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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>May 27, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[WSJ]<br>
<b>Oil Giants Are Dealt Major Defeats on Climate-Change as Pressures
Intensify</b><br>
Shell and Exxon lose landmark decisions on the same day,
demonstrating growing threats to fossil-fuel companies from
activists and investors<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-giants-are-dealt-devastating-blows-on-climate-change-as-pressures-intensify-11622065455">https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-giants-are-dealt-devastating-blows-on-climate-change-as-pressures-intensify-11622065455</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[New Yorker]<br>
<b>Big Oil’s Bad, Bad Day</b><br>
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.<br>
By Bill McKibben<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/big-oils-bad-bad-day">https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/big-oils-bad-bad-day</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[I didn't write this headline]<br>
<b>Shareholders Tell Exxon to Eat Shit</b><br>
Molly Taft - 5-26-2021<br>
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!<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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!...<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://earther.gizmodo.com/shareholders-tell-exxon-to-eat-shit-1846975117">https://earther.gizmodo.com/shareholders-tell-exxon-to-eat-shit-1846975117</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>[An important opinion -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/why-bill-gates-and-john-kerry-are-wrong-about-climate-change/">https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/why-bill-gates-and-john-kerry-are-wrong-about-climate-change/</a>]<br>
<b>Why Bill Gates and John Kerry are wrong about climate change</b><br>
By John Carey | May 25, 2021<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
Sorry, climate dudes, but I think you’re dead wrong.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
He should know better.<br>
<br>
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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
<br>
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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
<br>
Wrong.<br>
<br>
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.)<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
<br>
There’s no Gates-ian fairy tale, no Franzen-like acceptance of
disaster, and no awaiting the invention of some Kerry-like miracle
technologies.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/why-bill-gates-and-john-kerry-are-wrong-about-climate-change/">https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/why-bill-gates-and-john-kerry-are-wrong-about-climate-change/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
</p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming May
27, 2008 </b></font><br>
May 27, 2008: The New York Times reports: <br>
<blockquote>"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."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/business/27exxon.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/business/27exxon.html</a> <br>
<br>
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