper than the status quo, not even with nuclear. Resources have to be allocated to it, monetary incentives have to be created to do it.
Taxing Fossil Fuels Into The Ground (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. And a huge part of that money can come from taxing fossil fuels into the ground ! (Pun intended)
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The problem you have there is that ultimately the fuel source is used and paid for by the end user. Taxing fossil fuels initially results in more expensive fossil fuels. The very first thing that happen is a revolt from the general public which will come to head at the next general election where the people seeking power will simply run on a platform to remove the tax and thereby reducing the cost of living.
You just need to look to Europe after the Ukraine war to see what happened there. People were massive
Nope. (Score:3)
That's not how "progressive" and "exponential in time" works.
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Net zero because it's eay to administer, fucking around in the margins will get you nowhere and if you spend 99% of the effort to get there ypu might as well ho straight for 100% and close loopholes.
As for why it requires massive levels of mobilization to get net zero by 2055, common sense.
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Sounds like sovereign nations implementing environmental policies. Totalitarian from a libertarian point of view, but no categorical difference from say dioxin emission limits.
Russia is only 134 Million people, what they want to do internally isn't all that relevant. China will be brought to heel by border taxes (WTO and globalism are dead, implementing policy through trade restriction is kosher again).
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Modern society is a bunch of spoiled children, net zero can be accomplished with significantly less mobilization and resource reallacation away from luxury consumption than any major war in our pasts (or Ukrainian present).
It might not be politically feasible, but it's technically feasible without anyone starving.
Re:Tax any fossil fuel extraction (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you considered the possibility that your worldview might be a bit too local here?
Your description of "Modern Society" leads me to believe that you mean "America". I agree with you that we are swaddled in unimaginable luxury here. That said, we do not matter. Looking at carbon emissions from now to 2050, the people that matter are the billions currently living on a tenth or less of our average energy consumption. They are not spoiled children, and they'll be completely reasonable to respond with violence if our energy policies threaten their children.
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But they don't need net zero except for the factories creating exports, as long as they have labour cost comparative advantage that net zero supply chain will still get build.
After the west has dumped the cost of PV/electrolyzers/power-to-liquid/etc through scale and initial R&D, they can make the transition on the cheap.
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+1 Agree. Any energy "solution" based in artificial scarcity is going to fail long-term because it's only going to impact the poor. They will only tolerate for-me-not-for-thee for so long before they remember they have ballots, pitchforks, rifles, and guillotines.
Energy abundance is the only this works.
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Lack of food, water and air conditioning is affecting the poor now and it seems it is only getting worse. I never needed air conditioning up till recently, never seen such low water levels until recently and food sure has been going up in price against a backdrop of crop failures caused by heat and drought. Then there's the fires along with the grey air that has shown up 3 out of the last 4 years, after 55 years of my never seeing forest fire smoke.
Sure it is easy to say those heat deaths are just old peopl
Re: Tax any fossil fuel extraction (Score:3)
By burning fuel, you damage the world for everyone else. Itâ(TM)s perfectly reasonable to ask anyone doing that to pay for the damage caused.
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Taxes lead to bureaucracy and then to corruption.
Citation needed. Please provide objective data showing that there's a positive correlation between taxes and corruption.
To help you out, I did a search for "correlation between taxes and corruption". Here's one of the top hits, a paper from the International Monetary Fund [imf.org]. In the abstract it says,
We use a comprehensive dataset for 147 countries spanning 1995-2014, compiled by the IMF. It finds that--consistent with the existing literature--corruption is negatively associated with overall tax revenue, and most of its components.
Corruption is correlated with less taxes, not more. The causation seems to mainly go the other way, though. If there's a lot of corruption, people avoid paying taxes. There seems to be very little evidence o
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Ask yourself how hard you would work if the government was taking all of your earnings less whatever you spend on food or rent. If you were modded troll for that, it's because that comment is indistinguishable from some other over-the-top or hyperbolic comment a troll might make just to stir the pot.
