“We’re dangerously close to 1.5 Celsius thresholds,” says Rob Jackson, an expert on climate change in the 21st century and implications for the global carbon project

As world leaders are gathering at a summit in Egypt, new data comes out. Negotiations are underway to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Beyond that level, the world could see much more destructive storms and flooding, heat waves and drought.

“We’re dangerously close to 1.5 Celsius thresholds,” says Rob Jackson, climate scientist at Stanford University who worked on the report, which was compiled by scientists around the globe.

The Global Carbon Project’s analysis suggests that meeting the goals laid out in the Paris agreement would require a drop in carbon emissions of around 1.4 billion tonnes per year, or nearly 4% annually, with emissions zeroing out around mid-century. That is similar to the emissions reductions witnessed in 2020, when governments around the world locked down in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Le Quéré says. The scale of the concerted actions necessary to tackle climate change is highlighted by this.

The rate of fossil fuel growth has slowed recently. It increased by 3% a year in the 2000s. Fossil fuels have grown at an average rate of.5% per year over the past decade.

Climate Action Tracker: Natural Gas Terminals for the European Union after the Crimes of December 11, 2014 During the Ukraine’s War and the BP-Extended Clean Energy Plan

Many countries have been trying to replace natural gas exports from Russia due to the war in Ukraine. Exporting natural gas overseas requires super-cooling it down into liquified natural gas, so it can be loaded on ships. Once the ships reach their destination, the gas must be unloaded at special facilities. According to a new report from Climate Action Tracker, a climate think tank, 26 new terminals have been announced in the European Union since the invasion of Ukraine.

Increasing natural gas use could lead to a reduction in fossil fuel use. If those under construction come online, they could double the emissions of liquified natural gas, according to the report. That could jeopardize any commitments that governments make in the COP27 negotiations. The International Energy Agency says that there should be no new investment in fossil fuel supplies to reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal.

He says it’s a chaotic mess of an economy and we don’t know how emissions will settle out after Covid.

But with the energy system becoming cleaner each year, there are paths forward, says Glen Peters, a climate-policy researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo who is part of the Global Carbon Project. Climate policies being implemented by governments are working to some degree, Peters says, “but this really needs to accelerate much more rapidly”.

Naomi Oreskes, who studied the fossil, says that the fossil fuel industry was involved in extensive “greenwashing.” she says that the fossil industry was involved in extensive “greenwashing.” “Numerous analyses shows that these claims are untrue.”

“Today’s documents reveal that the industry has no real plans to clean up its act and is barreling ahead with plans to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come,” House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney told CNN in a statement.

By the year 2050, the business intends to be a net-zero emissions one. It invested a third of its $16.3 billion budget in transition businesses. The bulk of that money was spent on the acquisition of Archaea Energy, which derives natural gas from organic waste.

Just three years ago, BP unveiled a plan to slash oil and gas production by 40% from 2019 levels by 2030. On Tuesday, it said the output would be 25% lower. The goal is to cut carbon emissions from its oil and gas output by 20%- 30% by the year 2030.

A strategy slide presented to the Chevron Board of Directors from CEO Mike Wirth and obtained by the committee states that while Chevron sees “traditional energy business competitors retreating” from oil and gas, “Chevron’s strategy” is to “continue to invest” in fossil fuels to take advantage of consolidation in the industry.

An employee assessed that the company often adopted an obstructionist strategy with regulators, as a result of an email from a executive to the Chairman and President of BP America.

In 1994, the tobacco industry came under heavy scrutiny for their insistence that cigarettes were not addictive because of accusations of perjury and federal investigations.

The impact of House Oversight’s investigation into Big Oil will not be as immediate, but Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat and the chair of Oversight’s environmental subcommittee, said the findings have added to the historical record for the industry and its role in global warming.

In other cases the documents were heavily redacted because of companies like Exxon that said the information was confidential.

The battle between two lawyers in Georgetown, Guyana, after the Exxon Mobil discovery in 2015 blighted with a massive oil spill

The report also helps mark a new phase in the global fight against climate change. Five years ago, greenwashing was a subject for activists, not Congress. But one result of the world making so many more climate pledges in the wake of the Paris agreement has been that many more people started looking at just how realistic those pledges were — and how many corporations and indeed nations were offering promises held aloft by hypocrisy and hot air.

There was a battle between two lawyers inside a squat concrete building on a noisy street in Georgetown, Guyana, which was one of the most significant legal battles in the fight against climate change. The two people sat in a ground-floor office, staring at a computer screen while waiting to connect to the country’s supreme court via a video link. The internet is unreliable at best in Guyana’s capital city, and the fear that it would choose today to conk out was palpable.

