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Now here’s something you don’t see everyday–the head of an oil company sounding the alarm over climate change.
Oil chief: my fears for planet:
The head of one of the world’s biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him “really very worried for the planet”.
In an interview in today’s Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration.
“Sequestration is difficult, but if we don’t have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world,” said Lord Oxburgh. “No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present … with consequences that we really can’t predict but are probably not good.”
His comments will enrage many in the oil industry, which is targeted by climate change campaigners because the use of its products spews out huge quantities of carbon dioxide, most visibly from vehicle exhausts.
His words follow those of the government’s chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.
“You can’t slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position,” said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March.
…
Lord Oxburgh said the situation is particularly urgent because many developing countries, including India and China, are sitting on huge untapped stocks of coal, probably the most polluting fossil fuel.
“If they choose to burn their coal, we in the west are not in a very good position to tell them not to, because it’s exactly what we did in our industrial revolution.”
One of my rules of life is: Pay the most attention to people who argue against their own best interests. Almost universally they’re being brutally honest because they feel/are compelled to take a stand, or they’re employing a high-risk gambit to fool you about something.[1]
In this case, I think Oxburgh is telling the truth, as he sees it, no matter how incredibly inconvenient it is for him and his company.
And let’s be clear about this: If we can’t figure out a way to make CCS work on a broad enough scale, we have one hell of a global problem. The challenge is not just figuring out how to capture, transport, and sequester permanently the CO2 from new coal-fired plants, but how to do so for the immense installed base of plants, virtually none of which were designed or sited with CCS in mind, in the US, the UK, China, India, and everywhere else.
(Before you leap to the conclusion that David King, mentioned above, is concerned about “just” climate change, see Oil reserves ‘exaggerated by one third’.)
Just to put an edge on it, here’s an indication of how China, India, the US, and the entire world use coal to generate electricity (the purple wedge in each graph is coal):
Stare at those graphs for a few seconds and the magnitude of the challenge to decarbonize our electricity supply at least 80% by 2050, through whatever combination of conservation and adoption of renewables you care to invoke, is all too apparent.
Anyone know of publicly traded companies I can invest in that specialize in orbital mirrors, artificial trees that suck CO2 from the air, and building really big walls around coastal cities?
[1] Notice, for example, all the times I’ve said on this site that I think it’s an inescapable conclusion that humanity will build a lot more nuclear power plants, try to “save ourselves” via some combination of geoengineering schemes, and resort to much more overt, centralized control of the “free market”. I don’t like any of those things, and geoengineering, i.e. trying to hack the Earth system, scares me spitless. But my best guess is that’s exactly where we’re headed.
Visit Lou's Graphs Page.
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