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Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

bloomberg.com

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Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#121

Post by bannedbybros »

civilized wrote: post #78
sobkas wrote: post #67

Then there should be consequences for destroying environment and making earth inhabitable for humans. Oil industry knew that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming. Plastic industry knew that recycling is a total sham, and most of it will at best end up on a landfill at worts everywhere including our food. They knew but then they lied to us to make more profits. Maybe we should take that ill gotten profits…

I think developed nations collectively bought into fossil fuel-driven civilization, so it seems like scapegoating to lay all the blame at the feet of the producers. But like you say, it is appropriate to blame the producers for hiding what they knew about the greenhouse effect and well-funded lobbying and propaganda campaigns to deny and minimize it.

[dead]

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#122

Post by rlili »

Aachen wrote: post #97
cagenut wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Insert "buying from" before the last word This is entirely within people's own hands. Not all of those people are you and me, it also includes our boss who decides to buy combustion vehicles for employees still (what year is it?), but in the end it's individual humans that decide for themselves whether to continue paying for oil products when there are alternatives available such as with personal vehicles. Maybe a ma…

Naive. As long as they can deliver competitive prices, most people with poor buying power will have no choice but to buy from them, or buy some product derived from their products.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#123

Post by otachack »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #38
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #30

I try to remain positive, but climate change is the one area where I have pretty much lost hope. People (and I include myself) are simply unwilling to accept that their lives have to change. Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.

The main thing I struggle to downsize or make sustainable is my work. As a programmer, I depend on an immense infrastructure of earth-harming systems to get my equipment (both in my possession or leased in the cloud). My employers use a lot of energy. In the scheme of things we aren’t the worst polluters, but it’s undeniably bad. I’ve dramatically reduced my personal energy usage, I don’t eat animal products, my fami…

I've hit a similar wall and one answer to hurdle over is to organize with more people to push for bigger, community wide changes. This can include making your roads safer for biking, getting your local governments to penalize local polluters, etc. Getting the right politicians to vote in your collective ideals helps, too.

It all takes work so you have to brace yourself to sacrifice your free time and balance everything. It's not easy, but there are countless people already trying to do it.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#124

Post by Capricorn2481 »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #102
tw04 wrote: post #7

It makes a ton of sense if your focus is only short-term profit. It makes absolutely 0 sense if your goal is to try to decrease the legal liability of knowingly causing global warming and actively suppressing those internal studies to increase profits. Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years and the previous CEO was preparing their defense of "don't punish us for the s…

I guess I don't see what other option we have other than drill baby drill. Yes we're killing our planet but renewable aren't able to provide the energy we need at scale. Switching to 100% renewables and not drilling means increased oil prices and ultimately less consumption across the board. Less food, less driving, less heat, less AC. We'd all have to give up a lot and no one is signing up for that. There's this mag…

The option is not 100% renewable or 100% fossil fuels. It's not a ridiculous goal that we can just reduce emissions

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#125

Post by notjoemama »

coding123 wrote: post #100
UncleMeat wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that the people demanded the lifestyle provided by fossil fuel emissions. But corporations didn't just say "oh if you insist." When new policies and regulations are attempted that will not affect the lifestyle of the people but will eat into corporate profits, they fight tooth and nail. An honest corporation that was just acting to serve the needs of the people wouldn't do something like fight to reduce th…

I think we've KNOWN what this shit does to the air and water for at least, what 40 years? At what point do we blame ourselves to increasing fossil fuel usage, even in the what, past 5 years?

All boats float:

Let’s partner with oil companies to collectively solve carbon capture at planet scale? They get to keep functioning, citizens & government helps with subsidization and research programs. Put a time limit on progress and penalize the oil companies by making fines exponentially rise by time if possible and unmet. A select subcommittee can oversee the process and politicians can coordinate partnerships with other countries.

You need BOTH the carrot AND the stick to get behaviors to change.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#126

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

trashtester wrote: post #98
civilized wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think developed nations collectively bought into fossil fuel-driven civilization, so it seems like scapegoating to lay all the blame at the feet of the producers. But like you say, it is appropriate to blame the producers for hiding what they knew about the greenhouse effect and well-funded lobbying and propaganda campaigns to deny and minimize it.

If the world stopped consuming fossil fuels today, overpopulation would no longer be an issue in about a year or two. Because 90% of the population would die.

That seems to be an excuse that's been in use for decades. Meanwhile, we're just dragging our feet about stopping oil use and kicking the can down the road for the next generation to deal with.

Ultimately, it's a very poor excuse to state that because we can't stop immediately, that we might as well continue digging as much oil as possible out of the ground for burning.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#127

Post by fluoridation »

Aachen wrote: post #90
fluoridation wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you expecting Shell to increase the efficiency of every existing internal combustion engine?

It's what I wondered at the headline as well. Sounded ambitious, but with how much profit they make it's not immediately obvious whether it's infeasible, especially if you can convince a government to then be exempt from a part of the fuel taxes because you don't have to pay for the pollution aspect

It sounds not just infeasible, but comically infeasible. For the sake of argument, let's assume that it's easy to improve ICEs in general by 5%. You still have to apply that upgrade to all the existing engine designs, ideally as drop-in replacements, and then swap all those engines in the wild.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#128

Post by svachalek »

Aachen wrote: post #97
cagenut wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Insert "buying from" before the last word This is entirely within people's own hands. Not all of those people are you and me, it also includes our boss who decides to buy combustion vehicles for employees still (what year is it?), but in the end it's individual humans that decide for themselves whether to continue paying for oil products when there are alternatives available such as with personal vehicles. Maybe a ma…

If you leave it to that, most people don't care. They'll take whatever's cheapest, and what damage it does to the environment or other people is not a consideration. All of that stuff is happening far away, over long periods of time, but the nickel saved is right here and right now. If you want to leave it up to all 8 billion people in the world to take individual responsibility to end climate change, extinction, slavery, etc. then the approximate change accomplished is something approaching zero.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#129

Post by jacquesm »

sobkas wrote: post #67

Then there should be consequences for destroying environment and making earth inhabitable for humans. Oil industry knew that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming. Plastic industry knew that recycling is a total sham, and most of it will at best end up on a landfill at worts everywhere including our food. They knew but then they lied to us to make more profits. Maybe we should take that ill gotten profits…

What amazes me is that you just can't opt out, short of jumping off a cliff. Everything you do involves the destruction of non-renewable resources. If you look at what you produce in terms of garbage and other waste every month it is completely insane. Everything is packaged in plastic, high grade cardboard, glass etc. The amount of energy and materials required is ridiculous. And yet, not a month goes by or something that used to be packaged in paper suddenly is only available in plastic, something that was available in re-usable glass is only available in plastic and so on. The hold-outs seem to be beer bottles but I don't drink beer...

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#130

Post by danans »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #30

I try to remain positive, but climate change is the one area where I have pretty much lost hope. People (and I include myself) are simply unwilling to accept that their lives have to change. Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.

> People (and I include myself) are simply unwilling to accept that their lives have to change

The real tragedy is that a fair amount of this change would make people's lives better.

For example, more walkable human scale communities, less combustion in vehicles and homes, more comfortable, healthier, and cheaper to operate homes, reduced air pollution for communities in the vicinity of power plants and industrial facilities.

But on the other hand, yes smaller houses and cars, less meat, etc are hard to adjust to.

> Barring some of unforeseen technical miracle the next 20-30 years are going to get increasingly grim.

Disagree on that. The technologies we need are all pretty ready or close. It's about bending cost curves and the rate of deployment.

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