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Because the goal is not to ban it, the goal is to make them spend all the profit from it on renewable energy instead.
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If you're going put a 100% tax on something, why not just ban it outright? It's effectively the same thing,
No, it is not effectively the same thing.
If burning fossil fuels has some benefit, but also has negative consequences to people other than the person burning the fuel, the people burning the fuel have no incentive to cut back: after all, they're not the ones paying for the consequences. The market solution is to add a tax that, ideally, is equal to the costs that the fuel burning creates for others.
This allows the people burning the fuel to make the correct free market decision: is the benefit more than the
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...Now, the hard (and possibly impossible) part is the question "how much is that optimal tax, that exactly equals the cost of the damaging effects." Now, that is hard.
Indeed, but even an order of magnitude level estimate would still be better than the current "zero". I'd be willing to bet that we'd be able to get within around 50% though.
I've proposed before that rather than emissions being "free" as long as they meet EPA required controls, that we tax based on the "best guess" of the harms said emissions will cost. Set the level to 110% or so for administrative costs and because we always know it's going to be worse.
Then emitters would eagerly install and find innova
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Except that everyone is benefiting from fossil fuels. So if you start "taxing it more", you will just end up having everyone pay more.
What you mean by that, is that you want people to actually pay for the negative externalities [britannica.com] of fossil fuels. This is all good and fluffy, until you realize that your next slashdot post will actually cost you 5$ (the laptop you are using, internet connection, servers to host the content, electricity to power all that... and I am sure I am forgetting some).
This allows the people burning the fuel to make the correct free market decision
People can already
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What you mean by that, is that you want people to actually pay for the negative externalities [britannica.com] of fossil fuels. This is all good and fluffy, until you realize that your next slashdot post will actually cost you 5$ (the laptop you are using, internet connection, servers to host the content, electricity to power all that... and I am sure I am forgetting some).
You are assuming that every link in the chain is running on electricity being generated through the use of fossil fuels, which is not the case for basically anyone.
I happen to know for a fact that my electrical generation mix on the grid is 44% nuclear, 27% large hydroelectric, and 29% renewable from biomass (3%), geothermal (2%), small hydroelectric (2%), solar (12%), and wind (9%). And in addition to that, I have PV solar on my roof.
So basically as long as I'm talking to something hosted in AWS us-west-2
Economics 101 [Re:Tax any fossil fuel extraction] (Score:2)
Except that everyone is benefiting from fossil fuels. So if you start "taxing it more", you will just end up having everyone pay more.
Yes, everybody uses fossil fuels or products made with fossil fuels to some extent. But those people who use more fossil fuels will pay more tax, and those using less fossil fuels will pay less tax. Therefore there will be an incentive for people to use less fossil fuels, and for corporations to use less (in order to lower cost, and therefore sell more product). And, optimally, that "will pay more" would be exactly equal to the amount of the negative effects.
What you mean by that, is that you want people to actually pay for the negative externalities [britannica.com] of fossil fuels.
EXACTLY! You've got it in one.
In earlier slashdot
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Just going to reply about externalities: paying for externalities is not the same as just "taxing oil companies for 100% of their profit". If you want to start to pay for externalities, then prices must also go up for the consumer.
And usually, this is where people start to say that they don't want to go down that road. Because human nature basically, people being selfish and short-sighted, and because people want the ease of the modern life (cars, planes, meat, technology...) without having to pay the actua
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The issue doesn't lie with Shell alone. The real problem stems from societal expectations and individual behaviors, including your own. People anticipate the ability to heat their homes during winter, use air conditioning in the summer, rely on cars for short distances, indulge in annual tech gadget upgrades (like smartphones, smartwatches, connected appliances), occasionally purchase inexpensive clothing (even discarding unused items after years), and even you, expecting to post your usual content on Slash
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The oil companies have been trying to make it our problem, putting out a lot of stuff about your personal carbon footprint and how they are just innocently filling your demand.
