Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

JKenH

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Simple, and obvious shirley?

The large energy companies put $bn's and $bn's into campaigns claiming that AGW science was wrong.

Had they not done that, or even had the moral honesty to release their own reports (confirming AGW) then we would not have lost 30yrs arguing over the existence of AGW, but instead been acting on it.

Had we been acting sooner, then we could have reached peak annual CO2 emissions, perhaps in the 90's, and now be reducing them massively and heading for zero carbon.

Instead CO2 emissions have risen ever higher, adding ever more to the 'pot', and we now face far harsher climate impacts, higher maximum impacts, and a longer time to 'fix' the problem.

We are now potentially on course for irreversible climate change.

All of this would have been far different had their been one side all accepting the science and truth, rather than two sides, one of which having vast funds to spend on what was simply a campaign of lies.

You can't defend this, you can't excuse this. So try to apologise for the FF industry whilst instead spinning the blame onto myself or other consumers is deplorable.

You said it was in the 80s that Exxon should have published their research. It was in the 80s that the IPCC was formed. Are you saying that the IPCC was so ineffective that we lost 30 years before any action was taken? What were they doing and saying all this time?

I am sure the world was just as sceptical in the 90s about oil funded research as they are now. Governments have chosen the paths that they have taken because they want to get re-elected. Take the the UK as an example; NHS, standards of living, employment are matters of more pressing concern on polling day than AGW. It doesn’t matter what the surveys show; if the public wanted money spending on RE rather than the NHS then the Greens would storm into power.It is easy when you are a fringe party such as the Greens or Liberals, or in opposition to make a big noise about idealist policies but the reality is, once in government pragmatism takes over. There is no money in the budget. That’s why very little gets done to promote RE. That is not the fault of BIg Oil.

You say we are potentially on course for irreversible climate change. If you believe that then why, oh why do you continue to use FF? Although you love to bash Big Oil the reality is you, I, most people here, are hooked on it. We don’t want to give it up. We can make all the excuses in the world to salve our consciences and blame the government, Big Oil, our parents but, the reality is, the choice is ours.

ed110220

Martyn1981 wrote: »

If you believe AGW is debatable then I'll set you the same task as I have before - defend your position.

Provide evidence that AGW is not true and real, and that the FF industries were not lying whilst funding the anti-AGW side? Oh, and don't spin/pretend that we are talking about the 1950's, this is recent history. Exxon may even have acted illegally in their actions (you defend) as it will have impacted shareholders - a crack that litigation hopes to open in the same way Big Tobacco lies were finally broken.

I simply can't think of anything worse that could be posted on here than defending the anti-AGW campaigning of the FF industries.

Actually there is evidence that fossil fuel companies gathered evidence that massive burning of fossil fuels would ultimately cause serious climate problems much earlier than that.

Eg in 1968, Stanford Reseach Institute (SRI) scientists Elmer Robinson and R.C. Robbins produced a Final Report to the American Petroleum Institute (API) on SRI’s research in the sources, abundance, and fate of gaseous pollutants in the atmosphere that warned of the serious effects of raising carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming, ice melting and sea levl rise. See https://www.smokeandfumes.org/documents/document16

What is truly criminal is that they didn't just hide the evidence, they spent millions and millions of dollars through political donations, funding for think tanks and other misinformation to deny the dangers their own research had found. They turned what would otherwise be a fringe crank theory like the other types of science denialism (think of say the idea that HIV isn't the cause of AIDs or that vaccination is bad) into a mainstream political position. Basically they weaponised a position that has essentially no weight in the world of science into a weapon in the "culture wars" so that anyone who is anyone in say the US Republican Party or Farage's outfits adheres to this denialism.

EricMears

pile-o-stone wrote: »

This is good to see, especially for those of us who are hoping to purchase an electric car in the next few years.

DfT doubles on-street EV charging funding pot

https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/dft-doubles-on-street-ev-charging-funding-pot

"The government has doubled funding for the installation of on-street EV charging points. . . . .

Maybe not quite as good as you might have hoped !

It remains to be seen which organisation(s) will be running the schemes and how much they will charge for electricity. We can but hope that it will be provided gratis but it's more likely that users will have to pay and that could be pay a lot.

Latest schemes are charging 35 pence/kWh or even more !

When charging my car at home, I'm paying 8.2ppu which results in a fuel cost of around 2.0 to 2.5 pence per mile. At 35ppu I'd be looking at something around 10ppm which is no better than I get from my diesel engined car and no doubt some modern petrol engined cars might do better than that. Without the incentive of lower running costs, why would anyone switch to an EV ?

ed110220

JKenH wrote: »

You said it was in the 80s that Exxon should have published their research. It was in the 80s that the IPCC was formed. Are you saying that the IPCC was so ineffective that we lost 30 years before any action was taken? What were they doing and saying all this time?