The two lawyers were a bit of an odd couple. The tall and precise Burch-Smith is. Ask him if he knows the time and he’s likely to answer “yes” rather than divulge the hour. Janki is a petite woman with warm eyes and a sharp wit, quickly moved to rigorous denouncements of injustice, from the war in Ukraine to the plight of the planet to the litter on the street. The Phantom of the Opera playbill is on top of the desk. The art in Janki’s office is a little more confrontational: a life-size painting of a fierce yellow jaguar that appears poised to step out of a blackened forest and straight through the picture frame. The two attorneys had mounted an attack on Exxon Mobil, which was one of the world’s largest corporations with the legal muscle to match.

In 2015, Exxon struck oil off the coast, which is the first significant find in the country’s history. The scale of the discovery landed Guyana on the list of world’s top “carbon bomb” fossil fuel projects. There is a plan to produce more than 1 million barrels of oil a day. That would transform Guyana—currently a carbon sink thanks to its dense blanket of rain forests and minimal emissions—into one of the world’s top 20 oil producers by 2030. An Exxon Mobil spokesman said that the world needs to transition to a cleaner energy source, at the same time as it needs to reduce emissions. Exxon Mobil has a role to play in both.” By 2027, Exxon expects its Guyana operations to have “about 30 percent lower greenhouse gas intensity” than its average oil or gas production. Climate experts agree that by the year 2020 most of Georgetown will be underwater as a result of global warming. People in the interior of the country will be affected the most by climate change, from worsening droughts to loss of land and homes. In 2021, Janki and Burch-Smith sued the Guyanese government for giving Exxon the green light. Exxon later joined the government as a codefendant in the case.

Georgetown is made possible by the plentiful sources of water that can be found in the streets, rivers and canals. Viewed differently, though, the abundance of water is a sign of Georgetown’s particular vulnerability to climate change. All around is the evidence of an impoverished city that is rapidly industrializing. Some streets are traffic-clogged; cows are seen on the street corners near Popeyes and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Many homes and buildings are reminiscent of places of either war or extreme weather.

As attention turns to delivery in 2023, awareness will grow that these traditional offsets are at best a distraction that doesn’t count towards net zero, and at worst are downright fraudulent. Until now, carbon avoidance offsets have been an easy, cheap way for businesses to tick the box of sustainability, letting them spin a story about commitment and willingness to tackle the climate crisis. More than $1 billion of offsets were sold in the year 2020.

Businesses that are feeling pressure from both sides will have to look at other solutions. Carbon-removal technologies have grown in awareness. There is now a broader understanding and acceptance that these technologies, which actively suck carbon out of the atmosphere through direct air capture, enhanced weathering, and other methods, are critical to reaching our global climate goals. The group formed an alliance to commit nearly $1 billion in carbon removal by the year 2030. Access to and investment in carbon-removal technologies need to become mainstream if they are to scale at the pace the planet needs them to.

“2022 has proven to be a landmark, watershed year for climate action,” agrees Leah Stokes, a political scientist who studies climate and energy policy at UC Santa Barbara. I think we’re at a tipping point in the fight against climate change.

As buildings in the US account for a quarter of the total emissions, this will help decarbonize the economy and boost climate adaptation. Better-insulated homes use less energy and keep people more comfortable as temperatures get more extreme. And that $400 billion from the Feds is just a start—more money for rebates will come from state governments. It is going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars, if not a trillion dollars, of taxpayer money in climate action, and that will be done using private investment. BillionS of dollars have been put forth by private companies to make everything from battery manufacturing to electric vehicles, as well as heat pumps. That investment is going to be a big deal.

(If you’re not sure exactly what this entails in terms of home upgrades, updating insulation typically requires plugging leaks that let in outdoor air, then spraying either an expanding foam or pulverized newspaper into walls and attic surfaces. In the winter, a heat pump pulls in air to warm a home, then it reverses in the summer to cool the place down. The appliance runs on electricity, not gas, so it can be powered with renewable energy like rooftop solar. They are so efficient that even if you had to run them on energy generated with fossil fuels, you’d still be way better off emissions-wise than with a traditional furnace.)

The Reversal of ExxonMobil’s First Year Performing at Record-Number$4$Eass

ExxonMobil’s earnings slowed from a peak earlier in the year but the oil giant still reached a full-year record profit more than double what it reported a year ago.

The company earned adjusted income of $14.8 billion in the fourth quarter, down from the record 18.7 billion it earned in the third quarter but still up from $9.2 billion in the same quarter a year ago. That was also better than the forecast from analysts surveyed by Refinitiv.

The sector suffered losses and shareholder payouts were slashed in 2020 when the demand for energy and oil plummeted. The reversal of fortunes has been almost entirely due to oil and gas prices roaring back as economies reopened and then going into overdrive following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February.

