PLEA Network

9 November 2016, Energy Post, Oil companies’ climate initiative lacks initiative. The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) formed by ten of the world’s largest oil companies including Shell, BP, Total, Statoil and Saudi Aramco, has announced it will spend $1 billion over the next ten years “to accelerate the development of innovative low-emission technologies”. According to Stuart Haszeldine, Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage, at the University of Edinburgh, this is “small change compared to the size of the problem. This looks like trying to tell us that the climate problem is still best handled by denial, over-analysis, and under-activity.” Article courtesy of the Energy and Carbon blog. When is $1 billion not a lot of money? Answer one, when you are trying to save the human species from global self-destruction. Answer two, when it is split 10 ways, and then again 10 ways. In an announcement timed to coincide with the entry into force last Friday of the COP21 Paris Climate Agreement, 10 of the world’s largest international oil and gas producers announced a $1billion fund to help protect the earth’s climate. The OGCI (Oil and Gas Climate Initiative) was formed in January 2014, led by the CEO’s of six multinational oil and gas companies (1). Its self-stated ambition was to “catalyse meaningful action and coordination on climate change …. provide a full spectrum on what the sector what the sector is prepared to do, collaboratively, going forward”. The defining moment of the UN Climate Change conference in Paris last December has now passed, the agreed text has been scrutinized, pored over, analysed – and then ratified by the political leaders of more than 190 nations. It is clear that the intended national emissions reductions (INDCs) offered in Paris are voluntary and non-enforceable. It is also clear that even if the INDCs were delivered in full, then the world is on track for 3.7C or greater warming, not 2C or an aspirational 1.5C. And if nothing new happens, the world is already operating the hydrocarbon combustion equipment which can take warming beyond 6C by 2100. This group proudly proclaims that they are responsible for 20% of global oil and gas production, so we should expect something big, commensurate with the size of the problem, right?  Wrong. Read More here