BP is trying to have its cake and eat it too. And it is being criticized on all sides: the greens for greenwashing its major activity (oil and natural gas production) and mineral energy advocates for engaging in the uneconomic as a contra-capitalist company. BP head Bernard Looney tries to square the circle with both.

Looney just reported on LinkedIn:

Some brilliant news to share today… bp has just signed a $4 billion deal to buy Archaea Energy – a leading US biogas company that produces renewable natural gas. As I’ve said recently – “putting our money where our mouth is.”  

I realise renewable natural gas might not mean much to people outside the industry so let me explain…  It’s gas from organic waste – homes, cities and farms – that is captured instead of vented into the atmosphere or flared.

“Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner. (IPCC, below)

… government (coercive) mitigation policy is being left behind by self-interested energy actions around the world. Wind and solar and batteries … are running into limits. A new public policy era post-COP27 is called for. (RLB, below)

The UN Conference of Parties to be held in Cairo, Egypt, next month (COP27) has long been in preparation. Net Zero may be a dead he/she walking (Halloween fright?), but expect no backtracking from the Church of Climate. “Don’t Look Up” … IPCC reports … ExxonKnew … it is a one-after-the-other global media campaign to not focus on the Green Energy Crises or the tripartite fossil-fuel boom but on … Net Zero.…

“Assaad Razzouk needs to dial back the alarmism and comprehend the twin, inherent, fatal drawbacks of wind and solar: diluteness and intermittency. The scholarly work of Vaclav Smil, who has entered the mainstream as a voice of realism, is a great place to start.”

The business social-media site LinkedIn has an active traffic in energy and climate opinions. There can be legitimate debate, and some good first-hand knowledge about energy technology is imparted. “People are the best University” applies.

Recently, one Assaad Razzouk, Chief Executive Officer at Gurīn Energy, posted on greenwashing. In the climate alarmist camp, he wants radical energy transformation (government enabled, of course) and not the stuff we see all around us that qualifies as “look green” and get-the-tax-favors.

His new book, Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit, “clears a path through the clutter surrounding our daily efforts to do the right thing.”…

“In its Ahab-like focus on harpooning ExxonMobil, the BBC missed an opportunity to explore the enormous challenges involved in replacing fossil fuels. The costs of ignoring those challenges may well be tragically put on display this winter when Europeans face freezing temperatures with nothing but BBC-approved power systems to keep them warm.”

In Episodes 1 and 2 of its three-part documentary, Big Oil vs The World, the BBC succeeded only in demonstrating its own bias. Time and again, viewers were presented with only one side of a many-sided issue. Episode 3 is no exception. This episode’s main narrative is that, for years, oil companies have touted natural gas as a clean alternative to coal, but poor execution has largely offset the benefits.

Per unit of energy generated, natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of coal.…