While it's true that we do need to improve our lifestyles, fossil fuel energy companies could do a lot to facilitate that.
Many people struggle to afford things like heat pumps. Shell saying "oh, that's a shame, have some more gas" while making $40bn in profit last year demonstrates the problem. Profiting from exacerbating climate chan
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Many people struggle to afford things like heat pumps. Shell saying "oh, that's a shame, have some more gas" while making $40bn in profit last year demonstrates the problem. Profiting from exacerbating climate change, and taking advantage of people's inability to switch away from your fossil fuels.
That is some nice blame shifting. If people struggle to afford heatpumps, blame the heatpump manufacturers. But the reality is that people don't struggle to buy heatpumps. They struggle to make the right choices: when faced with the choice of buying a new shiny car for their 2kms commute, or buying a heatpump, they choose the car. When faced with the same choice, but for buying a new smartphone because their old one is "oh dear, 2 years old, and can barely handle a 2 day charge now", they choose the smartph
Re: Tax any fossil fuel extraction (Score:2)
No, heâ(TM)s saying that renewables compete extremely well with fossil fuels, especially when the government forces the fossil fuel companies to pay for the damage theyâ(TM)re causing to everyone else.
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They can compete just fine, if it's a level playing field.
Let's stop externalizing the costs of disposing with the waste products created by using fossil fuels (e.g. start charging for how much exhaust gas goes up the stack), and kill all the subsidies that go into fossil fuel production and run the numbers again - I think you'll find that fossil fuels are an absolutely shit value when everything is normalized.
But there's big money interests in making sure that doesn't happen, so we'll just have to pile on
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Except you probably cannot, without bringing some actual data to the table.
Everyone knows that when you burn methane, coal, and petroleum distillates that the released carbon goes into the air, and stays there for long periods of time as a normal operating parameter.
Solar panels and windmills have a one-time cost to produce, where they then produce clean energy for the designed lifetime of the unit +/- some amount of statistically probable splay (could break down before the intended lifetime, could outlast
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Except that nuclear receives 1/10th of the subsidies renewables does [iea.org]: $696 billion for renewables vs $63 billion for nuclear.
If you look at the situation in Europe for instance, one third of the clean electricity is produced by nuclear. Since 40-50 years now. About one quarter by renewables, and just very recently. That's a pretty poor result given that huge level of subsidies for renewables. You can also just have a look at Germany vs France: Germany which is "leading the way in renewables deployment in Eu
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About one quarter by renewables,
The EU isn't quite the whole of Europe, but 39.4% last year in the EU. Nuclear somewhat less, so your post seems a bit confused. https://www.consilium.europa.e... [europa.eu].
In terms of subsidy, 2022 saw 8GW more nuclear, 75GW wind, 191GW solar. Capacity factors reduce the potential produced by the renewables, but even then it's more than ten times nuclear. If you consider subsidy as a price signal to bring on new production, and taking into account relative carbon footprints and that nuclear is always on then the
Who will be our Luther? (Score:2)
It's a hilarious scam, aimed at buying indulgences for status purposes.
Truer words were never spoken.
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"Offsets" in practice have been either about paying PRC to keep running Three Gorges Dam, or paying Turkey to run some wind power.
It's a hilarious scam, aimed at buying indulgences for status purposes.
That's not the scam. The scam is doing things which wouldn't already be done, like not cutting down trees that weren't in danger of being cut down. Your two examples aren't a scam, they are specifically the whole point of the scheme. You are just too narrow minded to understand what it is supposed to do:
If you pay Turkey to run some wind power, that means wind power in Turkey has higher ROI. What do you think that means for investment in power generation when the ROI of green energy is suddenly increased th
Cut expenditures (Score:4, Insightful)
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Their entire business is creating carbon emissions. How would they ever be "on track" to reduce emissions without reducing the amount of oil and gas they extract?