When the oil price collapsed, energy companies took huge losses. Exxon recorded a loss for the first time in decades. It was dropped from the newsmagazine of the same name.

CEO Darren Woods defended the company’s investments in production, saying the company’s North American refineries had their greatest output ever, and that it had its highest global refinery production since 2012.

Woods said that the results benefited from a favorable market. When we decided to invest counter-cyclically we started our work years ago, so that we could use the undersupplied market. We leaned in when others leaned out, bucking conventional wisdom. We continued with the investments into this day and age after the Pandemic.

The Exxon-Mobil Dividend and Cash Flow in the Year-End 2006-Year Results, and the Implications for the Environment and Climate

Still, the company returned $29.8 billion to shareholders during the year, with about half of it coming through dividends and half through share repurchases.

Spending on exploration and other capital spending was more than double that. It also reported a $22.8 billion, or 336%, increase in cash on hand, ending the year with $29.6 billion in cash on its balance sheet. It paid back $7 billion in debt.

The full-year results come to an average of $1,874 of profit for every second during the course of the year. Since it takes about two minutes to pump 20 gallons of gas, that means that in the time it takes to fill a nearly empty tank of a full-size SUV or pickup, ExxonMobil earned about $225,000, on average.

Shares of ExxonMobil were slightly lower in premarket trading initially after the report, perhaps on investor disappointment that no new share repurchase program was announced. After the opening of trading, shares were slightly higher.

Engine No. 1 challenged Exxon’s management, accusing them of not moving fast enough to adjust to a world preparing to reduce its use of oil.

In this David vs. Goliath showdown, David won the battle, with Engine No. 1’s nominees replacing three Exxon board members. But Goliath isn’t going anywhere.

The scale of the gains by oil companies is generating fresh scrutiny of their investments in renewable energy and of the prices they charge their customers. Governments in Europe imposed windfall taxes to raise funds to help households with high energy bills.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., California is considering a similar windfall tax. President Biden has threatened oil companies with higher taxes if they don’t invest more of their windfall earnings in production. But it’s unclear whether the administration can follow through on such a threat.

Both Exxon and Chevron emphasized their carbon footprints in their earnings calls, a major shift from the not-so-recent past when oil companies denied, minimized, or ignored climate change when talking to investors.

But their responses to climate change focus on reducing the emissions from oil wells and pipelines, or making investments in “lower-carbon” technologies like hydrogen and carbon capture — not on a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, as climate advocates say is essential.

The surge in oil and gas prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in the creation of a new record for profits for the oil and gas companies.

The company reported annual profit of $36.2 billion on Wednesday, more than doubling the previous year’s earnings.

This extraordinary increase in profits has been replicated across the other Western energy giants, and shareholders have been rewarded with enormous windfalls.

The world needs to move much faster to address the climate crisis despite the fact that the influx of cash hasn’t produced a boom in renewable energy investments.

But the additional tax charges — which ExxonMobil, for its part, is challenging in court — and investments in new sources of energy pale in comparison with the sum the world’s five biggest private sector oil and gas companies handed to shareholders: the bounty exceeded $100 billion for 2022.

Big Oil Profits: the Last Three Years for the Shareholder Dividend Puzzle and the Role of Carbon Credits in the Energy Supply Chain

“It’s been a spectacular year for shareholder distributions,” said Tom Ellacott, senior vice president for corporate research at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy.

Although it expects dividends to stay high, the volume of share buybacks will have to increase if oil prices increase from their current level.

Several companies have decided to spend tens of billions of dollars on buying back their own shares. The company, the Dow’s best-performing stock last year, announced last month that it would buy $75 billion worth of its own shares.

Companies spent a fraction of their profits on renewable energy even as they raised spending on oil and gas, as European governments scrambled to replace Russian supplies.

Globally, capital spending on oil and gas, excluding exploration for new deposits, was around $470 billion in 2022, according to Wood Mackenzie. It may go even higher this year, as it is still below its pre-pandemic level.

“If the bulk of your investments remain tied to fossil fuels, and you even plan to increase those investments, you cannot maintain to be Paris-aligned, because you will not achieve large-scale emissions reductions by 2030,” Mark van Baal, the founder of activist shareholder group Follow This, said in a statement.

The Renewables and Energy Solutions business, which includes electricity generation, hydrogen production, carbon capture and storage and the trading of carbon credits, made up about 15% of Shell’s total capital spend.

The total amount spent on low- or zero- carbon businesses is $21 billion and a third of the total expenditure, the company said.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/energy/big-oil-profits/index.html

Shell CEO: Rethinking the problem of renewable energy and its impacts on the Shell-$Omega$$P$x$$Lanquillum reserves

Shell CEO Wael Sawan told journalists that the world had to move faster on renewable energy, including changes to government policy, and continued investments from Shell.