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Shell made a film about climate change in 1991
- theprop 9y agoSadly, this is the norm & the way the current system works...if you can profit now & collect a huge bonus now, your incentive is to do that no matter what happens to the future. Cigarette companies knew of the harms of their product for decades. Bankers knew many of their home loans and other products would fail (but it would be after they got paid massive bonuses...insane speculation didn't happen when investment banks were partnerships and bonuses could be clawed back). Dupont knew PFOAs were harmful for more than half a century and a decade into a massive lawsuit before they finally stopped producing them.
- sidcool 9y agoIt's inherent to most capitalist systems. Hence Laizze free doesn't work well.
- harryVic 9y agoWow! I just read about PFOA. Makes me scared with the Trump Administration gutting the EPA, who is looking after public interests!
- theprop 9y agoSo glad you mentioned that story!! I hope you read that NYTimes write-up. It was EYE-OPENING how LITTLE power the EPA actually has!! It's unbelievable. That said, I felt that some of Trump's efforts to lower EPA approval times from 6 years to 4 years could be good...I'm just not qualified to say. I agree though that anyone who read the story about the PFOA will agree that the EPA needs DRAMATICALLY more power and probably more funding not less.
- trentlott 9y agoI'm only a few minutes in, but they lay out the basics of anthropogenic warming really, really well.
- trentlott 9y agoI'm only a few minutes in, but they really lay out the basics of anthropogenic warming really, really well.
- aaron695 9y agoSo they did something positive but we'll somehow turn it into a negative to further our cause. What is wrong with people.
- Shinkei 9y agoReally? The negative is that they didn't act in the best interests of humanity--the very people that make up their shareholders, employees, customers, etc. For example, it's well documented that DuPont fought to continue using CFCs until they had secured patents on replacement products and suffered public humiliation by our government. Companies will not generally act in the best interests of the citizens, which is why we have a government which should be independent of influence by leaders of companies.
- aaron695 9y agoMy point is if DuPont put out a doco warning everyone about CFCs don't put them down for that. Use logic and talk about what they did do that's bad. Shell is a mega corp full of different people and different departments. Why are we using the fact part of the mega corp tried to make a positive change against them? Why are we being negative about positive behaviour?
- zbyte64 9y agoSeriously? This is an industry that is actively undermining climate policy. So yes, we are going to use this video against them and other oil companies until an actual (aka substantial) positive change happens. Lastly, warning labels do not absolve a company of all responsibility.
- bluesign 9y agoThey tried to act in the best interest of humanity, but humanity didnt care about best interest of humanity. Companies will never act in the best interest of humanity if humanity dont care. Governments also dont care of the best interest if humanity, if their citizens dont care about humanity, they care about the best interest of their citizens. Also people dont care about the best interest of humanity, if it doesnt line up with their personal interest (ex: car sales, car usage etc)
- 75dvtwin 9y agoDefinitely worth the watch. here are my cliff notes: > human energy consumption, by means of burning fossil fuels, is the reason for green house gases, that in turn trap more heat, then our environment can sustain. > technology to reduce CO2 emission, assuming the same level of electricity consumption -- is far from being available. They had talked about Nuclear, sun, geo, nuclear fusion. >more efficient means to convert to electricity: >35% of coal energy is transformed to electricity > incandescent light bulb converts only 5% to light If larger city (NY, Moscow, Bombay etc) switch to better light bulb, 1 million ton of C02 emissions every year, each. > simply changing from coal to gas cuts carbon emission by 40% >half of worlds oil is used by 500mln road vehicles. 400 mln of those are private cars. each producing 4 times its weight in CO2, each year. Internal com engine is only 20% efficient. Cars can improve by 3 times (not clear, if they assumed electric only or not). > when gas is not available option, coal can be gasified > >Taxation can work both ways, already there is a talk of carbon tax. But how to achieve compliance across national borders. >Global warming calls for global response. but world is not a common market. Examples they used is Easter Europe, other developing regions. >How could this countries advance, but leap-frog energy developments? Future must be different, developing countries cannot take the same path as the developed countries in the past.
- vmarsy 9y agoYes that's a nice summary. It's good to see that some of steps have already been taken (led instead of incandescent) and that at that time photovoltaic technologies weren't viable yet thus not mentioned in the video. Also I like the irony of showing Volkswagen cars when mentioning efforts from the E.U. to reduce car emissions :)
- adrianN 9y agoIt is my understanding that with internal combustion engines there is a trade-off between NOx and CO2. The hotter you burn, the more efficient the engine, but you also create more NOx. Volkswagen chose to tune their engines for fuel consumption, reducing GHGs, but tried to cheat their way around the illegally increased NOx.
- fovc 9y agoIsn't it the same motivation as ExxonMobil supporting a carbon tax? I.e., "buy natural gas from us to replace the coal furnaces" I wouldn't be surprised if before putting out this film they the relative difficulty/cost of displacing coal vs gasoline/diesel Edit: XOM stance: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/exxon-s-new-chief-endorses-carbon-tax-to-combat-climate-change https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/exxon-s-n...