I am sure the world was just as sceptical in the 90s about oil funded research as they are now. Governments have chosen the paths that they have taken because they want to get re-elected. Take the the UK as an example; NHS, standards of living, employment are matters of more pressing concern on polling day than AGW. It doesn’t matter what the surveys show; if the public wanted money spending on RE rather than the NHS then the Greens would storm into power.It is easy when you are a fringe party such as the Greens or Liberals, or in opposition to make a big noise about idealist policies but the reality is, once in government pragmatism takes over. There is no money in the budget. That’s why very little gets done to promote RE. That is not the fault of BIg Oil.

You say we are potentially on course for irreversible climate change. If you believe that then why, oh why do you continue to use FF? Although you love to bash Big Oil the reality is you, I, most people here, are hooked on it. We don’t want to give it up. We can make all the excuses in the world to salve our consciences and blame the government, Big Oil, our parents but, the reality is, the choice is ours.

Your line is logically and morally bankrupt and whitewashes companies and other organisations that have spent million, billions, on persuading the public that nothing should be done because climate change is not happening/not caused by us/won't be harmful/can't be prevented/a Marxist conspiracy etc. Billions poured into political campaigns by denialist politicians.

If we had held to this line in say the early 19th Century government should not have done anything to end slavery as almost everyone in Britain was consuming products made by or associated with slavery. "Stop wearing cotton clothes and walk around naked! Stop eating sugar before asking policy makers to prohibit slavery!"

GreatApe

JKenH wrote: »

You said it was in the 80s that Exxon should have published their research. It was in the 80s that the IPCC was formed. Are you saying that the IPCC was so ineffective that we lost 30 years before any action was taken? What were they doing and saying all this time?

I am sure the world was just as sceptical in the 90s about oil funded research as they are now. Governments have chosen the paths that they have taken because they want to get re-elected. Take the the UK as an example; NHS, standards of living, employment are matters of more pressing concern on polling day than AGW. It doesn’t matter what the surveys show; if the public wanted money spending on RE rather than the NHS then the Greens would storm into power.It is easy when you are a fringe party such as the Greens or Liberals, or in opposition to make a big noise about idealist policies but the reality is, once in government pragmatism takes over. There is no money in the budget. That’s why very little gets done to promote RE. That is not the fault of BIg Oil.

You say we are potentially on course for irreversible climate change. If you believe that then why, oh why do you continue to use FF? Although you love to bash Big Oil the reality is you, I, most people here, are hooked on it. We don’t want to give it up. We can make all the excuses in the world to salve our consciences and blame the government, Big Oil, our parents but, the reality is, the choice is ours.

Plus what does he think the coal lobby in the UK (and elsewhere) would have done?
Thatcher got three day weeks for closing a few pits
Would would have been the result to try and close them all down?

We are so much richer than 50 years ago we can afford to go green (at about 2-3% a year) but back then we were a lot poorer and not only would we have had no action to reduce CO2 we would have had no action to stop it growing.

Back then it would have been a choice of CO2 Vs cold homes (opting not to have central heating installed in the 1970s/80s

Back then it would have been a choice of CO2 or labor saving devises like washing machines fridges Hoover's TVs

The public and the government would have concluded CO2 be dammed

If Marty isn't willing to forgo an oil car in 2019 then why does he believe millions of much poorer people in 1970 would have been willing and able?

pile-o-stone

EricMears wrote: »

Maybe not quite as good as you might have hoped !

It remains to be seen which organisation(s) will be running the schemes and how much they will charge for electricity. We can but hope that it will be provided gratis but it's more likely that users will have to pay and that could be pay a lot.

Latest schemes are charging 35 pence/kWh or even more !

When charging my car at home, I'm paying 8.2ppu which results in a fuel cost of around 2.0 to 2.5 pence per mile. At 35ppu I'd be looking at something around 10ppm which is no better than I get from my diesel engined car and no doubt some modern petrol engined cars might do better than that. Without the incentive of lower running costs, why would anyone switch to an EV ?

Ouch, that's expensive. I did read that most people would be charging at home and that this would hold back the installation of charging points. A lot of Tesla ones were unused because of this very thing, and so with the limited number of charge points being unused it's hard to justify installing more.

I guess the current early adopters will be people who have driveways and garages so they can charge the car. People in terraced houses or apartments will only buy EVs once on-street charging points are available outside their houses (who wants to park their car streets away?)

It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation that maybe only solved with super rapid chargers that fill a battery in minutes, like filling a car with petrol.

GreatApe

EricMears wrote: »

Maybe not quite as good as you might have hoped !

It remains to be seen which organisation(s) will be running the schemes and how much they will charge for electricity. We can but hope that it will be provided gratis but it's more likely that users will have to pay and that could be pay a lot.

