[✔️] May 27, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*May 27, 2021*/

[WSJ]
*Oil Giants Are Dealt Major Defeats on Climate-Change as Pressures 
Intensify*
Shell and Exxon lose landmark decisions on the same day, demonstrating 
growing threats to fossil-fuel companies from activists and investors
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-giants-are-dealt-devastating-blows-on-climate-change-as-pressures-intensify-11622065455

- -

[New Yorker]
*Big Oil’s Bad, Bad Day*
Crushing blows to three of the world’s largest oil companies have made 
it clear that the arguments many have been making for decades have sunk 
in at the highest levels.
By Bill McKibben
In what may be the most cataclysmic day so far for the traditional 
fossil-fuel industry, a remarkable set of shareholder votes and court 
rulings have scrambled the future of three of the world’s largest oil 
companies. On Wednesday, a court in the Netherlands ordered Royal Dutch 
Shell to dramatically cut its emissions over the next decade—a mandate 
it can likely only meet by dramatically changing its business model. A 
few hours later, sixty-one per cent of shareholders at Chevron voted, 
over management objections, to demand that the company cut so-called 
Scope 3 emissions, which include emissions caused by its customers 
burning its products. Oil companies are willing to address the emissions 
that come from their operations, but, as Reuters pointed out, the 
support for the cuts “shows growing investor frustration with companies, 
which they believe are not doing enough to tackle climate change.” The 
most powerful proof of such frustration came shortly afterward, as 
ExxonMobil officials announced that shareholders had (over the company’s 
strenuous opposition) elected two dissident candidates to the company’s 
board, both of whom pledge to push for climate action...
- -
Instead, it’s clear that the arguments that many have been making for a 
decade have sunk in at the highest levels: there is no actual way to 
evade the inexorable mathematics of climate change. If you want to keep 
the temperature low enough that civilization will survive, you have to 
keep coal and oil and gas in the ground. That sounded radical a decade 
ago. Now it sounds like the law.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/big-oils-bad-bad-day

- -

[I didn't write this headline]
*Shareholders Tell Exxon to Eat Shit*
Molly Taft - 5-26-2021
History was made at ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday 
when investors essentially staged a coup, voting to oust at least two 
members of the board due to the company’s poor performance on climate 
change. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!

Those members will be replaced by climate activists backed by investor 
Engine 1, which was calling for four new independent candidates with 
more robust climate change and sustainability bona fides to sit on 
Exxon’s 12-member board. Engine 1 is a relatively small fund, but 
surprisingly—or perhaps not so surprisingly, given how investors seem to 
be waking up to the fact that oil companies are driving our planet over 
a menacing-looking cliff—the bigger boys in the room decided to play 
along. Financial giant BlackRock, which has a substantial share in Exxon 
and incentives to look good on climate change, said yesterday that it 
had decided to back three of the four Engine 1 board candidates, while a 
leading advisory firm for financial services also recommended voting for 
Engine 1’s nominees earlier this week.

Exxon was so panicked by seeing the writing on the wall that they paused 
voting Wednesday in what many critics say was an attempt to stall the 
inevitable. The company was still counting votes as of press time, but 
at least two of the four candidates had been voted in. Too bad, guys!...
- -
Trusting capitalism to solve our climate crisis is, of course, a 
fruitless exercise. But I’ll take any sign of hope that corporate 
America may be waking up to reality–and hitting oil companies where 
they’re going to hurt most.

