You got me, I’m Exxon. It’s a pretty common writing technique to talk from someone else’s point of view. I specifically though have a background in domestic oil and gas, which I have never hidden. It is far from what anyone would call Big Oil and has nothing to do with any of the companies discussed in this thread and also has absolutely nothing to do with any lobbying efforts on anything.
I find this line of thinking crazy. I’m not saying that in an insulting manner, but I just don’t understand this line of thinking. Oil and gas companies have absolutely no business in trying to become solar or wind or nuclear or whatever else companies. They have absolutely no expertise in those completely unrelated businesses. If I am an Chevron shareholder and I want to diversify my investment in oil and gas into nuclear, I should sell some of my shares in Chevron and buy shares in a nuclear company. It makes no sense for me to push Chevron into something they have no expertise in.
I think you are possibly speaking from ignorance here. How in the world would Exxon not be harmed by a carbon tax? It would: 1) hurt demand for their product; 2) make other products more competitive and possibly cheaper; 3) increase the cost of their feedstock (Exxon, in addition to being a producer of oil is also a large consumer); and 4) reduce the supply of their product that can be economically produced.
Is it hypocrisy to promote Climate Change while also being consumer of carbon based fuels? If so, who in this debate is not a hypocrite in your opinion?
It is also clear that years ago it was noticed by the sources I use that big oil companies stopped direct funding of denialist sources. The OP thinks it is clever but in reality he is late to what was found already. What he does not show is that Fossil Fuel companies (mostly the CEOs or the rich owners) are doing like the tobacco companies do nowadays, fund groups and think tanks that while not concentrated on climate change denial they fund politicians that do.
Coming up next, the now classic tobacco industry tactic of ‘corporate philanthropy as a political device’, it works by influencing research and charity groups by funding them, the idea now is to influence or stop more regulations regardless of the arguments used; sometimes it works like when the funded Smithsonian exhibition by the Koch brothers made the climate change of the past to be a good thing for the early humans. And sometimes it spectacularly blows in their faces like when the brothers funded the Berkeley Earth project that investigated the data and research done before regarding global warming.
Professor Muller was the head of it and an skeptic, he turned to show virtually all other skeptics wrong but the Kochs an other fossil fuel rich owners like the owner of Murray Energy are acting like if the long memo does not exist:
Preach it. Do you drive a car? Take a bus? Eat food? Heat your home? Own anything containing plastic?
If so, you too might be a hypocrite.
I’m frankly tired of all the pseudo-environmentalists whose existence is dependent upon petroleum products bashing companies whose business it is to provide these products. Businesses exist to return value to shareholders. If you’re mining a perfectly legal product and profiting from the sale of the product then you have a good business model and people will invest in your company.
If someone like Elon Musk comes along and creates a company that can make a bigger profit without drilling for oil, then investor support will migrate there.
Right now, there are no alternatives, or at least very limited. Maybe in 50 to 100 years we will be weaned from oil. But we have no choice at the moment.
Using “our” is a specific linguistic device to refer to something that someone belongs to. If you say “Our species is going to burn alive by 2016” you indicate membership. If you say
you indicate membership in one or more of those organizations providing oil. Which you verified, thus:
No, but it gives those participating a better understanding of your view point. Even if you have “never hidden it”, I do not believe I’ve directly conversed with you, before. Thus, I had no prior knowledge to what you haven’t hidden in the past.
That’s because you aren’t thinking like a business person. If I buy a nuclear energy company, I now have a division that has the expertise to run a nuclear energy company. Or I can hire in experts to make that division from scratch. There are countless ways to incorporate, profitably, those investment sources. Additionally, if I am a business, keeping my mitts into a single product and/or service will mean that I’ll fail in the medium term. It’s why most long term businesses are conglomerates. As one area falls in consumer or social value, they have other profit bases to shore up their earnings and pay the bills.
But buying another firm participating in that market or those markets is the easiest entry into those areas. By staying solidly with oil and gas, while saying that carbon taxes (the worst effect of the carbon tax burden goes to the poor, by the way) are good but that they don’t support any efforts to clean or mitigate the effects of what they produce at their cost or as a bundled cost of providing the good or service is what makes me think these are shallow political statements to keep on the good side of whoever makes it into power.
Taxes are a business’ best friend - they can pass along a price increase and point directly at the government for it and they bear very little ill will for that increase.
