BP Shuns Renewables in Return To Oil and Gas (bbc.com) 85
BP has announced it will cut its renewable energy investments and instead focus on increasing oil and gas production. The energy giant revealed the shift in strategy on Wednesday following pressure from some investors unhappy its profits and share price have been lower than its rivals. From a report: BP said it would increase its investments in oil and gas by about 20% to $10bn a year, while decreasing previously planned funding for renewables by more than $5bn. The move comes as rivals Shell and Norwegian company Equinor have also scaled back plans to invest in green energy and US President Donald Trump's "drill baby drill" comments have encouraged investment in fossil fuels.
Investor accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Investor accountability (Score:4, Insightful)
There is only one thing that must be done here: hold the investors accountable. Sue them for ecocide.
Those with the power to make a difference have decided: Ecocide is the answer. The reason? Profit is all, profit is their only value system. Nothing can stand in its way.
The God of Greed must be fed until we are no longer capable of feeding it. Consequences be damned.
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Those with the power to make a difference have decided: Ecocide is the answer. The reason? Profit is all, profit is their only value system. Nothing can stand in its way.
I predict that, sooner or later, profit will drive them (back?) to embrace renewables. Why? They're sustainable. Oil and gas are not.
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You're not reading my post clearly. I'm saying greed and profits will drive them back to renewables. But it may take awhile.
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Renewables can be more distributed: solar panels and home batteries are harder to profit, long term. Fossil-based power plants and nukes need central management, ownership, and give bigger control of the profit. Im assuming theyre rolling the numbers and see more money, near term, with fossil.
Long term we are all dead, but with accelerated CO2 more of the living things around us are dead longer too.
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Those with the power to make a difference have decided: Ecocide is the answer. The reason? Profit is all, profit is their only value system. Nothing can stand in its way.
I predict that, sooner or later, profit will drive them (back?) to embrace renewables. Why? They're sustainable. Oil and gas are not.
There's a *LOT* of inertia to overcome before profit will drive anyone to renewables. There's enough oil left in the ground to make it profitable for quite a long time yet, especially with world governments dancing to the tune of handing out subsidies to make it happen. I don't foresee profit being a driver for renewables at any point in my lifetime unless something drastic happens to change some aspect of using oil to make it less appealing to *everyone* from the dude just putting gas in the tank to get to
Re:Investor accountability (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire US is going to have to be held to account at this rate, given all this is to please Trump. I'll get modded to hell for saying it, but it's the truth.
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Renewables advocates have had years and years to hand Americans huge vehicles going 15mph over the speed limit, and all we've got to show for it are the some Rivans and F-150 Lightnings (and what have you) with limited support infrastructure and high-enough-to-be-undesirable charger rates.
When power at my plug at home is $.12 per kWh while the charger costs $.40 per kWh, something is wrong.
Fix that and you're in business.
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Yes, that means you.
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Here in the USA we are responsible for the fuckwit and still not seeing it. This mornings national radio quoted a mid America woman saying she agrees with the governement cutting but they are just a little too crude about it. That has to include right wing thoughts about climate too.
The fascists have growing numbers world wide, it seems, but USA is responsible for the UnWoke Nazi Virus from Queens.
Re: fascists growing world wide (Score:1)
Their recipe is pretty similar the world over: "Immigrants are coming to rob you, take your job, bid up egg & housing prices, and change the gender of your kids and/or pets."
The fascism algorithm is so easy that even cavemen are successfully doing it. (And falling for it also.)
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While true, the US is currently also by far the least prepared for what is to come. I have some (limited) compassion for those that did not vote Trump, but that is it.
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Also: most individual investors have very little influence on company strategy; the idea to hold them criminally responsible is idiotic. If there are actual laws being broken, issue a hefty fine large enough to affect the stock price, and punish investors that way.
Re:Investor accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
"they are not burning the oil". They release a huge amount of pollutants.
"Five major European companies ranked among the top ten contributors to CO2-equivalent emissions from 2012 to 2022. British Petroleum (BP) ranked second, with total emissions of 133 million tons"
https://daraj.media/en/burning... [daraj.media]
"the BP Refinery in Whiting is “one of the worst polluters in the nation."
https://www.indystar.com/story... [indystar.com]
"Among investor-owned companies, oil producers Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Chevron produced the most carbon emissions historically, combining for more than 10 percent"
https://www.smithsonianmag.com... [smithsonianmag.com]
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While this may be the case, most of these companies (can't actually speak for Chevron) are good corporate citizens, by that I mean they follow the rules set out for them. Whiting may be the worst polluter in the nation but that's only because Indiana permits them to be. The government exclusively sets the license to operate such a facility and has decided that by policy that refinery should be allowed to run like that.