“This is not the end, this is the beginning,” said Behar. “Every board 
of directors is on notice now. If they don’t do their job of proper 
oversight, they will be replaced.”
https://earther.gizmodo.com/shareholders-tell-exxon-to-eat-shit-1846975117



[An important opinion - 
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/why-bill-gates-and-john-kerry-are-wrong-about-climate-change/]
*Why Bill Gates and John Kerry are wrong about climate change*
By John Carey | May 25, 2021
There’s a recent phenomenon in which smart people, mostly white men, 
parachute down from a higher plane to tell us mere mortals the truth 
about fighting climate change. Colorfully dubbed “first-time climate 
dudes” by journalist Emily Atkin of the newsletter Heated, they 
invariably offer some version of doom and gloom, whether it’s Bill Gates 
calling any attempt to rapidly reduce greenhouse emissions to near zero 
“a fairy tale”, or novelist Jonathan Franzen proclaiming in the New 
Yorker that we must “accept that disaster is coming.”

Sorry, climate dudes, but I think you’re dead wrong.

Wrong too is John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, when he 
says that half of future emissions cuts will have to come from 
technologies not invented yet.

He should know better.

In fact, we already have the basic technologies we need to slay the 
monster of climate change. Moreover, these technologies are not just 
affordable now, but they continue to get cheaper (and better) at a 
stunning pace, and new ideas are constantly emerging. In fact, humanity 
may look back after 20 or 50 years and wonder why we ever thought it was 
so hard or so expensive to move beyond the era of fossil fuels.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. I can do alarmism as well as anyone—at 
least about the science. I wrote a story nine years ago about the 
growing worries and evidence that climate change could be happening 
faster than the consensus predictions at the time, as positive feedbacks 
like melting permafrost and declining sea ice coverage kicked in. Since 
then, it has become clear that the fears were more than justified. 
Without immediate and dramatic emissions reductions, we face an 
inevitable future of potentially catastrophic extreme weather—what an 
article in the journal Nature calls a “rapid and unstoppable” sea level 
rise, and many other devastating impacts. And if we delay too long, all 
those feedbacks could eventually push the planet towards a “hothouse 
Earth” scenario (as a scientific paper that went viral put it) like that 
of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, when the 
Arctic was a subtropical paradise and the tropics may have been too hot 
for most life to exist.

But if both the threat and the need for urgent action are huge, the 
solutions are already at hand. While I’m not a professional scientist, I 
have covered climate change for BusinessWeek, Newsweek, and other 
publications for more than three decades and, in the last few years, 
have been fortunate to work as writer or editor on a number of reports 
on the topic, such as Risky Business’s From Risk to Return and both the 
Global Energy Transformation: A Roadmap to 2050 and Electrification with 
Renewables from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). These 
and a slew of other studies, like these 56 compiled by Stanford 
University, show a clearly achievable and affordable three-step path to 
making the dramatic emissions cuts needed to prevent climate catastrophe.

The first step: electrify everything possible. That means roads crawling 
with Teslas, Chevy Bolts (like mine), and their progeny; heat pumps and 
induction stoves in homes; electric furnaces in industry; and even 
electric ships and airplanes. Since using electricity is so much more 
efficient than burning fossil fuels, extensive electrification actually 
cuts total energy demand and energy costs—even at today’s prices for 
renewable energy. (And let’s not forget that the powertrain in an 
electric vehicle is light years more efficient than the one in the 
internal combustion engine of a gasoline-powered car; as little as 12 
percent of the energy in the fuel is actually used to make a gasoline 
car move, while electric cars are 77 percent efficient or more—and 
electric powertrains have as few as 20 moving parts, while conventional 
power trains have 2,000.) And since most electrical devices can be 
quickly ramped up or down to match the electricity supply, and some, 
like plugged-in electric vehicles, can even pump electrons back into the 
grid, widespread electrification touches off a virtuous cycle. By making 
it easier to incorporate the variable output from wind turbines and 
solar arrays, it smooths the implementation of the second key 
step—generating all the electricity we need from renewables. The third 
step then is a serious expansion of energy efficiency measures like home 
weatherization to reduce overall energy consumption even further.

