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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

#241

Post by matthewdgreen »

corethree wrote: post #186
wredue wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a weird way to put it. Driving a gas car doesn’t make you pro-big oil. Most of us are beholden to market pressures and have no realistic option. Everyone still has to make their living, and they have to do it inside the elites construction of the market.

The elites didn't construct the market. You're just looking for someone to blame. The market came as an emergent property. The elites are at fault as much as you and I are at fault. The story of oil is a human crisis caused by humanity itself. We like to blame specific groups but that's just not reality.

If this was true, then the for-profit fossil fuel industry wouldn't spend so much money on PR and political lobbying. They'd return that money to their shareholders instead.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#242

Post by agloe_dreams »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #179
agloe_dreams wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they don't really seem to get AI. To say this is to not know how Apple operates. They have been shipping local AI in phones for a decade now. Every phone has one of the best neural processors out there. Apple is better prepared than anyone. And that's before considering their remarkable restraint to not release something until they are happy with it. They are 100% working on LLMs and I'm sure they will do it th…

Best neural processor in the world but how is it even being used? Not by Siri thats for sure.

Search for 'car' in your iOS photos library, or any specific word. tap on an animal and let it tell you what breed it is. The recognition is amazing.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#243

Post by matthewdgreen »

webworker wrote: post #152
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…

You can’t seriously believe that we’re in that grave of danger

Take a look at atmospheric methane levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#244

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

jonahrd wrote: post #184
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything who owns? The corporation? What you think is a harsh fine, even "everything they own" is nothing more than the cost of doing business. Even if you seize a few tens of billions of dollars, what's that compared to the trillions they've earned and paid out as dividends over the last century? > For some reason police can do it to the poor, Which is an interesting discussion if you wanted to have it, but is not…

I don't fully agree with parent poster, but the questions in your comments begged for some legitimate answers: > What do you expect them to do with office buildings filled with conference rooms and thousand dollar conference room chairs? Turn them into public housing, public spaces, publicly funded cafeterias, etc. > Not to mention now you've put a 100,000 people out of work, probably more. I guess making them starve…

> Now with the excess

Like, with just the corporate headquarters of Shell, you've somehow created an excess in housing?

> maybe it wont be as necessary for people to hang on to fulltime work.

... To the point that they won't have to work for a living?!

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#245

Post by bitcharmer »

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #235
throwaway894345 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to ditch your car (an absurd proposition for most people), you could just get an EV.

Do you realize how they get batteries for an EV? And where the electricity comes from? And what every part of the EV are made out of?

Please enlighten us as to where the electricity comes from

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#246

Post by busterarm »

UncleMeat wrote: post #219
jackmott42 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no regulation proposed, or method proposed, to substantively reduce how much co2 is emitted when you burn fossil fuels for power. That is why this problem is so hard. You can't put a filter in place like you can for heavy metals or particulates. There is no solution other than switching to nuclear/solar/wind/etc

And those solutions can be enforced by regulation. But when you get regulation like generation shifting, corporations and the political right wing collude to say that the regulations are unconstitutional.

This assumes that governments will trend towards more stability and the ability to enforce this regulation. The latter depends on alternative energy costs trending downward and competing for viability on a larger scale.

None of these things are necessarily true. In fact from the government stability perspective we've been in an unparalleled period of peace and stability that looks incredibly shaky into the near future.

Any climate commitments go completely out the window when conflict breaks out between nations.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#247

Post by IKantRead »

robnado wrote: post #213
IKantRead wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you see what climate change does with continued carbon emissions! But this has always been the problem with stopping climate change. We are choosing between lesser, but certain immediate pain vs larger but less certain future pain. In the 1880s we could have easily stopped climate changed, but been forced to slow growth. The pain would have been minimal for those living, but the probability of extreme cata…

Without modern fertilizers which heavily rely on fossil fuels to produce, roughly half of the world population cannot be fed. Further, agriculture becomes much more labor intensive and we pretty much revert to the past where the majority of the population on earth were farmers. If you don't know how to farm effectively using past methods, you probably also get added to the "cannot be fed" list. That is a substantial…

> I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.

Oh, much worse.

First off we, fertilizer or no, we're already facing crop failures in the US [0] and will continue to face even more extreme crop failures [1]. Even if we had unlimited fertilizer we've already signed up for massive famine.

But if you really want to talk about the unmitigated climate change path, which is what happens if we choose not to keep hydrocarbons in the ground, I really recommend reading Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky [2].