It increases the retail price of their good while inflicting little of that pain upon the producer, even if the tax is on the production, it will get simply moved to the retail cost of the product/service and there will be very little effect on the oil companies. Even though they are a consumer of oil, the EROI is something like 35x or 40x for oil and gas recovery. The final bill will do little to that portion of the production cost needle.
It will have some effect on demand, but since demand is clinically cinched to oil and gas at the present time, it’ll only hurt the economy overall - not the bottom line of the oil companies. Even in the down years, while profits did go down in the Oil and Gas industries, they were never hurting for cash and generated profits.
For competition, unless the carbon tax is truly massive enough to warrant a move to other generator styles (e.g. cheaper to actually replace your Ford Focus engine with LPG/Propane/Battery/Huge Hamster Wheel than it is to continue to incrementally use gasoline – or replace your electric heater/air conditioner with a gas heater or to buy solar installations to augment electrical supply), no other products will come close to competition. It takes subsidies of solar and wind energies to come close to current household power costs (and even then, payback time is 10-20 years for most household solar installations, variation depending on what is needed for your particular area). And fuel costs are quite a bit below that.
It also wouldn’t reduce supply production. Since you are in the Oil and Gas industry, you’d know that current contract sale takes into account prices that are anticipated to happen in the future. Thus, if you’re buying coal or natural gas, or what have you, the known cost increase from a carbon tax coming into effect on July 1 (for instance) would have the six month contract pricing increasing starting on Feb 1 because part of the delivery would cross that threshold. The refinery/production companies will laugh all the way to the bank for upto a year before they start paying for a production tax (although, the longer the contract, the more likely it’s a “good customer” that would likely be able to negotiation some of this pain down). Fuel like gas and diesel, though, will change closer to the time of the tax increase.
Thus, the supply would only reduce if the contracts reduced, and they wouldn’t in the near term. Everyone would just try to pass along the cost increases to the consumer. The final-end-consumer (either business or individuals that have no one to pass a cost onto) would pay that increase price for as long as they remained profitable. So, by definition, the hope that the supply reduction would occur would be at the expense of jobs or profitability, either(/both) which would cause an economic slowdown.
If the economic slowdown happens fast enough, government won’t use it to stop carbon in any way, they’ll use it to plug their revenue holes. If the slow down is long enough off, I’m fairly convinced it’ll be used to prop up things (in the US) like the failing Highway fund or social security instead of reducing carbon. So, really, the only winner in a carbon tax is government that gets additional revenue.
While pain is going to be a factor in any scheme, the above assessment is why I advocate for mandating that for each ton of carbon produced (or, in the case of fuels - to be produced at burning), a ton of carbon is mitigated by the producer of that carbon or fuel. Whether that’s sequestering, filtering at the smoke stack when it’s burned, or beaming it up Scotty isn’t really my concern. It’s far better to have private enterprise focused on what they do best: Bloodthirsty and ruthless competition for the almighty dollar. This will lead to research dollars by companies to find the best way to mitigate the carbon, which will make technology in this area march forward faster than it is, now.
This will get passed along exactly like I laid out above, with all of the economic pain I talked about with one exception: You don’t have the possibility that government interferes and reroutes funds to things not related to what is considered an issue worth taxing over. I’m also cynical enough that in the future, I’m fairly sure that the tax will be applied to all energy concerns (even if we are 150% solar powered with no carbon emissions at all) for whatever socially acceptable reasons at that time come up because politicians aren’t about to let a lucrative cash flow source escape their grasp.
It’s hypocrisy to say that we should reduce our consumption while undertaking no effort to do so by the person or entity making the statement. I can’t say that about anyone on this board, because I don’t know what they’ve done, personally, while advocating for their particular positions. And I’m pretty sure few to none of them want me showing up on their doorsteps with a clipboard and an invasive series of questions about their lives to find out. This is also why I don’t advocate for consumption reduction, just mitigation.
Exxon’s statement, since we’ve focused on that, says that we should put policies in place…Why can’t Exxon do this without waiting for all of the world governments to get into agreement (you know, in the year 2099 when it might actually happen)? Businesses can make internal policies. Better, these policies can be consistent with their political statements! What if they started to contract with their downstream users to provide them with mitigation technologies of some kind? Both a new source of revenue AND consistent with their political statements. Fancy.
Problem here is (that besides the hypocrite accusation being a red herring) is that then you miss the point of the OP, the problem is not then the fossil fuel companies, but their emissions and their owners.
