Guest post: Chevron knew
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Cue the stirring music.
The thing that I seriously don’t understand is that if capitalism is supposed to bring us the best of all possible worlds due to profit, why don’t these giant energy companies see themselves as energy companies as opposed to oil companies. Chevron knew that the carbon emission from their products was going to lead us to where we are now with climate change 50 years ago, but decided to hide their data and analysis, and find ways to drill deeper and farther offshore and keep us using gasoling and diesel fuel. They knew that it’s a finite resource, they knew that eventually they will have to rely on despotic governments to make contracts for drilling on their land. They knew that there are other sources of energy, and extraction is an engineering problem that could eventually be less expensive than drilling under 500 feet of water, or in the Arctic. Shell, BP, and these other giants make the commercials that this is spoofing, and promote all the wonderful things that their engineers are doing to find ways to protect the environment while giving up nothing from our mobile lifestyle.
But they continue to fight to keep it the way that it is through fracking, mountaintop removal, using ice roads to get drilling rigs over the Arctic, build drilling platforms in the North Sea and off of the Carolina coast (subject to hurricanes,) just to maintain an oil and coal based energy economy.
I’m not a commie, don’t worry. But, I’m also not a capitalist cheerleader. It’s short-term thinking when long-term was needed.
Maybe they really only see themselves as money companies.
Nearly forty years ago, the historian and columnist Gwynne Dyer made a documentary series called War. One of its episodes was called “Keeping the Old Game Alive,” in which he looked at how Great Powers tend to prepare for the last war, rather than the next one. He also cited the belief that a war in Europe could be contained, and limited to “conventional” weapons, or tactical nukes, tops. Dyer concluded that this belief, and the policies that sprang from it, were dangerously delusional, and that a conventional war in Europe between the US and USSR would have escalated to a nuclear exchange. The advent of nuclear arms changed everything but our way of thinking. We were still sabre rattling , but with sabres that could end civilization
In terms of energy, fossil fuels are the old game, the solution for yesterday’s world that has led to today’s climate crisis. The money companies are more interested in making more money now, doing what they’ve always done, than in spending money to do things that are even marginally less destructive and more sustainable.
While we were few in number and technologically simple, we were, as the saying goes, “relatively harmless.” But, we leveraged our cleverness and multiplied our lethality, refusing to live within limits. Once, there was always more game over the horizon, or across the river, or on the next continent. We were already on the road to exceeding our limits even before we launched into the wild orgy of cheap energy made possible by fossil fuels. They just magnified and fed a proclivity and addiction we were already presenting.
In a species that has never been that good with large scale/long term thinking, the quarterly report may prove to be our undoing. “I’ll take my bonuses and stock options now; the future is somebody else’s problem.” Well, the problem is, the future is getting closer and closer. The future is now. The horizon of ignorable, discountable, externalites is shrinking daily. The consequences that weren’t originally scheduled to come until safely after retirement and death, are making today’s headlines.
The whole idea behind tactical nuclear weapons, or “battlefield” nuclear weapons was that they suposedly could be used without triggering an all out strategic nuclear retaliation.
One of the things that Dyer pointed out was the Russian disbelief in NATO’s defensive nature. NATO deployments were too shallow to be a credible “defence in depth” in the event of a conventional war. This was partly the result of European countries reluctance to spend more GDP on defence (when they could pass off more of this burden on the US), combined with the unwillingness of conceding that their territories would have been designated kill zones in any land war. The Russians might not have been as sensitive to how this would have played out amongst the European electorate, but instead saw the NATO forces on the ground offensive because they would have been next to useless as a realistic defence against invasion.
There’s a more immediate reason that’s baked into the nature of extractive industries.
Any corporation’s value is based on its assets, both physical and in cash. For an oil company a big chunk of those assets is the oil still under the ground where they own or have leases to extract it. The economic value of the oil is based on the presumption that it will eventually be extracted and sold at a profit. Stop extracting and selling the oil and its asset value is zero. Which decreases the value of the business, making it harder to borrow and attract investment.
You see the conundrum: Even if Chevron wanted to stop pumping oil and change to a sustainable energy corporation it would mean a large drop in its value, making it difficult to finance the transition. Not to mention facing a lot of very angry shareholders and redundant petroleum engineers, chemists, and oilfield workers.