Well, not quite, but Shell's head poobah Jeroen van der Veer is concerned about the planet's energy future, what with AGW and peak oil only 7 years away, and he has outlined his concerns in this letter to Shell employees which, believe me, you will be hearing about in the coming days and weeks.
I had a whole long post written up about this, and blogger went and ate the damn thing. So just go read Jeroen.
Boy, it's taking a long time for reality to reassert itself, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI spoke to someone in the know a few years ago who said that [some] big-oil was asking for gov't green/carbon regulation because market competition meant they didn't have the manoeuvring room to set out on their own - too much risk.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the days of cheap oil are over.
ReplyDeleteI also believe that you have to take Big Oil's words with a grain of salt. Anything shell is arguing for is tactical, not altruistic. The world is closing it's resources to big oil in favour of nationally controlled firms. Shell wants regulation that will allot dwindling areas of supply to firms who have a patent lock on technology that will reduce CO2 emissions. The small oil company and it's investors will inevitably get screwed.
Royal Dutch Shell's opportunistic buy of Shell Canada (and it's oil sands holdings) was a disgusting play in my mind but an example of it's tactics.
1.Shell Canada sounds the alarm of cost over-runs in the oil sands
2.The stock plummets
3.RDS looks to take over at an opportunistic price
4. After the take over, it is revealed that the cost-overruns weren't as serious as was thought.
5. Shell Canada investors realized they were hosed as well as the investors of other oil sand holdings that saw part of their market cap evaporate away in the midst of the panic.
Don't even get me started on their behavior towards Western Oil Sands. They left their partner without any expansion options other than selling by not allowing any additional refining on their assets. I'm really happy they weren't able to buy that one.
Wait.
ReplyDeleteYou linked to a parody website.
Is the whole letter a parody?
It's not clear til you dig around a bit.
The letter is real. There were a couple of lefit news stories on it.
ReplyDeleteYawn, anything else, Chicken Little?
ReplyDeleteCan anybody explain why the IPCC scenarios run with CO2 growth rates of 1% per year for each of the next 100 years, when the highest CO2 growth rates have only been around 0.4% per year?
ReplyDeleteAnd 1% is their 'Low' projection. They use 2% as their High projection, implying that 1.5% would be 'Normal'. In other words, 3.75 times the historical average is what they need for their doom & gloom scenarios to play out in 100 years.
ReplyDeleteThere was to be a Global Warming march in Winnipeg today, but . . .
ReplyDelete