Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/17/goodbye-big-oil-half-the-w.html
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would somebody please post that cat image saying-- GOOD
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Most of the article is behind a paywall so I’m going to temper my expectations of BP until I hear more. They’ve been positioning themselves as a supporter of “green energy” for decades now, redesigning their logo in 2000 to look like a pretty sun/flower and even adopting the tagline “Beyond Petroleum.” Yet the vast majority of their business is still in fossil fuels.
Is this a real paradigm shift for the company or just more greenwashing?
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Thankfully, it looks like we may avoid it. Now onto the climate crisis, because we’ve failed to prevent climate change.
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I would greet this as good news, as a sign that there may finally be some chance of starting to get a handle on reducing pollution and starting to chip away at global warming, except for two things:
A) Even if we do see a huge rise in vehicles using electricity or hydrogen or biofuels or anything, we have to expect the increase in the industries that work with those things will cause pollution problems of their own. For example, there will probably be an increase in water pollution because there will be a surge in mining to get the minerals needed for making batteries. There will still be big and probably increasing problems in toxic chemicals making their way into our water supplies and into the food chain. If the swing to electric/green energy systems is done in the same unbridled profit-uber-alles manner that allowed oil companies to poison our world and drive us within a hair of burning up, then the only change to our situation will be that we are a little bit cooler as we watch animals go extinct and humans die of other kinds of pollution.
B) I am suspicious of this kind of pronouncement by a big corporation because it has been amply proven, too many times, over too many years, that big corporations are run by Trumpists - sociopathic compulsive liars who don’t care about any lives but their own, who want to get richer no matter how many people get ruined or killed by their greed, and who can be counted upon to tell ANY lie they think will bring them some kind of advantage. And remember, we’re talking about BP, the company that poisoned the entire Gulf of Mexico in order to save a few dollars.
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thank you!
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So the weird thing about off-shore wind is that it is basically a conversion of existing tech and leases for oil platforms. We’re (my company is a engineering consulting firm doing renewables) working with Oersted and one of my friends there said that they transitioned from that field - they hold the leases for the ocean sections needed, they know how to build things on the continental shelf. So saying that the upstream group of BP is going to the green power sector is not totally ridiculous (but it’s mostly ridiculous and queue another discussion about hydrogen in about 5 minutes, because they’re wishing that they could keep their biz largely intact). I’d imagine also there’s a lot of crossover between land acquisition for frakking and distribution level solar.
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Those assets may be stranded but the fossil fools will still demand that we proles pay them for it. Incidentally, I’ve read the recent USA COVID relief funds went to more fossil foolishness than to renewables by a large margin. It is ever thus.
Curse you, BP! You’ve just made Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel Windup Girl obsolete!
(As much as I liked the novel, I could never get fully into it, as his world building needed to ignore renewables in order to work); much of the novel was obsolete when published, but the Big-Ag portions are still spot on.
In other good news:
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If some or all petroleum is abiotic then there never was peak.
They’ve done this several times. In the 1980s, BP was a major investor in solar energy through BP Solar. They sold off the division in 2011.
Don’t believe a word of it until BP hands back exploration licences for new fossil fuels.
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If only we could get the governments in America (states and federal) to raise the taxes on motor fuels and demand higher fuel efficiency, people might stop buying large SUVs and we could slow the problem sooner.
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There had been some decent progress here, including requiring an average fuel economy of 50 MPG across an automaker’s fleet by 2025, and increasing penalties for not meeting fuel economy requirements. All of these have been undone by Trump and many are currently tied up in the courts. The EPA also successfully sued to stop California from being able to set stricter emissions and fuel economy rules.
(The irony is much of this de-regulation is actually opposed by many automakers.)
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Realistically, whatever BP actually intends in presenting this, it wouldn’t have been new information to anyone in the oil and gas industry. They already know.
They also know it won’t really affect profits until after the current executives retire and/or die, so there’s still no incentive to do much about it
I learned today that some in O&G are going through old seismic data, looking for sites not to pull oil up from, but that might prove useful to pump carbon down into for sequestration. New circumstances, new models apply. We shall see, but this kind of news bodes, well, at least not worst-case awful, drain it 'til the last drop is gone (which is what I generally assume their policy is).
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I interpreted this not as a statement about the company itself, but as market projections. Like, an investor call, basically, laying out what they expect for the next…uh… 120 quarters.
But yes, BP are notorious greenwashers. Worst of the bunch, and they’re all bad about it.
Related- Planet Money recently did an incredible story on how all plastic recycling is a lie, and always has been (and the oil and plastic companies knew it). Much like the Crying Indian ads were a trick to make us all blame each other for disposable beverage containers, those little “recycle” symbols with the numbers on the bottom of plastic objects were knowingly a trick to make us think that stuff is all recyclable. They have former lobbyists on record saying it was all knowing lies.
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And if wishes were horses, we’d all have steaks for dinner.
Cutting our dependence on oil is a small problem compared to ending the power of oil capitalism.
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