This is purely about keeping more money for shareholders and exec bonusing, after they've extracted the maximum value out of the greenwash - there's a reason they had a big marketing and PR campaign about their bullshit offsets and such, and then they quietly kill it without any announcements at all.
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Well that's great. Unfortunately, it's very much still a problem that entire towns can be wiped off the map by worsening weather events and sea level rise, regardless of if those towns manage to go completely carbon negative or not. It turns out that it's everyone's atmosphere, and the atmosphere gives exactly zero fucks about arbitrary lines on maps, or who is and isn't causing the problem.
So I guess people in low-lying towns, people close to large forests and wilderness that can catch on fire, and peopl
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"Maybe it's time to nationalize them."
Presumably that would be up to the government of the Netherlands.
Be Who You Are. (Score:3, Insightful)
They're a fossil fuel company. Go ahead and be that. Reminds me of McDonald's push to sell salads. Ridiculous. I don't expect them to solve the problems. I don't expect we can force them into being green. I expect they will fade in importance through increasing irrelevance. Not all at once mind you, and not completely. But I don't think the answers will come from them, and I won't judge them for not giving them to us. I understand some people vehemently disagree with this premise, but I really believe that the problem is not production, it's consumption. Solve it there.
Re:Be Who You Are. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a responsible CEO they should be looking towards the inevitable future where demand for oil is much lower, and building up a renewable energy and vehicle charging business to replace it.
As an irresponsible CEO, they will do everything they can to delay the decline of oil, up to an including setting the world on fire.
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Diversification away from being just a petroleum company to an energy provider is their 'responsible' strategy.
Here in Australia they are investing in electricity by acquiring established players such as ERM Power and Powershop. As a market player in an industry moving away from coal, this offers a roadmap to shareholders by positioning themselves as a renewable electricity partner.
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Australia seems to be struggling to develop its wind resources for some reason. From what I've read it's political.
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Australia seems to be struggling to develop its wind resources for some reason. From what I've read it's political.
Yup. Absolutely nothing to do with the intermittency of wind generation, and the fact that even experts and renewables-afficionados are calling their renewables scale hard to conceptualize [abc.net.au].
Amimojo, expert in deflecting responsibility.
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Australia has vast amounts of space for solar, and great off-shore wind resources. Solar tracks the peak of aircon demand, and wind over such a wide area and out at sea has a decent capacity factor. They have the shallow areas to build simple, mature turbines on.
They are also trying to get a long distance DC cable built to export that power to other countries.
From what I understand, the delays are political and corporate mis-management.
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From what I understand, the delays are political and corporate mis-management.
Look again. Start with the link I provided in my last post. Follow through.
Re: Be Who You Are. (Score:2)
Yeh, because the intermittency isnâ(TM)t trivially easy to deal with with one of a huge number of different storage systems that are available.
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Not so trivial when you take into account that they will need 5x more electricity than what they are using today to reach net zero. They already know they will lack storage capacity by 2030, even when taking into account all their current investments. Meaning that they will have to keep those coal/gas plants around.
Also, the amount of storage they need is actually huge. And it is for only 26 million people. If you think that can scale at world population level, you are delusional. Climate change will get wa
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I agree with your intention - they need to diversify their business against the inevitable decline of fossil fuels, or they'll just end up as a stranded asset holding company. But I disagree with your direction.
What does Shell know about: geology and drilling, offshore platforms, global logistics, advanced chemist
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As a responsible CEO they should be looking towards the inevitable future where demand for oil is much lower, and building up a renewable energy and vehicle charging business to replace it.
As an irresponsible CEO, they will do everything they can to delay the decline of oil, up to an including setting the world on fire.
