Californian Refiners and Mammon

It is going to be interesting to watch the writhing and squirming over the next few decades, as companies and countries lobby fiercely to avoid the reduction in the use of fossil fuels.

As it starts to dawn on them that the carbon assets on their balance sheets aren’t assets at all, but weapons of mass destruction.  They are in fact great big fat losses.  In this blog, we referred to oil shale and how its extraction uses more carbon than it does to burn it.

And in this blog, about how we cannot burn all the known fossil fuel reserves that we have anyway, as that will take us past a 2^oC tipping point and we will all die from the effects of climate change.

And yet the fossil fuel companies (oil, gas, coal) continue to spend tens of billions every year researching and attempting to extract ever more untenable sources of fossil fuel.

One of my favourites a few months ago was the announcement of BP and its partners [remember Mexico?] about a GBP10 billion investment in the UK North Sea.  On the day it was announced in the newspaper, a cartoon was published with a pair of seagulls on the edge of a cliff looking out over the North Sea at an oil rig and ordering futures in detergent.  BP reports it is its biggest investment ever.

I mean, how dumb are its shareholders?  This oil cannot be burnt according to Carbon Tracker. So that would be GBP10 billion for what?  Money that could have been returned to shareholders so that they can financially prepare for the new carbon burning reductions.

And today a Bloomberg report reveals that the Californian government has passed rules discouraging the states [oil] refiners from processing types of crude that produce high levels of carbon during production, such as those pesky oil sands in Canada.  Already banned in Europe.

And I am delighted to inform you that the Californian Air Resources Board spokesman refers to it as “stuff”.  

The refiners complain, calling the rules anti competitive, writhing and squirming, lobbying and lying, and generally trying to overturn the rules.  We lost our moral compass to mammon years ago, but even I am embarrassed for them.