So why aren’t we racing down this path to a cleaner, safer future? In 
his recent book, The New Climate War, top climate scientist Michael Mann 
persuasively blames the powerful campaigns of denial, deception, 
distraction, and delay mounted by the fossil fuel industries and their 
supporters. But as he also hints, there is a more fundamental barrier 
that is rooted deep in human nature, which also helps explain the 
pernicious “doomism” of the “first-time climate dudes.” Basically, 
humans have always been lousy at foreseeing or even understanding the 
potential pace of technological and social change—or all of the new 
possibilities that can emerge from those advances.

Remember how IBM chairman Thomas Watson famously said in 1943 that there 
might be a total world market “for maybe five computers?” Or how Lord 
Kelvin predicted nearly half a century earlier that “radio has no 
future?” Or how no one dreamed that we’d all now be carrying the power 
of a 1990s supercomputer in our pockets, enabling us to buy virtually 
anything online, share cat videos, or binge-watch The Crown on Netflix?

Failing to anticipate and take into account future innovation is a story 
that repeats itself over and over again, especially in areas like 
environmental and health regulation. For a story in BusinessWeek, I once 
dug up the actual costs of meeting new regulations that had been 
implemented years previously, such as limits on sulfur dioxide emissions 
imposed on power plants to curb acid rain. In every case, the final 
costs were far lower, and the reductions and benefits much greater, than 
even the most optimistic projections from the experts. The reason:  Once 
rules or other types of incentives are in place, smart people will 
figure out clever new ways to get the job done.

That’s why Bill Gates is so wrong when he claims we need a technology 
“miracle” to successfully fight climate change. In fact, humanity has 
always been able to depend on something even more powerful than any 
single groundbreaking advance; we have a better magic in the form of 
innovation at all scales, from big breakthroughs to countless 
incremental improvements in materials, designs, manufacturing processes, 
and installation practices.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that renewable technologies have declined 
in costs and been deployed faster that even the most optimistic 
projections. A 2012 US Energy Department publication reported that solar 
photovoltaic module prices had plunged from $4.90 per watt in 1998 to 
$1.28 per watt in 2011, dryly noting that “most analysts in recent 
history have underestimated the rapid reductions in module prices.” 
Indeed, the 2012 report itself was no exception to that persistent 
underestimation. It hoped that the Energy Department could spur a 
further 75 percent reduction by 2020. The actual drop? More than 85 
percent, to under $0.2 per watt.

Similarly, just five years ago, Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicted 
that lithium-ion battery prices would drop to just under $200 per 
kilowatt-hour by 2020. That would represent a stunning decline from 
$1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010, but the estimate was not nearly 
ambitious enough. The actual lowest price in 2020 was $100 per 
kilowatt-hour.

And back in 2010, the International Energy Agency predicted that the 
world’s total capacity for solar PV (the “PV” stands for 
photovoltaics—the technology that converts incoming photons of sunlight 
to electricity) would hit 410 gigawatts by 2035.

Wrong.

By 2020, the number had already climbed past 707 gigawatts, IRENA 
reports. (To give a sense of scale with all these numbers, Hoover Dam 
generates 2 gigawatts.)

Because of these rapid advances, “new solar photovoltaic (PV) and 
onshore wind power cost less than keeping many existing coal plants in 
operation,” IRENA reports. Renewable capacity additions in 2020 hit an 
all-time record, up nearly 50 percent from 2019. And country after 
country is reporting record shares of renewable power on their 
electricity grids, such as the United Kingdom’s wind farms providing 
48.5 percent of the nation’s entire electricity supply on a windy May 3, 
2021, or Denmark generating more than 50 percent of its electricity from 
wind and solar for the entire year of 2020.

Now, every day brings new reports of potential advances. There are solar 
cells made with perovskite or stacked in 3D structures that may offer 
lower costs or higher efficiencies, and solar arrays built on hydropower 
reservoirs, thus making both types of generation more effective by 
cooling the panels and slowing evaporation from the reservoirs. Wind 
turbines continue to break records in size and output, such as an 
855-foot-tall 15 megawatt behemoth from Vestas, and the pace of offshore 
wind development is accelerating rapidly to take advantage of a 
renewable resource so vast that it could supply 90 percent of the United 
States’ total electricity needs in 2050.