How can this be modded Insightful? As a responsible CEO, they are already diversifying and bidding on wind farms projects around the world [shell.com]. But as responsible CEO, they also see that despite people telling them renewables is the only future, those very same people also want to drive their cars around, use their gas stoves, buy new shiny things every year, eat meat every day... So as responsible CEO of a company that can provide that, they also do that...
The people being irresponsible are the ones that don't
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As a responsible CEO they should be looking towards the inevitable future where demand for oil is much lower, and building up a renewable energy and vehicle charging business to replace it.
The reality is they are. That is an unfortunate effect of the industry. By all forecasts if you want to maximise shareholder value you should *not* be investing in green energy now as oil/gas projects will not only pay for themselves, but will do so with significantly higher margins and significantly higher ROI than green energy projects.
Green energy: you invest $10 today to make $1/year for the next 50 years. Your value is $40
Oil energy: you invest $1000 today to make $50/year for the next 30 years. Your v
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A rapid shift away from fossil fuels requires them to abandon infrastructure which is worth trillions. It makes it hard for them to compete with new green energy focused companies. I suppose they can try to gradually shift based on the depreciation of those assets, but I don't think the world should suffer for their economic timetable. Governments need to step in and start
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You already admitted above that renewables can never be viable to replace oil .
He didn't, that's your personal strawman
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"Then stop overregulating the only viable alternatives to oil"
Interesting... are they doing that? Or do you mean "do not regulate at all"?
If you do not regulate the new industries at all, the sins of the old one will be repeated. Chemicals from the creation of panels will be dumped into rivers. The fabrication of massive turbines will result in particulate matter in the atmosphere. Factories and other facilities will be abandoned as the industry changes without thought to "cleaning up" before leaving.
The f
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The barrier to entry for new renewable facilities isn't 50 years long. I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
Nuclear is suffering under the regulatory burden. Solar arrays and wind farms are not. At least not that I've observed.
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Damn it, I apologize. You were perfectly clear you were talking about NG and nuclear.Apparently I can't fucking read.
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I agree we should end interventionism, how about we start by cutting all fossil fuel subsidies [eesi.org].
Sure. Until you realize than in Europe, most of those subsidies went to keeping prices at the pump low (or low enough let's say), and gas prices low so that people could heat their house during winter.
If you have a car, use a gas heater, or live in a country where natural gas is used for more than 10% of your electric mix, then you have been a beneficiary of those subsidies.
The good news is that you can be a part of the needed change, and reduce the need for those subsidies: drive less, change your gas heat
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If you have a car
I do, it's full-electric.
use a gas heater,
I do not, it's a variable-speed multi-zone heat pump
or live in a country where natural gas is used for more than 10% of your electric mix
The mix that my grid operator publishes is 29% renewable, 44% nuclear, and 27% large hydro. 0% coal, 0% gas, 0% oil.
, then you have been a beneficiary of those subsidies.
So by your own logic, I'm paying tax dollars for someone to extract, refine, ship, and sell a product to other people that is making my life worse. Why should I be forced to do that?
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From what you've said, some of your tax dollars are going to people who don't own an electric car, or an electrical heat pump (not talking about oil companies here, but about direct subsidies that we see popping up in a lot of western country to artifically keep the price of fossil fuels low)..
You are forced to do that because you are part of society. Same as when people who don't have kids (or who don't have kids going to school anymore), still pay taxes that go to public education.
And some others of your
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"No decline in oil till you can replace plastic"
About 4% of oil is used in plastic production. I don't think you are correct.
Plastic is not the problem [Re:Be Who You Are.] (Score:2)
Oil use for plastics is an absolutely trivial amount of oil used compared to the amount of oil we pump out of the ground. (4% of crude oil in 2012 [oilprice.com]) If we were hypothetically to stop all burning of fossil fuels but keep on using it for plastics, that would solve the problem.
