“After advertising its efforts to produce environmentally friendly fuels from algae for over a decade, Exxon Mobil Corp. is now quietly walking away from its most heavily publicized climate solution.” (below)
Biofuel is out, leaving carbon capture and storage (CCS) as the leave-us-alone, we-are-doing-our-part “greenwashing” strategy at ExxonMobil (see tomorrow’s post). The end of algae as a substitute for crude oil comes after $350 million and 14 years of commitment. This expenditure was joined by a “green” advertising campaign around the project of at least $60 million, mostly spent between 2017 and 2019.
It was predictable. Shell, BP, and Chevron had previously thrown in the biofuels towel. And it is reminiscent of Exxon’s failed ventures in the 1970s: Office equipment. Real estate. Synthetic fuels. Shale oil. Electric motors.…
“A major player in the renewable energy opposition in rural Michigan is Kevon Martis, who works for E&E Legal, a D.C.-based lobbying firm that gets funding from the fossil fuel industry.” (Sinclair, below)
“Those are the people funding Peter Sinclair: huge fossil fuel entities. Yet he plays the fossil fuel card against me when I have never received a dime from any fossil entity unless you count my cashback credit card used for gasoline purchases!” (Martis, below)
DC-based Big Environmentalism has a grassroots problem: local residents who do not like or want super-sized industrial wind turbines and multi-acre solar slabs. It is more than NIMBY since taxpayer dollars put such (unneeded, duplicative) machinery in play. But also respect the opposition’s rational concern about mega-machinery noise, visual blight, health effects, and property devaluation.…
“There are substantial environmental, technical, and cost challenges in using carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at the scale needed to significantly reduce global warming…. [that make it] unlikely that CDR could be implemented rapidly enough or at sufficient scale to entirely avoid dangerous levels of climate warming in the near term.” (Pro, public letter, February 27, 2023)
“The speculative possibility of future solar geoengineering risks becoming a powerful argument for industry lobbyists, climate denialists, and some governments to delay decarbonization policies.” (Con, open letter: January 17, 2022)
It is hard, contradictory, and hypocritical to be “green” as conventionally defined. I am reminded of a comment in the 1970s that noted “a general frustration generated by the energy crisis: every solution to the problem seems to create tremendous problems of its own.”…