I think [Chevron] is trying to give its employees a reason to come to work every day,” [Danielle] Fugere said. “I’m sure it’s not easy to work at an oil and gas company when those companies are contributing potentially to the downfall of civilization.” (Emily Atkin, below)
Emily Atkin, formerly at The New Republic, has a blog site, Heated, “a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis.” How pleasant!
One of her posts caught my eye: a hit piece on Chevron and, indirectly, Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
In Chevron pushes “the moral case for fossil fuels”, she states:
Earlier this week, a tipster sent me a picture of a pamphlet. They said it was given to them by a friend who works at Chevron.…
Continue Reading“Many inside the company, including Tony Hayward, had long thought that [John] Browne was distracted by his pet issues of climate change and environmentalism, and by his flirtations with the public spotlight. They thought he had been obsessed with branding the company and lowering its carbon footprint at the expense of BP’s real business, producing and selling oil.” – Abrahm Lustgarden, Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (2012), p. 203.
“The world’s carbon budget is finite and running out fast. We need a rapid transition to net zero.” – Bernard Looney. CEO, BP, quoted in Financial Times, February 12, 2020
British Petroleum Company, then BP Amoco, then BP, has had a troubled history since it went political in the 1990. That history deserves revisiting given its latest rebranding effort.…
Continue Reading“While the biomass bonanza from plants like Covanta’s in California may be dead, byproducts such as biomethane, and other applications such as the utilization of biomass vegetation to create biochar … do show promise in more selective operations.”
Over the years, posts at MasterResource have documented the environmental problems of wood/plant/garbage-generated electricity, as well as opposition from environmental groups. Biomass is “the air pollution renewable.”
Last summer, Kennedy Maize documented the lost luster of government-enabled waste-to-energy power plants, such as the Wheelabrator plant near Baltimore and the Detroit Renewable Energy plant.
“Waste-to-energy had a 15-year heyday, driven in part by the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA),” Maize explained. “The law essentially created the non-utility generating industry.” He continued:
… Continue ReadingMany local governments had long incinerated garbage to reduce volumes flowing to landfills, but that provoked public opposition due to air pollution.