The industry has been pushing through policies devoting billions of dollars to the technology, and much more is likely to come with legislation pending before Congress.
Over the last year, energy companies, electrical utilities and other industrial sectors have been quietly pushing through a suite of policies to support a technology that stands to yield tens of billions of dollars for corporate polluters, but may do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Ace researchers dropped two blockbuster reports on us last week. The first — from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC — hit on Monday with a worldwide thunderclap.
Climate inaction was never really about denial. Rich countries just thought poorer countries would bear the brunt of the crisis.
MANY PEOPLE HERE think they are safe from climate change, the journalist from a German newspaper explained to me. They don’t see it as an immediate threat, like Covid-19. They see the Greens as scolds who want to take away their cheap holidays. “What do you have to say to them?”
The green energy revolution is redrawing the lines of the global geopolitical map and China is fighting to come out on top. While other energy superpowers such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia have clung to their prodigious oil and gas industries to varying degrees, China has gone all-in on establishing their own energy security and independence, a large portion of which will soon be sourced from clean energy resources.
Comments from a recent energy industry conference reveal major financiers of fossil fuels view environmental and social investing concerns as a trend to “inoculate” against but not a long-term threat to the industry.
“I kind of remind people, I personally think oil is a renewable, it just takes a little bit longer,” said Mari Salazar, senior vice president and manager of Energy Financial Services for BOK Financial, an Oklahoma-based bank that caters to the oil and gas industry.
From Oregon in the United States, to Antalya and Bodrum in Turkey, to some of the coldest areas of Siberia, in the last month wildfires have been devastating thousands of acres amidst temperatures above 40°C. The flip side of this has been simultaneously catastrophic floods in Germany and China. As this article was being prepared, wildfires threatened to ignited huge coal stocks at the Milas power station in Turkey.
