I mean, he sucks, but I also don’t disagree that having a bridge solution during OPEC fuckaround times is a good idea. Supply cuts aren’t fun, period, especially when we can’t influence them whatsoever (since it seems dollar hegemony is going bye-bye at some point):
There’s probably a decent solution to temporarily boost and maintain domestic oil production while also feeding green R&D, whether that’s in the form of a tax, credit, government package, or full-blown turn-Shell-into-an-SOE; all of its years vs. months, I think. Bottom line, I think it’s a more complex solution than “fuck this guy”.
My idea was a mandatory investment in green energy. Like, if you want to extract X barrels of oil, fine but you have to put up Y new windmills. You want to burn X tons of coal? OK that’ll be Y new solar panels please. It’s different from a carbon tax since the energy company can still own the windmills and whatever and of course sell the electricity from them. One day they’ll look around and realize most of their profits now come from green energy, might as well spend some lobbying money on that.
This is actually a proven idea in net new real estate development involving wetlands and protected acreage; you can build on wetlands, but for every acre you displace, you have to create two acres, and both the plan and results are audited.
To your point, the end result of this - in many cases - is to simply build elsewhere due to the considerably higher costs. I think a model similar in energy would pay dividends rather quickly - most likely, we’d see Shell, EM, CP, etc. rapidly transition to renewables from an imposed cost perspective.
You bring up lobbying - definitely the major hurdle. Fortunately, if you go read these guys 10k’s, I think the shift is inevitable, they’re just artificially pumping the brakes to adhere to some kind of amortisation timeline of investments they’ve already made… which unfortunately, is super frustrating.
He meant it would be irresponsible because his compensation package would suffer. (https://apnews.com/article/shell-ceo-pay-energy-prices-record-profits-3f9b9bb08d1cd88a11d0ab550ffdc053)
As a member of the Global Climate Coalition, Shell helped sow doubt about climate change. Now that the globe has seen the highest temperatures in 100,000 years, Shell wants to argue it’s irresponsible to cut oil production now?
It’s because Shell and other fossil fuel companies helped publish research that challenged climate science (and continue to do so) that it’s irresponsible to cut oil production now.
They had their chance to do the right thing. They didn’t.
Fuck them and their operations.
Yes, I’m somewhat aware of the consequences. But if we don’t make hard decisions to kill dangerous companies like fossil fuels now…well…given the damage they case, it may not matter: millions, maybe billions, will still probably die.
Yeah god forbid his net worth go down by a few tenths of a percent.
We need to seriously, as a society, treats this level of greed as a serious, in patient, mental illness that requires treatment.
Friend, you’re absolutely correct. And while I love punctuation as much as the next person, you need to ease up on the commas almost as much as we need to ease up on fossil fuel consumption.