Latest schemes are charging 35 pence/kWh or even more !

When charging my car at home, I'm paying 8.2ppu which results in a fuel cost of around 2.0 to 2.5 pence per mile. At 35ppu I'd be looking at something around 10ppm which is no better than I get from my diesel engined car and no doubt some modern petrol engined cars might do better than that. Without the incentive of lower running costs, why would anyone switch to an EV ?

Fuel cost is trivial for new car buyers
A new car buyer might spend £30,000 on a car keep it for 3 years and sell it for £15,000
They spent £15,000 on depreciation and and probably around £3,000 for fuel
The cost of the car and subsequent deprecation is more important not the fuel cost

Software will solve this problem
A software driven taxi doing 500,000 miles over 5 years will care more about fuel cost than a human car doing 50,000 miles in five years. With 10 X the mileage the fuel cost is more important than the capital cost

ed110220

pile-o-stone wrote: »

Ouch, that's expensive. I did read that most people would be charging at home and that this would hold back the installation of charging points. A lot of Tesla ones were unused because of this very thing, and so with the limited number of charge points being unused it's hard to justify installing more.

I guess the current early adopters will be people who have driveways and garages so they can charge the car. People in terraced houses or apartments will only buy EVs once on-street charging points are available outside their houses (who wants to park their car streets away?)

It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation that maybe only solved with super rapid chargers that fill a battery in minutes, like filling a car with petrol.

If you really want the benefits of EVs, I think very rapid chargers are best only used for long distance travel with most charging done while the car is parked up for longer periods, such as at home, work etc. Much like the Tesla supercharger network. Very rapid chargers are always going to tend to be more expensive than slower ones, and trying to replicate a petrol station model would mean a very large number of high speed chargers being necessary and all the queueing etc.

Really we need a lot more workplace and other carpark chargers I think so most charging can be done in 'dead' time.

zeupater

Martyn1981 wrote: »

... The delay in acting can, I believe, be directly linked to the mis-information campaigning by these companies, done, as you state to protect their profits.

We pretty much lost 30yrs where FF emissions grew, when without the mis-information / lies, more action would have been possible, and we could have reduced the emissions that were made during that time, and today have a far more advanced RE industry ...

Hi

There's also a high level of involvement in the RE industry itself ... I remember that at the time that we were first looking into grid connected PV there was a lot of discussion around market manipulation of the global solar sector by oil vested interests, including ownership of ~25% of manufacturing capacity by two European based FF companies, presumably (at the time) to control supply & pricing of a potentially competitive product.

It's only when catalyst based PV support schemes such as FiT started to appear in various countries that the 'affordability' gap really started to be breached & economies of scale started to make an appreciable difference to unit prices.

A couple of our early quotations for PV included BP panels as they were pretty much the go-to manufacturer for installers at the time ... they weren't cheap options either at well over £20k for a 4kWp system ... it didn't take competitors long to realise that they could compete on manufacturing efficiencies and/or margin aspirations and take decisions to grab global market share!

I came across this 2014 report a few years ago which gives an idea of how they acted & invested to protect their market leading position (share of) for a product technology that was still relatively profitable at the time ... Top Ten PV Manufacturers from 2000 to Present: A Pictorial Retrospective ... looks like a non-core-product was simply sacrificed, leaving a number of questions as to why it was thought necessary to be invested in that particular product-line in the first place!

Move on a decade or two and we find argument revolving around FF money being behind the shorting of Tesla stock in an attempt to hinder/delay growth in the EV sector ... whether rooted in conspiracy theory or not, the argument for this being the case is quite compelling!

HTH
Z

JKenH

Obviously things are looking bad for Big Oil in the courts and one might reasonably expect from the evidence presented here that the actions will succeed.

My question is what happens next?

If Big Oil are found guilty they will no doubt have to pay damages, even punitive damages which will affect their profits which will knock their dividends and share prices. This in turn will impact heavily on UK pension funds. Those of us lucky enough to be in final salary schemes should be ok (in a worst case the PPF kicks in) but anyone in defined contribution schemes ( most people under 40) will take a hit. That will only be the start of it however. It could tip the world into recession so anyone working might find their jobs at risk.

It could though have a longer term impact on the oil industry that might challenge the viability of some companies.

Having taken this action and demonstrated that oil has wrecked the climate can the US allow the oil industry to continue? Probably not as it exists at the moment.Europe would be morally obliged to follow in any action to restrict the activities of oil companies.

This could all be a huge shock for the western world and significantly alter the balance of power. Gazprom will be allowed to continue as they did before and Russia will extend its influence in the Middle East. Similarly China will extend its sphere of influence against a much weaker US.

Interesting times ahead.