He's a respected geologist that makes a compelling case that the vast majority of mass extinction events were caused by rapid rises in CO2.

One of the realistic scenarios we're facing, he argues, is the break down of the AMOC ultimately leading to the oceans becoming anoxic and releasing hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen. The entire marine ecosystem is essentially wiped out except for some cyanobacteria. The oceans are the foundation of all of our food systems. It would make the planet uninhabitable my most complex life of today. This has happened before in Earth's climate history.

All of the "bad-awful" but not-extinction event scenarios assume that we do not burn all of the fossil fuel reserves currently leased. We are already looking at a grim future, but given that we're rapidly pumping millions of years of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, upper bounds for the damage we can do are tremendous.

0. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/us/kansas-wheat-harvest-d... 1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/4/scientists-warn-of-c... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Under-Green-Sky-Warming-Extinctions/d...

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#248

Post by Huppie »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #173
Aachen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who drives a heavy vehicle alone is using immense amounts of power (hundreds of horses' at once, by approximation), it takes some infrastructure but with wind, sun, and water we can power that. What makes you say that your livelihood depends on an amount of energy so large that it's really bad? Why couldn't that be generated sustainably? Why not talk to your employer about a step in that direction, given that…

> Why couldn't that be generated sustainably? It very likely could, and I'd happily pay for it. Like, my Mac Studio with an M2 Max in it probably took, all said, and absurd about of resources to create... But it only cost me $3k or something. Well, if it works as long as it should, it'll easily help me earn over half a million dollars. I'd rather pay far more for the computer and cover the expenses of the externaliti…

I can look up the study if you want but a little under ten years ago the Dutch government had a full well-to-wheel analysis done to figure out the advantages (as far as pollution goes) and it includes the break even point for their chosen EV (a classic Nissan Leaf.)

IIRC the break even point when powered by renewable energy was about 60k kilometers.

Depending on where you live and your driving habits that could be seen as a lot, but considering that after those ~40k miles every mile can be considered 'clean' I don't think it's all that bad.

Edit:

Source in Dutch: http://publications.tno.nl/publication/34616575/gS20vf/TNO-2...

TL;DR: Assuming a car lifespan of 220k km (136k miles) and including emissions for fabrication, repairs, etc. emissions will be 70% lower for an electric vehicle powered by renewables. When powered by non-renewable energy it's still 30% less total emissions than a regular petrol car. Other than that you also emit less of various other pollutants. And (personal opinion alert) it's just a way nicer drive ;-)

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#249

Post by bubbleRefuge »

crote wrote: post #187
bubbleRefuge wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why can't we do nuclear with plugin hybrids in urban areas. the federal government , which, as an issuer of money, can afford anything, unlike states/municipalities, should massively fund nuclear to save the environment meet energy demands. seems like such a no-brainer.

> why can't we do nuclear Because the free market is not willing to bear the risks - even when you ignore the whole "nuclear waste" and "meltdown" part. The construction costs are extremely high and basically guaranteed to wildly exceed initial estimates, while electricity price is highly volatile. The only way companies are interested in building reactors is by having a guaranteed government subsidy. For example, Si…

Governments like the US federal gov, who are currency issues can afford anything . Where did the 7 trillion dollar covid spending come from ? What we cannot afford is to do nothing and maintain the status quo. Federally funded nuclear with plug in electric is the path to prosperity.

Re: Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissions

#250

Post by marcosdumay »

trashtester wrote: post #115
lukeschlather wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity is probably going to be an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper in 20 years, at least for bulk purchase in most fixed locations (not Antarctic winter.) The assumption that oil extraction is worthwhile is based on it being the cheapest way to get a unit of power. But if power is 1/10th what it costs now it is economical to do some process that has absurdly bad efficiency (10:1, even 100:1) to translate pow…

I don't see any way electricity could fall anywhere near that much in 20 years. For that to happen, we either need a revolutionary decrease in the price of nuclear power, a radical improvement in the price of dependable renewable energy (probably involving a lot of batteries) or some hard AI takeoff that makes EVERYTHING cheaper. Keep in mind that most countries are trying to electrify most parts of the economy, so w…

It's actually very likely.

As long as you only consume it while the Sun is shinning, at the place of generation. This set of restrictions is allowing enough for a surprisingly large set of industrial applications (anything where energy costs are larger than capital ones).

In fact, we are not far from that. Solar is already a few times cheaper than the grid energy on those conditions.

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