Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Revealed: North Sea oil company chief exec claims climate emergency is ‘fake’" video.

More excellent journalism from C4. No wonder the government wants to sell it off and destroy it.
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The oil industry cannot have a future. It's that simple. The best plan I have heard is just to nationalise it and manage its decline over the next 10 years, using what's left of the revenues to fund transition to clean energy jobs for all the affected communities.
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@Praylak You're not wrong. But they can be stopped. IF we are out on the streets and striking to demand radical change. That's why I am with XR, but there are other groups that you can join. We are the massive majority. The economy cannot function without our labour. Time to use those facts, get organised and get very serious about this fight.
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@larkatmic Free market capitalism is destroying our life support systems right under your nose. Yes, it's time we stopped doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
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In the 1970s and 1980s it was the oil majors' own scientists that were doing the science and man made climate change. When they realised they couldn't easily deal with the problem, they just fired all the scientists and went into full-on denial misinformation mode.
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@lonebarn You haven't contradicted what I said. What you wrote is like saying that heroine makes you feel good so it's great, while ignoring the fact that it is killing you. And no, a life without oil categorically does not mean lower living standards. That is obviously baseless nonsense.
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@db-gr6fh Firstly, public attitudes on climate change are the product of decades of very effective propaganda and misinformation on the subject by the fossil fuel industry, and their servants in politics. It's no wonder that they dramatically underestimate the looming danger of the climate crisis. The premise of your argument assumes that people are well informed but they are actually very poorly informed. If you asked people "would you pay 10% for your energy if it meant avoiding hundreds of millions of deaths and the end of civilisation as we know it in the your grandchildren's lifespan?" you would probably get different answers. Also, going after demand in some areas make sense - diet for example - because you can still live well without the most polluting foods such as meat and dairy. People can unilaterally make that choice today and nothing materially changes in their life. But demanding that people give up basic benefits of the modern world is both unnecessary and doomed to failure. There are alternatives available for clean energy and many clean industrial processes. The problem isn't the technology. The problem is the capitalist imperative to always do things to make the most profit in the short term while ignoring the externalised costs in the long term. The biggest example of this is the oil industry itself which enjoys total explicit and implicit subsidies of over $5,000,000,000,000 per year because the industry both gets taxpayers cash shovelled into it (even while it's already vastly profitable) and because it doesn't pay for the huge damage it causes to public health and the environment. If that market failure didn't exist, we would have switched off fossil fuels decades ago. But it remains in place because the fossil fuel industry captured governments through old fashioned corruption as well as through a very elaborate and expensive misinformation campaign against the public.
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@lonebarn You haven't demonstrated that only the burning fossil fuels could achieve these things. For example, when it comes to cars, the ICE car didn't win because it was better. It won because the industry successfully lobbied to create legislation and regulations on road design and use and fuel sources to that ensured it won. And yes, petrochemicals have uses beyond being a fuel source that are less damaging than simply burning them, but that does not deny the fact that burning them has the potential to undermine the whole fabric of our society. It seems an obvious point but you may be missing it. What is the point in having a few decades of good living standards (for a small minority btw) with rapid growth, only then to permanently destroy the conditions that actually support abundant life on the planet? Like I say, it's like having a massive binge on drugs, saying how amazing you feel and then dying hours later.
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@lonebarn An alternative to what? Burning fossil fuels for energy? The alternatives have existed for decades. Now we are finally investing in them, they are proving far cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels will ever be. Offshore wind is now cheaper than gas. Onshore wind and solar are the cheapest power ever generated, and this with only about 10 years of real investment. Likewise, batteries have fallen in price by 90% in 10 years and continue to cheaper and more durable. These are just the alternatives that exist today. As R&D continues better technologies continue to be developed leading cheaper and better products. Meanwhile oil and ICE vehicles only remain competitive because they don't pay for any of the catastrophic damage they cause. From the climate crisis to air pollution, to land and water contamination to ocean acidification. As I said, if fossil fuels paid for their damage, alternatives would already dominate. And you haven't addressed the point that it is clearly insane for a minority of people to live well in the short term using fossil fuels but literally endanger our ability to grow enough food for the vast majority of people in the long term. Which matters more? The ability of a tiny minority to fly across the Atlantic for £250 or the ability of billions of people, now and in the future, to provide food and shelter to their families? You envisage fossil fuels as some wonderful machine that enables everyone to live better. Whether that was ever true is moot. The fact is they are doing precisely the opposite now. They are now a machine for destroying prospects for organised human life on the planet.
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@db-gr6fh You are factually wrong about the technology we have for replacing fossil fuels. Government and academic reports going back a decade show that it's do-able. In 2012, the US government found that renewables could supply 80% of energy by 2050 https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/stat-of-the-day-80-percent-renewables-at-mid-century And the technology has got dramatically cheaper and dramatically better since then. Single wing turbines now produce 13MW of power, with a better capacity factor (reliability of supply) than coal. And no, renewables don't require fossil energy for manufacturing. They require energy. That is why new Gigafactories for EV and battery production have their own solar and wind power systems. But like usual, you are missing the point a bit here. What is the point of putting the economy first and insisting that we keep burning fossil fuels for a handful more years if that wrecks the habitability of our one and only home? That is surely insane isn't it? Which matter more - cheap flights and ICE cars or feeding your kids? Btw renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels so there is no cost argument on energy. In fact, if you are worried about costs, the climate change we are on course for right now will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage to infrastructure and the economy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15453-z If you want a healthy economy, fighting climate change with everything we have is the best course of action. It's not even expensive. In fact the U.K. CCC demonstrated that the investments pay for themselves in costs savings within a decade.
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@db-gr6fh No, I'm not missing the point. My source wasn't a green website. If you read the first para of the article, you will see, as I said that the research was done by the US NREL, part of the Dept of Energy, in 2012. Here is the direct link https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re-futures.html And that was 9 years ago, since when renewables and battery prices have collapsed. Yes storage is required, but, I'm good conditions, solar and storage is already cheaper than gas plants. And battery and storage tech is in the process of being revolutionised as money pours in for R&D. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Investment-In-Battery-Tech-Exploded-In-2020.html If you read what I said, I said that fossil energy is not required. And it isn't. Not for batteries, not for steel which can be produced with hydrogen, rather than coming coal. And if we don't switch off fossil fuels very rapidly, we will not be worried about cheap energy. We will be worrying about food, water and shelter.
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