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoThey probably just underestimated the gullability of the average American voter. Imagine if some nerd had spoke up at a Shell meeting and said his analysis of the American voter suggested that they could just claim it was a Chinese hoax and that would be accepted. Most intelligent people would find it hard to take that seriously, so they only found out by continually pushing the boundaries of what they thought the public would accept. Unfortunately for the world, there was a certain group of Republican voters that were very susceptible to their propaganda and so they could keep pushing into the absurd.
- staticelf 9y agoThis is why you should, if possible, refuel at Statoil/Circle K. Statoil is (partly?) owned by the norwegian government and is basically the only oil giant that try to preserve the environment and to reduce it's impact. Please support companies like that.
- semi-extrinsic 9y agoI agree it's good Statoil is making an effort, and they are most definitely trying to pivot into renewables (mainly offshore wind). But they also do some stupid shit, like oil sands in Canada. However I don't know if they're unique in this aspect, e.g. Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Total are all huge oil companies that are pivoting into solar and wind. At this point it just makes pure business sense; renewable energy has (or will soon, depending on which tech) become profitable even without subsidies. These companies have a lot of engineering talent and money they can invest in projects. They see that oil and gas long term future prospects are bad (production costs are going up while demand is going down). Renewables are the opposite, costs going down and demand increasing. They are already energy production companies. You can also see they're playing on their strengths, like Statoil doing offshore wind because of their experience with offshore structures in adverse weather, while Saudi Aramco know lots about building and operating production equipment scattered around the desert so they focus on solar, etc.
- staticelf 9y agoYeah sure, other companies does that as well. But in the meantime they deny that climate change is even a thing (at least in the US) but Statoil does not do that.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agohttp://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-policy/climate-perspectives/our-position http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-po...
- vidarh 9y ago> Statoil is (partly?) owned by the norwegian government Statoil is 67% owned by the Norwegian government directly, and another 3% is owned by the Government Pension Fund Norway (which is the "small one" of the two Norwegian sovereign wealth funds - the biggest one which usually gets all the attention only invests outside of Norway)
- stefek99 9y agoNeed systematic change - example - Kickstarter becoming public benefic corporation - https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefit-corporation https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefi... Otherwise the goal of the company is to make profit for shareholders - anything else would be illegal (against the law) Need to change the "operating system of economy" to that environment is included in the balance sheets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Bottom_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Bottom_Line
- musgrove 9y agoThe title left off "...and You Aren't Going to Believe What Happened Next"
- nailer 9y agoThe 'greenhouse effect' (which was the umbrella term for what is now called climate change) was widely discussed in the 80s and 90s and taught in schools, at least in Australia. As a child I learned that many metropolitan cities would be underwater by the year 2000.
- bamboozled 9y agoI didn't learn that most cities would be underwater by 2000.
- nailer 9y agoYou might be a bit younger than me. I remember doing a project on the greenhouse effect in grade 3, which would have been... 1988? The year 2000 seemed way off then, so people felt pretty comfortable predicting doomsday scenarios. I believe in climate change now, but I also take every underwater city the BBC shows with a grain of salt.
- soundwave106 9y agoI decided to do a Google newspaper archive survey just to see what people were saying back then. I'll be honest, the articles seem pretty close to the mark from what I see. For instance, a 1988 article says scientists warn that pollutants already have committed the planet in "30 years to 50 year to its highest temperatures in 10,000 years"; in 2017 I would say that (based on our reconstructed temperature estimates) this prediction is likely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past...). There is an article in 1983 predicting a 3.6 degree rise by 2040 (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1928&dat=19831019&id=oHsgAAAAIBAJ&sjid=t2cFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1897,2698157 https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1928&dat=19831019&id=...) and one in 1982 predicting a 4 to 5 degree temperature rise in 50 years (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19820326&id=AYc1AAAAIBAJ&sjid=96QFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4891,1722612 https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19820326&id=...). Being American articles, you convert Fahrenheit to Celsius; this seems very consistent with modern predictions on the climate. The current temperature anomaly is about 1C (https://www2.ucar.edu/climate/faq/what-average-global-temperature-now); https://www2.ucar.edu/climate/faq/what-average-global-temper... an additional 1C by 2040-2050 is within the scope of current climate change models, as far as I know. I don't doubt that there were some people that projected overly pessimistic doomsday scenarios of flooded cities by the end of 2000 (though to be honest most of the articles I'm encountering more warn of 2100), but for me this is actually is an interesting confirmation; even 30 years ago, the scientists had a model in place that has proven to be way more resilient than some of the deniers would have it.
- jlebrech 9y agowe need to start burning methane as it releases less CO2 when burnt than it reaching the atmosphere.
- rmbeard 9y agoNothing new, we all knew about it as students back in the early 80's. The denial came much later, climate change is not a new issue, but we have been incredibly slow to react to it.
- peatmoss 9y agoSome other industry players also made a movie about climate change at about the same time, but their conclusion was basically, "Don't worry about it, because plants will just love all the excess CO2." I remember this film because of an otherwise good, but somewhat dogmatic conservative high school physics teacher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth