Graeme wrote:My impression is that most members here have a preconceived notion that our situation is hopeless. I don't think so. The positive posts are not for "comfort"; they are real. My posts do counterbalance these negative views.
Graeme wrote:Yes, I'm well aware of those books. If they depress you, try reading some that are more positive like "Reinventing Fire" or "Natural Capitalism".
pstarr wrote:It's cheaper to feed the masses on a high-glycemic, endorphin-producing grain diet then having to constantly subdue rebellion.
The fourth-largest U.S. oil and gas company revealed Friday that it is leaving the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) amid widespread backlash over the free-market lobbying group’s efforts to undermine clean energy and promote climate change denial.
In a letter to its investment manager obtained by National Journal, Occidental Petroleum said it has “no plans” to continue supporting the group. The company said it determined that there are “other associations at the state-level that provide equal or greater value” than ALEC. It also cited concerns that it could be “presumed to share the positions” of other ALEC members, like the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce, on climate change and EPA regulations.
Occidental’s revelation comes just a few days after a number of tech companies announced they would abandon ALEC, an exodus spearheaded by Google chairman Eric Schmidt last week. Schmidt, in an appearance on NPR’s Diane Rehm show, said the company’s decision to fund ALEC was a “mistake,” because the group spreads lies about global warming and “mak[es] the world a much worse place.”
“Everyone understands climate change is occurring and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place,” Schmidt said at the time. “And so we should not be aligned with such people — they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”
When Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt recently called out the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for “literally lying” about climate change and his company announced it would not renew its ALEC membership, it was just one of the conservative business lobby group’s latest—and loudest—setbacks.
Thanks to pressure from shareholders, unions and public interest organizations, more than 90 companies have severed ties with ALEC since 2012, according to the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which tracks the secretive group’s activities on its ALEC Exposed website. The list of deserters comprises a veritable Who’s Who of U.S. business, including Amazon, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Kraft, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart. And in the days following Schmidt’s denunciation of ALEC for “making the world a much worse place,” other Internet companies headed for the exits. Yahoo cancelled its membership, Facebook said it was unlikely it would renew next year, and Yelp divulged it was no longer a member.
ALEC also lost a few energy sector members over the last two years, notably ConocoPhillips, Entergy, Xcel Energy and, in the wake of Schmidt’s outburst, Occidental Petroleum. But roughly 30 fossil fuel companies and trade associations—including BP America, Chevron, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Peabody Energy and Shell — are still steadfast supporters.
Two of the companies—ExxonMobil and Koch Industries—are so gung ho that they’ve been kicking in significantly more than the annual fee. ExxonMobil donated $942,500 to ALEC over the last decade, while Koch family foundations gave $747,000 between 2007 and 2012. On top of that, the oil and gas industry’s premier trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, contributed $88,000 between 2008 and 2010.
Given this support, it’s not surprising that ALEC’s sample bills would, among other things, impede government oversight on fracking, undermine regional cap-and-trade climate pacts and introduce climate misinformation in school curricula. Last year, according to CMD estimates, ALEC sponsored more than 75 energy bills in 34 states. Thirteen of those bills, if enacted, would have frozen, rolled back or repealed state standards requiring electric utilities to increase their use of renewable energy. Fortunately, all 13 went down in defeat.
Just a few weeks ago, Hone’s boss, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden, amplified his company’s position in an interview with the Washington Post. “Let me be very, very clear,” van Beurden said. “For us, climate change is real and it’s a threat that we want to act on. We’re not aligning with skeptics.”
If that’s the case, why is Shell—or BP, Chevron, Duke Energy and ExxonMobil, for that matter—still an ALEC member?
In September 2014, the $860 million Rockefeller Foundation made an historic announcement. Timed to coincide with massive marches for climate action all over the world, the fund revealed it was going to divest from fossil fuels. Following in the footsteps of the World Council of Churches, the British Medical Association and Stanford University, the latest major institution to make such an announcement is also the most symbolic. Because the Rockefeller fortune owes its very existence to oil.
The Rockefeller story is also the story of the rise and fall of the first ‘oil major’. Standard Oil, founded by John D Rockefeller in 1870, soon came to control the burgeoning US oil industry, from extraction to refining to transportation to retail.
It built an unprecedented monopoly that ultimately became so publicly despised that the US government stepped in and broke it up – birthing Exxon, Mobil and Chevron, among others. But by then, Standard had already set the Western world on a path to oil dependence that we are still shackled to, chain-gang-style, today.
The forced break-up created the Rockefeller millions. A century later, those millions are being used to make a dramatic point: we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the oil age.
Transform or die
There is no doubt that we will witness the end of oil’s dominance over the coming decades. What speed and form that takes will depend on a host of actors. As the industry overshoots its limits in every direction and turmoil in the Middle East snowballs, the arguments for an immediate co-ordinated move away from oil dependence are overwhelming.
We need a managed and fair transition, not a massive oil shock which could plunge the already fuel-poor into further hardship and breed economic and social pandemonium. If today’s anti-oil social movements continue to strengthen, this could happen: through pressure from shareholders, the erosion of oil companies’ social licence, the physical disruption of operations by local resistance, the boom in renewable energy, and public pressure on governments to take more decisive climate action.
The oil majors will be forced to retreat, to shrink. Some will disappear completely. Perhaps there will be enough political will for states to step in and physically break them up, like Standard Oil. More likely in the short-term they will suffer painful economic shocks as their favourable terms of trade evaporate, dwindle rapidly as investors remove their capital to invest elsewhere, be asset-stripped by corporate raiders, and find themselves forced to transform or die, like so many obsolete industries before them.
However it happens, the oil majors will ultimately become oil minors, relinquishing their vice-like grip on the political process and making a much more diverse, decentralized and democratic energy future possible.
‘We will see the end of the oil companies in the rear-view mirror,’ predicts Big Oil’s long-term adversary James Marriott, who co-founded Platform over 30 years ago to monitor, expose, communicate and inspire creative resistance to the industry. ‘The last thing to disappear – like the smile on the Cheshire cat – will be the logos.’
James, who follows trends in the world of oil more than most, is feeling ‘immensely optimistic’ these days. ‘It’s obvious the oil industry is coming to an end. So what is the society we want to build in its wake?’
These seismic shifts bearing down on our civilization could spawn chaos. But if progressive social movements can seize the moment, then the end of the oil age could also be the end of a multitude of wrongs.
The cleverest people in fossil fuels have long since fled, headed for greener (pun intended) pastures. I see those that remain are a mixture of evil and incompetent. And some of the cleverest people are joining the vultures, already dismembering the carcasses of the weakest (coal, i'm looking at you.)
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