Anyhow, that is not the main issue here, (but it seems to be important to not deal with it) the issue here is how the OP is way late with his insight and how many fossil fuel owners and CEOs are ignoring even what their own companies are claiming.
The point here should be that if a company can remove a CEO that is not benefiting a company the inactivity coming from many fossil fuel companies when dealing with rogue (as per the official words of the companies) CEOs, points not much to hypocrisy, but to tacit approval of the denial funding by those CEOs.
I guess I’m dense. You’re saying oil companies should remove CEOs who don’t approve of using profits to fund alternative energy programs, when their chief business is oil exploration and production?
That’s not their core business. Other businesses can come along and prove a viable alternative. In the mean time oil companies are free to provide to the free market what the free market needs.
ETA: You don’t need to be so cryptic in your writing style. You always leave me confused in these kind of threads. Tone it down a bit and type in words and phrases we can understand. Please.
The point is (and there are examples already linked in the thread) that those CEOs are funding denial groups and think thanks that fund politicians that also deny the science.
Indeed they are not what you think and they are going against the official policy of their companies.
Not so free when it ignores the real costs of using our atmosphere as a sewer.
Thank you, and I get your point, but what’s the alternative? We currently have no alternative and, as I stated, if an entrepreneur like Elon Musk came up with a solution the oil companies would be out of business. But we don’t have an alternative.
It’s like saying using fresh drinking water is slowly killing our planet. Therefore we must stop using drinking water. We have no alternative.
Red herring again, in this case we can not talk much about alternatives when it is clear that outside the usa super majorities agree on supporting change but in the USA we get a party that denies that there is a problem to begin with, the issue is indeed making the note that we should start with the old say so of “following the money” and shame or do what Teddy Roosevelt did with the Robber Barons of the past. The CEOs and the companies need to stop funding the astroturfing or suffering at least the loss of their subsidies and give that money to develop non emission energy sources.
Again with the confusing and difficult to follow phrasing. I’m not American; I have no idea what “Teddy Roosevelt did with the Robber Barons of the past.”
Outside the USA countries like India and China don’t give a shit, and neither should they. We in the western world had our period of environmental rape, which was instrumental in developing our countries. And now we have the gall, as developed countries, to tell India and China that they are forbidden from following the same model?
The CEOs don’t need to give any money to develop non-emission energy. Why the hell would they do that unless a business model supported it. Businesses make money for shareholders; they’re not charities: that’s capitalism.
Of course it is not my problem that you attempt to make points with your ignorance.
Actually I pointed before that the end of the Communist Party and the end of current government in India is to be expected if they do not bother.
That is the tragedy of the commons, there is indeed here a perfect reason why governments are needed, and we need eternal vigilance to make sure the governments are not corrupted by people that only look at short gains.
I’m ignorant because I don’t know everything about every US political movement?
Are you familiar with Pierre Trudeau’s famous “just watch me” comment during the 1970 interview regarding the FLQ October crisis? I write reports that go to the CEO of a nuclear facility. The basic rule is, keep it simple and understandable without using verbose words or phrases. You don’t make yourself seem anymore intelligent. In fact the opposite is true.
Agreed that governments should look beyond short gains. I doubt that’s possible though. But I still don’t see any alternative to oil in the short (50-100 years) time frame. And you haven’t provided any.
If I’m Carmelo Anthony, why would I want to take a pay cut to sign with the Miami Heat. Wait, am I Exxon or am I an NBA all-star? Oh, wait, I’ve just mastered an elementary writing technique.
Wait a minute, we sure don’t want someone speaking with any relevant experience around here. No, we’d much rather jerk off in an echo chamber.
So, let me guess you stopped paying attention to business trends around 1970? I’ll clue you in, conglomerates were a fad. Investors figured out they could get diversification in better more efficient ways. We like focused companies now with clear direction. Even small investors can take part in this new world of easier more efficient diversification methods. If you get a chance, read up about the mutual fund.
Your wall of text here shows me that you are not too familiar with oil and gas companies. Let me clue you in, they sell a commodity. As a result of that very simple statement, everything you just typed is now invalid.
I don’t know if I saw any in the previous discussions. Frankly your discussions with FXMastermind (did I get that right?) were also hard to follow due to esoteric comments and verbose wording. If you could link to some I would appreciate it.