On the flip side their refinery in the Netherlands is incredibly green. You see massive na
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The claim was that "they are not burning the oil". In fact they burn quite a bit and emit large amounts of various pollutants as I showed.
Your argument here is that nobody prevents them from harming the environment in various situations, and so its okay if they do that in the name of greed. I disagree.
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The drug dealers aren't damaging your health, you are... see the parallels?
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First, they are not burning the oil. YOU are. Also: most individual investors have very little influence on company strategy; the idea to hold them criminally responsible is idiotic. If there are actual laws being broken, issue a hefty fine large enough to affect the stock price, and punish investors that way.
Explain something to me. If CEOs aren't responsible for reprehensible actions their companies take because they have to please the board or the investors, and the board and the investors aren't responsible for the reprehensible actions their companies take because no individual has much influence on company strategy, who the fuck is making the decisions that lead to all this reprehensible behavior?
I get that the entire corporation structure is specifically built to shield all parties from responsibility, bu
Re:The climate change lure (Score:4, Insightful)
Why can you assholes never stop lying? Is is a mental disability? Or are you simply utterly dumb and do actually not understand that your hallucinations do not describe reality?
No, climate change will not be "rapid". It will take a few centuries. But it cannot be stopped anymore (only made less severe if decisive action is taken _now_) and that is too "fast" for nature to adapt and very likely for human civilization too.
Re: The climate change lure (Score:2)
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Do you also believe the earth is flat and vaccines do not work? Because that is on the same level as the complete crap you just claimed.
Re: The climate change lure (Score:2)
Says someone who doesnt understand the basic physics of CO2 and IR interaction.
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There is only one thing that must be done here: hold the investors accountable. Sue them for ecocide.
Funny you should mention that, there was virtually no talks of abandoning green ambitions until... https://www.reuters.com/busine... [reuters.com]
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There is only one thing that must be done here: hold the investors accountable. Sue them for ecocide.
Hm. Lots of hurdles to climb over for the common man. In theory, 'standing' should be easy enough to prove, but to prove ecocide? Not without being able to speak directly to the science yourself. I also can't afford a lawyer who could help in a case like this as the costs would be in the millions and the likelihood of winning very small.
So... nice idea. Find some rich guy to peddle it to. The rest of us can not participate in this way.
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There is only one thing that must be done here: hold the investors accountable. Sue them for ecocide.
There is only one thing that must be done here: hold the investors accountable. Sue them for ecocide.
Who's going to sue, and on who's behalf? These companies are going back to oil precisely because that's what satisfies the demands of the public.
What are you going to argue? That you're suing on behalf of your neighbors... who are voluntarily lining up at the pump to to pay their money to BP to fill their tanks?
Good luck with that. You might get a judge somewhere to initially give you a victory, but you're going to lose further up the judicial food chain for sure.
Meanwhile you will still buy products from China? (Score:2)
There is only one thing that must be done here: hold the investors accountable. Sue them for ecocide.
Will you apply similar logic to the #1 polluter in the world, China, refusing to buy Chinese manufactured products? Refusing to be a part of the EU and US greenwashing of their economies as they export the pollution of manufacturing to China?
China is doing far worse than BP, they are focused on coal. They have a lowest cost energy policy that is coal first. They are digging it up and importing it as fast as they can, increasing coal usage. Renewables in China are NOT replacing coal, they are SUPPLEMENTIN
Every day.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Every day I look into the eyes of my daughter and feel like I didn't do enough to protect her future. Meanwhile my parents continue to post fossil fuel propaganda to Facebook, yet they gush over how they tried to protect my future.
It is the greatest sin that I must ask more of my children than I could ever ask of myself.
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Personally I am just happy I never ended up having kids. This world is ... not a world to hand over to anyone else anymore.
Re: Every day.... (Score:2)
Re: Every day.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Every day I look into the eyes of my daughter and feel like I didn't do enough to protect her future. Meanwhile my parents continue to post fossil fuel propaganda to Facebook, yet they gush over how they tried to protect my future.
It is the greatest sin that I must ask more of my children than I could ever ask of myself.
While I feel some sympathy for parents in this age, I'm with the other poster here. I'm glad I never had children. There's too much in this world that points toward leaving it far, FAR worse for future generations, if we don't find a way to prevent them from happening at all.
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I'm with you: I'm also glad I never had children. If for no other reason, then for the fact that many of the world's problems would be lessened if we just had fewer people around. And don't read anything dark into that. I'm just in favor of encouraging people to have fewer children.
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Every day I look into the eyes of my daughter and feel like I didn't do enough to protect her future.
