Green really is the new black as Big Oil gets a taste for renewables | Business. The world’s largest oil companies have in recent weeks announced a series of “green” investments – in wind farms, electric battery storage systems and carbon capture and storage (CCS). These unexpected moves come hot on the heels of revelations by Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude exporter, that it plans to sell off parts of its national oil company and diversify its economy away from petroleum.
They also come in the aftermath of a United Nations climate change agreement and before annual general meetings for Shell and Exxon Mobil this week, meetings at which shareholders will demand that more be done to tackle climate change. So has the fossil fuel industry finally woken up to the dangers posed to their futures by a move to a low-carbon world, or is this all “greenwash” – relatively insignificant investments designed to shake off critics?
Some of the moves certainly have serious amounts of cash behind them. Shell has done the same. The Carbon Web. Oil runs through every sector of society. London, our city, is one of the global centres of the oil industry. Oil companies use the city to extract a combination of financial, political, legal and technological services that enable them to produce, pump, transport, refine and sell oil and gas. For more than a decade, Platform has been mapping out the network of relationships between oil and gas companies and the government departments, regulators, cultural institutions, banks and other institutions that surround them. We call this the Carbon Web. The Carbon Web is key to our understanding of how the corporations function. Platform’s overall aim is to sever the links between oil companies and the institutions that facilitate extraction.
Climate Change Docu ‘This Changes Everything’ TIFF Trailer. When Charles Dudley Warner said “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” he was joking, but he might as well have been talking to people living in the era of global climate change. The problem is huge and often looks insurmountable, but This Changes Everything, a new documentary premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, aims to change that. Inspired by the nonfiction bestseller by Naomi Klein, the film attempts to humanize the problem by looking at the people living on what amounts to the front lines, visiting locations like the Alberta tar sands, Montana’s Powder River Basin. polluted Beijing, South India, and more, while also drawing connections between the problem of global warming and economic systems that facilitate it.
The official trailer is out now and you can watch it here. Canada’s carbon moment has arrived. Jeff Rubin is an author and former chief economist at CIBC World Markets; David Suzuki is a scientist and emeritus professor at UBC As Canadians prepare to vote in an upcoming federal election, it’s time to reassess the country’s economic prospects, once touted as the strong suit of Stephen Harper’s government. For almost a decade, Canadians have been told massive expansion of Alberta’s oil sands would be the engine of economic growth as the country rode a wave of soaring oil prices during the government’s early years. Some question the wisdom of building an economy on the foundation of a single resource. And the Prime Minister’s strategy of making Canada an oil-based energy superpower has led instead to a made-in-Canada recession, with a dramatic implosion in capital spending in the country’s oil patch.
It makes no sense for any government focused on the economy to ignore the accelerating issue of climate change. Mr. New paper shows that renewables can supply 100% of all energy (not just electricity) Posted on 20 August 2015 by michael sweet A new paper: 100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for the 50 United States by Jacobson et al 2015 describes the wind, solar and other renewable technologies needed to supply all the energy used in the USA That is all the energy, not just the electricity.
They find that using wind to generate 50% of energy, solar photovoltaic (PV) for 38%, concentrated solar power (CSP) for 13% and a combination of hydro, geothermal, tide and wave power for the remainder (5%) allows all energy in the USA to be supplied at a lower cost than using fossil fuels. (The total is over 100% as extra power is required to stabilize the power grid because the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine). The jobs required to build and run the renewable power supply would be greater than the jobs lost by closing down the fossil and nuclear power suppliers. About 0.42% of land would be covered by the generators. Model S on Cover of Oil Industry Magazine.
Oil industry magazine puts Tesla on cover, "beginning of the end for oil?" A good find by our friends at EV Obsession, apparently a trade magazine from the oil industry, Alberta Oil, has put a Tesla Model S electric car on its cover ("Hell on wheels") and published an article with this title and sub-title: "Is Tesla’s Model-S the Beginning of the End for Oil? Why battery technology could drive the electric vehicle to new heights – and disrupt the fossil fuel industry in the process". You get the feeling that the thinking of many inside the oil industry is starting to change; for the longest time, most of the comments and official forecasts from the industry basically said that, yes, electric vehicles are coming, but they won't be a big deal for many decades, and that maybe in 30-40 years they'll represent a few percents of the vehicles out there.
This reassuring (for them) prognostication about the status quo was repeated like a mantra until even most people who heard it over and over in the media accepted it as truth. But that's not how things work. . © Tesla. Get to Know Andrew Leach and Dave Mowat of the Alberta Energy Panels - Alberta Oil Magazine | Canada's leading source for oil and gas newsAlberta Oil Magazine | Canada's leading source for oil and gas news.