In any case, the carbon that goes into the plastic doesn't go into the atmosphere. Plastics may contribute to global warming due to the relatively small amount of energy used to produce them, but the oil used in the plastic themselves is
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Good. Carbon offsets are nonsense. It's like buying absolution from the church: maybe it makes you feel good, but you're really just throwing money away. There have been enough investigative articles showing that the offset programs (like tree planting) are mostly nonsense. Other kinds of offsets - like handing Tesla money for nothing - are nonsense for other, equally obvious reasons.
Shell is in the oil business. There's nothing wrong with being honest about that. If we want to reduce the usage of fossil fuels, that's also fine. "If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it." That's the job of the government, and the voters who should drive government policy.
S'okay. The world is gonna scrap Shell. (Score:2)
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Once Shell realized that carbon offset plans, credit exchanges, etc. were not as advertised. Here, in Washington State, the carbon credit program regulations can only be satisfied by buying credits from the State. They have a monopoly on that program. And the funds received disappear into a social justice fund with no spending accountability.
It's like buying Indulgences. They only count if you buy them from the Church. If you try to do some charitable work on your own, you are still going to Hell.
Re: Business as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Business as usual (Score:2, Insightful)
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Sooo, you also are against punishing drug-dealers, I take it? Just punish the consumers, they are the ones creating the market after all!
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Actually... yes. I am against punishing drug dealers.
Well, sort of. If I ask for cocaine and I get 70% baby laxative, they should face the same penalties as others who misrepresent ingredients in their product. And if I ask for heroin and I get fentanyl they should be investigated for criminal negligence, and (depending on the outcome) more serious crimes.
But if I ask for cocaine and get cocaine - even a baggie marked with "70% cocaine by weight", then no, I don't think you should punish the drug dealer.
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Interesting. Well you are consistent. So if the oil-industry labels their products as "destroys planetary ecosphere", then they are in the clear?
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Well, they're in the clear if what they're doing is within the rules. At least legally. Morality is up to everybody else to decide.
Change the rules. Happens all the time. Look at what has happened to ICE average fuel efficiency - they swore up and down that meeting the new standards would be impossible, or at least economically infeasible. But the rules stuck, and the innovators innovated.
But complaining that a company continues to do what it is permitted to do isn't productive.
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That is too simple and does not work. As the only available mass-scale experiment demonstrates nicely. Well, maybe in 200 years some insight will have manifested, but I am not hopeful.
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We're in agreement there. I am not hopeful either. I don't think either side has the will.
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Ah yes. Downmod strengthens my point considerably.
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The only common point between drug and oil, is that once you start using either, you get addicted to it.
But this is about as far as it gets; Oil and fossil fuel in general allowed and still allow the society that we live in: cars, planes, plenty of food, meat every day, healthcare, living past 35 years old, new clothes whenever we want, cheap smartphones/computers... and slashdot too. Oil allows anti-nuclear idiots like you to post on slashdot too, rent-free; and bitchj about anything and everything.
If you
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Indeed. But 2nd and 3rd rated politicians always want some "war" to be able to misiredt away from their own screw-ups.
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As well as their intentions to extract ever last drop of oil that they can, oil companies' production of plastics has been increasing exponentially over the past few dec
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While true, governments are not fundamentally different and money talks.
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Just don't buy their product. And don't buy or use product related to them.
Oh, I guess that means we won't see you posting on slashdot anymore: the computer you are using, the infrastructure used for the network, the electricity to power all that, the data centers, the car that drove you to work if you are posting from there... You could benefit from all that because companies like Shell are just providing you (indirectly sometimes) with that cheap stuff.
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That fossil fuels are not the serial killers. People buying products related to fossil fuels are the serial killers.
As everything today is basically related to fossil fuels, the only choice you have left is how big of a serial killer do you want to be. And as there is no punishment if you are a big or small serial killer, the incentive to buy less cheap stuffs, drive your car less, etc... when compared to your neighbor, is not there.
But yeah, my point was: you are blaming oil companies whereas you (and I, a