...and then go buy some more shit I don't need from Amazon before jumping in my 6.7 litre V8 duallie truck to go buy a loaf of bread at the local store I could've walked to....
The unmasking continues (Score:4, Informative)
Did anyone really believe their Beyond Petroleum greenwashing after the deepwater horizon disaster? The EPA did nothing when BP sprayed tons of Corexit into the ocean, lining the seafloor with a toxic sludge of oil and dispersant and giving untold numbers of people cancer. If another country did this, it would be an act of war.
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I guess it's Back to Petroleum now
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Pumping more oil and gas is not nearly as profitable as building out wind and solar farms. The problem is wind farms have become a political issue thanks to the US president
Also it's still costs some money to build out the solar farms. Normally energy companies just go to the government and get the government to pay for everything and then when they're done build to get on government taxpayer money
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"The problem is wind farms have become a political issue thanks to the US president"
Is it? The disaster was 12 years ago and it's clear these companies never actually intended to overhaul their entire infrastructure as they would have led us to believe. The greenwashing campaign, other than being an apology tour, was a shallow substitute for an overhaul. It's not unlike GM's limp-wristed attempts to do EVs in the 90s per government order. (see: Who Killed the Electric Car)
The disaster could have been averte
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Jesus, you're completely fucking obsessed with rsilvergun. Your post is not at all a normal amount of effort in regards to a Slashdot user you dont like.
My advice to you, get a life outside Slashdot and off the internet in general.
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You can try to spin it all you want, that post was a crazy person's amount of effort for something so inconsequential and you are very likely the AC that has a long history of this and this is likely the reason you write these posts AC as well. Wanna deny it? Then what's your Slashdot user name?
The funny part in all this is that all your efforts to make rsilvergun out as crazy just makes him look incredibly sane relative to yourself. If he was a nut we'd be able to tell for ourselves via his posts like we c
How do these people look in the mirror? (Score:3)
Explicitly putting profit over planet.
What do they tell their kids?
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What does anyone doing this think of themselves? Explicitly putting profit over planet. What do they tell their kids?
The nice thing is that since their investors are on records, our kids/grandkids will know whose estates to sue [slashdot.org] in the future. That is, if they survive that long...
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The same as all small-time evildoers do: "it is not my fault","it will not be _that_ bad surely?", "I had no choice", etc.
Always the same crap. Oil execs, concentration-camp guards, contributors to mass-murder, etc.
Obviously, there are also the fundamentally and utterly evil (like Trump), that just say "I will be dead when everybody sees the evil, so why do I care?"
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What does anyone doing this think of themselves?
Explicitly putting profit over planet.
What do they tell their kids?
Kids? Wait you don't have kids do you? On this overpopulated planet? How irresponsible can you be! Okay facetiousness aside, you've just picked on particular issue to latch on to. You're no better. You do what you do to make your life good for you. If you didn't then you wouldn't be wasting energy talking on Slashdot.
Companies are no different. They don't have a conscience. Their social contract extends to making a profit in a way that is permitted by law. Bp is a perfect example of a company that tried to
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What does anyone doing this think of themselves? Explicitly putting profit over planet. What do they tell their kids?
"Do whatever you want kids. Since that affluenza case, it's carte blanche for you little shits. Go all out. Daddy'll keep a nestegg for the judge's bribe."
Another side-effect of long term pledges (Score:2)
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Of course, b/c a pledge with out a plan is mere sophistry. Plans require concrete actions and timelines, and those things could be attacked or mocked, and we can't have that.
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"Renewables"? (Score:3, Interesting)
The only "renewable" energy I'm aware of is burning wood. You can always grow more of it.
Everything else requires something made from copper, steel, aluminum, silicon, rare earths, radioactive isotopes, etc.
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You can always make more oil.
The bigger issue is that single use copper, once you smelt it and make something out of it it's done. That's why no recyling place takes it.
I may be missing your point, or maybe you were being sarcastic? Copper is easily recycled. The scrap metal dealers are currently paying between $2 and $3.75 per pound according to a good search for prices in Los Angeles.
I suppose we can "make more oil", but while "synthetic" petroleum products can be made out of basic elements using the magic of chemistry, doing so is energy and cost prohibitive compared to digging it out of the ground, which is why we are in the atmospheric CO2 mess we are in.
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That's a very alternate view of energy. Hint: no one is talking about the cost of construction of a facility when they label an energy as renewable or not. A facility isn't energy. A solar panel isn't energy. A wind farm isn't energy. They are infrastructure, plant, equipment etc.
While the equipment may not be green, the *energy* many such systems produce most definitely is. Even if you needed a rare earth material to make a magnet used in the generator.
