Were you perhaps concerned that all this talk about 1.5°C being exceeded and climate change going out of control might cause Big Oil to cut back and stop drilling?
No worries! They'll never stop!! 😃
As Big Oil returns this week to the industry's annual showcase in Houston, deepwater discoveries off Guyana, Namibia, and the U.S. Gulf Coast will take the spotlight.
Offshore exploration had dimmed after the U.S. shale boom ushered in new and cheaper-to-tap supplies of oil, and as past offshore cost overruns pushed deepwater projects onto the industry's backburner.
But capital spending on all-new deepwater drilling is poised to hit a 12-year high next year, predicts Rystad Energy. Investment in all-new and existing deepwater fields could hit $130.7 billion in 2027, a 30% jump over 2023, it said.
Enthusiasm for offshore has climbed with discoveries and technology breakthroughs. Namibia's Mopane is forecast to hold as much as 10 billion barrels of oil, Portuguese oil company Galp Energia said last month.
Chevron and TotalEnergies have made a breakthrough in ultra-high pressure environments with their Anchor project in the Gulf of Mexico, the world's first to operate at once-unfathomable 20,000 pounds per square inch pressures. The Anchor platform is preparing to start production off the Louisiana coast, and at its peak will produce up to 75,000 barrels per day of crude and operate for 30 years.
Last month was by far the warmest April that humans have ever experienced — our 11th consecutive record-breaking month. April 2024 was 1.58°C above the pre-industrial baseline.
🚨 We are in a climate emergency. 🚨
And yet, all we get from our “leaders” is more Business As Usual.
Is everyone excited? It's time for another week of BUSINESS AS USUAL, sponsored this time by Saudi Aramco, Ford Motor Company, and the US military-industrial complex.
For the last two years, activists and anti-plastic campaigners have pinned their hopes on an effort made by the United Nations to negotiate an effective international treaty aimed at reducing the tremendous global amounts of plastic production, use, and quick disposal.
It's not over yet, but the outcome of that process is not looking good...
Campaigners are blaming developed countries for capitulating at the last minute to pressure from fossil fuel and industry lobbyists, and slowing progress towards the first global treaty to cut plastic waste.
Delegates concluded talks in Ottawa, Canada this week with no agreement on a proposal for global reductions in the $712 billion plastic production industry by 2040 to address twin issues of plastic waste and huge carbon emissions.
Two years on from a historic agreement in Nairobi to forge a global treaty to cut plastic waste, delegates said countries were just wasting time. A proposal from Peru and Rwanda to address for the first time the scale of plastic production in order cut waste was supported by 29 countries including Australia, Denmark, Nigeria, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Nigeria, who signed a declaration calling on all delegates to ensure plastic production was addressed.
The US and UK did not support the proposal to cut plastic production.
David Azoulay of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) said while a handful of countries had taken a stand to keep ambitious proposals alive, most countries accepted a compromise at the last minute that played into the hands of petrostates and industry influences.
“From the beginning of negotiations, we have known that we need to cut plastic production to adopt a treaty that lives up to the promise envisioned two years ago,” he said. “But when the time came to go beyond issuing empty declarations and support an effective program, we saw the same developed member states who claim to be leading towards a world free from plastic pollution, abandon all pretence as soon as the biggest polluters look sideways at them.”
The US was singled out for criticism for blocking talks on cutting plastic production.
“The United States needs to stop pretending to be a leader and own the failure it has created here,” said Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL. “When the world’s biggest exporter of oil and gas, and one of the biggest architects of the plastic expansion, says that it will ignore plastic production at the expense of the health, rights, and lives of its own people, the world listens.”
He said that despite signalling at the G7 summit this month that it would commit to reduce plastic production, the US failed in Ottawa to follow through on its promises.
More oil and more gas. More plastic. More waste. More pollution. All we ever get is more Business As Usual. That's what the United States of America stands for.
Scientists have been absolutely clear that we MUST make immediate and drastic changes if we are to avoid catastrophic eco-system collapse. But, as Greta Thunberg has said, all we ever get from politicians and industry leaders is more useless blah blah blah…
We’ve all done the purple circle. It’s wrong, but it’s forgivable.
For the past 10 years, corporations and governments and major media have been doing the green circle. That’s wrong, it’s murderous, and it’s unforgivable.
NOTE: The last 12 months have averaged 1.58ºC above pre-industrial temperatures.