Nor are wind and solar the only renewable games in town. The horizontal 
drilling technology pioneered in fracking for gas and oil is now making 
it possible to create closed-loop geothermal energy systems that offer 
continuous low-cost baseload electricity—and a flexible source of power 
that can be readily “dispatched” (as the jargon goes) wherever it is 
needed to balance the second-by-second fluctuations in wind and solar 
generation. And powerful tides are fueling electric cars in Scotland and 
will be delivering megawatts to the Nova Scotia grid from the Bay of Fundy

Meanwhile, the storage and use of electricity are being constantly 
improved. Consider lithium ion batteries laced with graphene to boost 
their energy density and extend lifetimes, solid state batteries that 
promise 50 percent greater energy density and more rapid charging, or 
demonstration projects that store renewable energy in hot stones. There 
also are innovative lighter and more powerful electric motors, like the 
inside-out design from Belgium start-up Magnax. (Typical motors have a 
stationary part—the stator—inside which there is a part that turns—the 
rotor. Magnax flips that around, with the rotor outside of the stator.) 
There are also standardized commercial geothermal heat pump systems that 
deliver heat and air conditioning at far higher efficiencies than 
competitors can. Even seemingly simple advances, like an 
ultra-reflective white paint, can cool buildings and bring major 
efficiency gains.

The key point here is not to single out any of these specific 
technologies or approaches as being magic bullets, but rather to 
highlight the fierce competition now underway that is already driving 
relentless, continual improvements and cost reductions in renewable 
energy technologies—and also potentially leading us down promising new 
avenues as yet unforeseen. We’ve already witnessed this competition in 
action in the demise of solar thermal systems (which used mirrors to 
reflect and concentrate the sun’s heat to heat up water), done in by 
ever-cheaper solar photovoltaic panels, and in the recent stumbles of 
would-be hydrogen-truck manufacturers, as improvements in lithium-ion 
batteries make electric trucks the better option.

And given the current pace of innovation, it’s possible to imagine a 
future far different from the despair and pessimism of the climate 
doomists. There’s no reason why we can’t be headed towards what solar 
energy pioneer Martin Green calls “a future of insanely cheap energy.”

So cheap, in fact, that some experts are already suggesting that one 
cost-effective way to create a reliable electricity grid with variable 
generation from wind and solar is simply to build massive overcapacity. 
The extra capacity, in turn, would then open up new possibilities, such 
as making enough “green” hydrogen or other renewable fuels and 
feedstocks (when electricity demand is lower than capacity) to eliminate 
greenhouse gas emissions from other activities that are hard to 
electrify, from steelmaking to ocean shipping. IRENA’s reports also 
document the potential for countries like Morocco or Chile to use their 
enormous solar resources to become profitable exporters of those 
renewable fuels.

Of course, none of this is easy. Nurturing the full flowering of these 
innovations and speeding their deployment will require immense political 
will, big investments, and a whole passel of supportive policies. But we 
should have the imagination and faith to understand know that climate 
change is one problem that we can solve.

There’s no Gates-ian fairy tale, no Franzen-like acceptance of disaster, 
and no awaiting the invention of some Kerry-like miracle technologies.

As physicist Ray Pierrehumbert once wrote in these pages about renewable 
technology, “It is time to stop quivering in our boots in pointless fear 
of the future and just roll up our sleeves and build it.”
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/why-bill-gates-and-john-kerry-are-wrong-about-climate-change/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  May 27, 2008 *
May 27, 2008: The New York Times reports:

    "The Rockefeller family built one of the great American fortunes by
    supplying the nation with oil. Now history has come full circle:
    some family members say it is time to start moving beyond the oil age."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/business/27exxon.html

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