The "New BP" (Score:2)
New direction, new company. BP, where our new motto is "Beyond Procrastination".
Re: The "New BP" (Score:2)
Conservatives knew it was lies all the time (Score:1)
Re:Conservatives knew it was lies all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this satire or a determined demonstration that you are not only an idiot, but willing to contribute to evil on an unimaginable scale?
My guess would have been satire, but in these times the scum of the scum crawls out of their dark holes and again stands proud in their evil.
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Is this satire or a determined demonstration that you are not only an idiot, but willing to contribute to evil on an unimaginable scale?
The satirical post is yours, an abject waste of energy posting on Slashdot. Those electrons could have been used for something more practical. The reality is the OP makes a critical point: Economics sort it out. Unless you have external market forces at play people will do whats best for them and don't care about externalised costs. That includes everyone who owns are car (most of the population of America). If you ever drove in a car, or a bus, or have flown in a plane, you are the problem. These companies
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We on the right, have faced the green movement with the view, if they fly into an international conference twice a year, we know whatever they are selling is bullshit.
I keep saying people can work remotely just as productively as being at the office, but climate scientists and activists keep telling me I am wrong.
Re: Conservatives knew it was lies all the time (Score:2)
Change from the inside is hard... (Score:3)
This is IMO a reminder that changing an industry from the inside is unlikely, because the legacy players have too many internal conflicts. That's why the legacy companies, such as Sears, utterly failed at transitioning to online eCommerce, it took a new player, Amazon, to make it work. So while renewables are booming, led by new companies, not oil companies, oil is roughly flat, which means that they're trapped by their need to maximize short term profits so they're missing the big strategic transition that'll ultimately be very bad for them. BP was a bit smarter than most, covering both renewables and oil, but apparently the investors are demanding that BP destroy their long-term options to maximize short-term profits. Sigh.
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This is IMO a reminder that changing an industry from the inside is unlikely, because the legacy players have too many internal conflicts.
I disagree that BP has an "internal conflict" here, if we are talking about their other products and services potentially "competing" with renewable energy. BP doesn't care about that. If they could make 25% gross profit (as they did in 2024) with renewables they most certainly would. Their other products don't matter. The only relevant information for them is that renewables simply aren't as profitable as oil and gas, especially for a company with no experience in the industry.
Somewhat related to t
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False comparison. Sears had an internal resistance to change but the market forces were actively in support of that change and that's why they failed to adapt to a changing market. Bp is exactly the opposite.
Bp had no resistance to internal change. Green ambitions went all the way up to the CEO, and they started investing insane amounts in green energy (bp *was* the biggest wind energy producer in America, bp own the largest solar power producer in Europe, etc, etc). The problem what the market forces were
Typical (Score:3)
Typical modern corporate thinking, short term profits over long term prosperity.
Fossil fuels are the energy source of the past, as the symptoms of global warming keep getting more significant so will the efforts for phasing fossil fuels out. By focusing on the short term profits fossil fuels still deliver they are failing to set them selves up for the inevitable time when they are no longer a strong money maker.
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Indeed. Uncaring-evil or maybe incompetent-evil. No less evil though.
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I'm aware of our planet's current energy mix. You dont expect pressures for phase out to increase as global warming gets worse?
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Typical modern corporate thinking, short term profits over long term prosperity.
Except this is not short term profits. This is long term prosperity for a company. The ROI for renewable energy projects is a pittance compared to oil and gas. Bp has been on this path for about 10 years now, and extremely all in on green energy for about 5 years. Especially in the past 5 years you can see they trailed all other oil and gas companies by a significant factor to the point where bp's public evaluation right now makes them rife for a takeover.
Long term prosperity for a company isn't about savin
Undersstandable (Score:2)
The planetary eco-sphere will not destroy itself, after all! Got to contribute to that or it may not even happen!
Just like an addict (Score:3)
As long as green is a left issue we are doomed (Score:3)
Note: Historically protecting the environment was a rich person cause. This isn't just because rich people have the extra money to indulge in these things but being rich gives you the flexibility (and confidence) to accept changes. There are times I think the left would like us all to be peasant farmers growing all our own food on tiny plots of land.
Logic (Score:2)
Bp hasn't shunned anything (Score:2)
Activist investors have forced the issue. There was virtually no talk rolling back green energy targets until Elliot started purchasing bp stock. Now that they have a considerable stake in the company they rallied a whole lot of investors that pushed the issue to the board and CEO resulting in a very sudden change in the company.
It's all about money. They aren't wrong either, bp is now the last oil company to roll back green ambitions and was the company with the strongest ambitions as well. Since the Shell