Shell Chairman - "We Have No Time To Lose" On Climate

[hatrack]

The Guardian, 15 June 2005 - "When Lord Ron Oxburgh visited the Hay festival a couple of weeks ago he arrived during a spell of weather best described as unsettled. A record-breakingly warm Friday was followed on Saturday by a wild, gusting wind and, in the festival marquees, a great howling and a flapping of canvas. The lighting rigs creaked with the strain, and pictures of Hay, projected on to screens behind the performers, bucked and swayed; it was a glimpse of how it must feel to sail a boat into a storm, and an almost too appropriate backdrop to chief government scientist David King's calm laying out of the basic facts of climate change: that since the industrial period carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per million (classical for all previous warm periods) to 379ppm today, and are rising at 2ppm per year. In 10 years' time they will be at 400ppm; at 500ppm, Greenland's ice will melt entirely - it's already receding by 10 metres a year - and the sea level will rise, drowning coastal cities and entirely changing the contours of the earth. Most scientists now agree that unless we stabilise the earth's atmosphere by 2050, there will be no way to halt the disaster.

Oxburgh, the non-executive chairman of Shell in the UK, on the dias with Greenpeace executive director Stephen Tindale, listened to King with increasing impatience, his abundant black eyebrows knitting restlessly under windblown white hair. As soon as he decently could, he grabbed the microphone, strode to the front of the stage and launched into his speech, contemptuous of the lectern, glancing only occasionally at his notes, leaning in towards the audience as if, like an evangelist, he wanted to pick everyone up and shake sense into them, just as the wind was shaking the tent. "We have roughly 45 years. And if we start NOW, not in 10 or 15 years' time, we have a chance of hitting those targets. But we've got to start now. We have no time to lose."

EDIT

his is the sort of issue that must be dealt with at government level, and governments are notoriously blind beyond the next election, not to mention worried about upsetting powerful corporations. Yet just a couple of weeks ago Shell and 12 other signatories, including BP, sent an open letter to Tony Blair, in which they pointed out that "governments tend to feel limited in their ability to introduce new policies for reducing emissions because they fear business resistance, while companies are unable to take their investments in low-carbon solutions to scale because of lack of long-term policies," and urged immediate action. Oxburgh advocates that government uses the controls at its disposal: "Regulate biofuels. Or subsidise. Or tax" - any incentive really, but "what we don't want to see is in two years' time the government simply becoming bored with climate change after we've invested a lot of our shareholders' money. Remember, those shareholders are pension funds and other similar organisations." The prospect of big business forcing government to regulate it would be funny, if it weren't so serious.

Meanwhile, the price of oil is high at $ 55 a barrel, and the oil companies don't see it falling substantially in the near future. At the current rate of progress, says Oxburgh, "we are going to be really quite dependent on fossil fuels for another 50 years. And nothing is going to slow the world economy more, and inhibit our control of the greenhouse gas problem, than a world recession. So, fundamentally, what we are trying to do worldwide is to make sure that we have enough of a supply of oil and gas." Paradoxically, the high price of oil is also good for renewable energy, as it forces the speedier development of alternatives, and Oxburgh just views this as a further business opportunity: corn ethanol, to take the example of a biofuel currently in use, currently costs nearly as much as oil."

EDIT

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=8724&url=http://www.sustain-online.org/plugins/DocSearch/details.asp?MenuId=1&ClickMenu=&doOpen=1&type=DocDet&ObjectId=MTU1MTM

[patrice]

1. And Domestic oil, going down the tubes at $11 @ barrel before

*'s fucking war, is now quite rich for the forseeable future at $50+ forever.

The DSMs proove our lives are as Oil-chattel for some EXTREMELY RICH people.

Go figure . . . .

[phantom power]

2. If I read this right...

Our best hope is the enlightened self-interest of the plutocracy. Hey, why not? It really is much preferable to our un-enlightened theocracy.