We should pay attention to timing: what are they promising to do? What are they doing now? What have they already done?<p>Often people don't make distinctions. Very often, companies will use present tense rather than future tense because it sounds better. Or they might be "transforming" when not much has been accomplished yet.<p>I've only skimmed a bit, but it looks like the report itself [1] is a good summary.<p>[1] <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0263596" rel="nofollow">https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...</a>
I'm no apologist for the oil companies but: Why is this surprising?<p>Demand for energy is rising; demand for premium-priced energy covering the reduced efficiency and new capital costs of greener technology is not rising as quickly. In the markets where genuinely massive shifts are both politically necessary and possible (Hi, China!), the state will be the driving force.<p>At the oil companies themselves, management has a singular duty to shareholders -- anything else is just PR blah-blah. We can debate whether that's a feature or bug of capitalism, but pearl-clutching news reports that ignore that basic fact aren't helpful in the public debate.
Say what you want about fossil fuels, but constant fossilization of Carbon from the atmosphere to under the earths surface is not sustainable.<p>Carbon is a building block of life... and for the few billion years life has been around, we've been losing atmospheric carbon to fossilization because it is being trapped as oranic matter under the earths surface. There are no good natural processes to release it back to the atmosphere consistently. The "carbon-cycle" is net negative over longer periods.<p>In the 4 billion years that life has been around, no other species has even come close to doing this very important work of bringing dormant carbon back into circulation... and if history is any indication, if something happens to us, it may be another billions of years before something like this happens... or never.<p>If there is a "Gaia", humans using as much fossil fuels over a long period is the ONE thing it wants. To ensure long-term sustainabilty of life, we should be building self-assembling and reproducing autonomous robots to dig out carbon as a contingency plan in case humans dissappear or lose this ability... or what is much more likely that we're are no longer interested because some other energy sources become cheaper.<p>It is lunacy to keep repeating the CleanTech era marketing material. Corporations and governments which have no future in oil have or have huge investments in alternate energy will try to vilify cabon and shut it down. But it is important for intellectuals to take the longer view and remember how important digging out trapped carbon is for long-term sustainability of life.
I think this article is missing the point, and is not providing a full picture.<p>First of all, the supersized national oil companies are far worse than the multinationals<p>Exxon, for example, is now controlled to an extent by activist investor hedge funds that want energy giants to pursue greener energy, and to think more about the future [1]<p>However, for right now, green energy is not self-sustaining, and cannot provide the energy we need [2]. The question then is, how do we transition in a meaningful manner? How do we curtail methane emissions, and others, which are among some of the worst problems stemming from oil/gas production? Are the energy giants making the right investments now into potential future energy sources that could lead to a greener future? Do we have the right options, or are we missing big ones, that, properly funded, could result in potentially quadrillions and quintillions of BTUs? [3]<p>Please keep in mind that producing energy on the massive scale required for geo-level requirements is a decades to centuries, and trillions to tens of trillions type of engineering problem set.<p>What many people consider green energy such as mega-dams and hydro have had horrible impacts on flora & fauna. Technology is both the problem, and, potentially, a set of solutions [4]<p>Caveat: I am investor in Exxon, and a number of other companies in both green and transitioning to green areas.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/business/exxon-mobil-engine-no1-activist.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/business/exxon-mobil-engi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://greeninnovationindex.org/2021-edition/energy-efficiency/figure-51-energy-consumption/" rel="nofollow">https://greeninnovationindex.org/2021-edition/energy-efficie...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power" rel="nofollow">https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2GGqWbzpvw&t" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2GGqWbzpvw&t</a>