"When we say that our leaders have not been taking any climate action during the last thirty years, we could not be more wrong. In fact, they have been very busy. But not in the way that you might think — or hope.
"They have spent this time actively delaying action, creating frameworks full of loopholes that will benefit their own national short-term economic policies — and their own popularity. And as long as the level of awareness is as low as it is today, they will continue to get away with it."
One of my biggest fears about the so-called “green transition” is that it will end up as simply greenwashing for more Business As Usual.
We know that Big Oil and Big Finance are happy to adopt schemes (like carbon offsetting) that they can sell as “climate friendly” which will still keep profits rolling in for them while doing ZERO to restore habitats or promote biodiversity or achieve climate justice. And as long as capitalism remains in charge, without fundamental system change, we should expect nothing different.
Why are corporations allowed to continue reaping billions in profits while ravaging the biosphere and endangering the future of civilization?
Why do politicians give only lip-service, pretending to be strong on the climate while doing nothing to stop the irretrievable damage of the corporations? And why do voters keep returning those same politicians to office, over and over again?
Because the system is operating exactly as intended.
Our rulers make sure we'll get enough to eat (bread) if we work hard for it, and they provide trivial entertainment (circuses) to keep us distracted from what's really going on. We can barely see that, if at all, and anyway we're kept too busy to care very much.
The aim of the system is — and always has been — more money and more power for those at the top. To hell with the consequences.
HEADLINE: Corporate climate plans are improving, but still ‘critically insufficient’
A little bit better is not good enough. Not when we’re racing so fast toward a cliff.
Despite minor improvements, major companies’ climate commitments remain “critically insufficient” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a new analysis.
“We’re seeing improvements from a very low baseline,” said Gilles Dufrasne of Carbon Market Watch, a co-author of the report. “There’s still quite a big gap between what they’re pledging to deliver and what they’re actually delivering.”
Business As Usual goes on and on, wrecking the climate, destroying the biosphere, and pushing civilization toward the brink of collapse...
The world’s fossil-fuel producers are on track to nearly quadruple the amount of extracted oil and gas from newly approved projects by the end of this decade, with the US leading the way in a surge of activity that threatens to blow apart agreed climate goals, a new report has found.
There can be no new oil and gas infrastructure if the planet is to avoid careering past 1.5C (2.7F) of global heating, above pre-industrial times, the International Energy Agency has stated. Breaching this warming threshold, agreed to by governments in the Paris climate agreement, will see ever worsening effects such as heatwaves, floods, drought, and more.
Last year, at least 20 oil and gas fields were readied and approved for extraction following discovery, sanctioning the removal of 8 billion barrels of oil equivalent. By the end of this decade, the report found, the fossil-fuel industry aims to sanction nearly four times this amount – 31 billion barrels of oil equivalent – across 64 additional new oil and gas fields.
The US, which has produced more crude oil than any country has ever done in history for the past six years in a row, led the way in new oil and gas projects in 2022 and 2023. Guyana was second, with countries in the Americas accounting for 40% of all new oil sanctioned in the past two years.
Politicians love bragging about their enthusiastic support for “Net Zero by 2050.” In reality, however, that is nothing but a scam promoted by the fossil fuel industry and their capitalist financiers to perpetuate Business As Usual for as long as possible.
The suggestion that getting to Net Zero emissions will solve everything is completely false. Because beyond the problem of greenhouse gas emissions — which are still growing, by the way — another byproduct of industry is aerosols, small reflective particles in the atmosphere which mask the true amount of global heating that would occur if those particles weren't there. Cleaning up our industries seems like a good idea, and it is. But when those aerosols are removed, the masking goes away and temperatures could rise.
Beyond aerosols, we have ocean heat content, climbing ever higher, scarily higher, into record territory.
And beyond ocean heat content is the enormous amount of CO2 we've already pumped into the atmosphere. It's there to stay, for centuries at least, unless we invent a fancy new whiz-bang technology to cheaply, quickly, and effectively remove and safely store all that carbon somewhere else.
Sorry, that's not gonna happen. Such a near-magical technology is a fairy tale.
But it's also the basis of the whole Net Zero scam! Everyone realizes there’s no way the world is going to reduce fossil fuel use and cut emissions at a sufficiently fast pace. So, all the projections used by the IPCC and the pledges made by delegates at COP meetings rely on 🧚♀️ fairy dust 🦄.