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Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing

January 22, 2022

Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing

A new Global Witness report found that it has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million gas-powered cars.
Shell's Quest carbon capture and storage facility in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta.
SHELL’S QUEST CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE FACILITY IN FORT SASKATCHEWAN, ALBERTA. THE CANADIAN PRESS/JASON FRANSON

A first-of-its-kind “green” Shell facility in Alberta is emitting more greenhouse gases than it’s capturing, throwing into question whether taxpayers should be funding it, a new report has found.

Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage facility captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the hydrogen produced at its Scotford complex between 2015 and 2019. Scotford refines oil from the Alberta tar sands.

But a new report from human rights organization Global Witness found the hydrogen plant emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in the same timeframe—including methane, which has 80 times the warming power of carbon during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and accounts for about a quarter of man-made warming today.

To put that in perspective, the “climate-forward” part of the Scotford plant alone has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million fuel-powered cars, Global Witness said.

“We do think Shell is misleading the public in that sense and only giving us one side of the story,” said Dominic Eagleton, who wrote the report. He said industry’s been pushing for governments to subsidize the production of fossil hydrogen (hydrogen produced from natural gas) that’s supplemented with carbon capture technology as a “climate-friendly” way forward, but the new report shows that’s not the case.

In an email, Shell said the facility was introduced to display the merits of carbon capture technology, but didn’t directly respond to the allegation that its hydrogen component emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the Economy Has to Radically Transform to End Fossil Fuels in 20 Years

August 19, 2021

How the Economy Has to Radically Transform to End Fossil Fuels in 20 Years

Coming disruptions will eventually lay waste to conventional jobs in incumbent fossil fuel, combustion engine, and livestock farming industries.
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IMAGE: MARCEL KUSCH/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES

To avoid the worst of climate change’s disastrous effects, humanity needs to slash carbon emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere at a pace and scale often said to be eye-wateringly difficult, expensive, and even unlikely given the continued failure of political will. That’s the implication of the IPCC’s report, published this week, which concludes that a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures is now inevitable in 20 years.

The IPCC’s “best-case” scenario concludes that if we act fast, we might be able to gradually reduce temperatures back down to 1.4C by 2100. Yet this would keep us in the 1.5C climate danger zone for decades, which could risk triggering tipping points that could lead to irreversible and even more dangerous shifts in the climate system. Against this background, the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill has offered a watered down set of policies that simply won’t contribute to the scale of change required.

But a new report by technology forecasting think-tank RethinkX finds that the scope for change could be far larger and faster than either the IPCC or powerful governments like the United States realise: because the most powerful fossil fuel-based industries in the world—oil, gas, and coal; livestock farming; and combustion engines—are going to become obsolete purely due to extant economic factors well within the next 20 years. According to RethinkX, they are being increasingly disrupted by a cluster of clean technologies in the energy, transport and food sectors, which are rapidly becoming cheaper, more efficient, and as a result, more ubiquitous.

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Fossil Fuels Are Wildly More Expensive Than Previously Thought, Study Says

March 11, 2021

Fossil Fuels Are Wildly More Expensive Than Previously Thought, Study Says

Overinflated fossil fuel investments might be a ‘worthless’ bubble waiting to trigger the next crash, while renewables seem more appealing than ever.
GettyImages-631092436
IMAGE:  LUKAS SCHULZE/GETTY IMAGES)

A new study finds that conventional electric power plants powered by fossil fuels and hydro are massively overvalued by the world’s leading analyst organizations. The report says they are overvalued to such a degree that the trillions of dollars of investment in these industries could amount to a “bubble” similar to the subprime mortgage housing bubble whose collapse triggered the 2008 financial crash.

The stunning findings imply not only that renewable energies such as solar, wind and battery storage are far cheaper than believed, but that they are already outcompeting coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro power. This fact, however, has been masked by distorted calculations based on a fundamentally incorrect metric: the ‘Levelized Cost of Electricity’ (LCOE).

The new report by independent technology think tank RethinkX, titled The Great Stranding: How Inaccurate Mainstream LCOE Estimates are Creating a Trillion-Dollar Bubble in Conventional Energy Assets is written by environmental social scientist Dr. Adam Dorr, a Research Fellow at RethinkX, and the think tank’s co-founder Tony Seba, a serial entrepreneur and Stanford University lecturer in technology disruption.

Their new analysis, which is likely to send shockwaves across fossil fuel industries and utilities, probes into the science around a conventional power plant’s LCOE—which basically measures the average cost of generating electricity across the entire lifetime of the plant, including its building and operating costs.

Energy hype

Dorr and Seba show that mainstream LCOE assessments for conventional coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro power plants are simply false. In reality, due to the growing inefficiencies of these forms of energy, the amount of electricity conventional power plants produce falls over time, in some cases quite dramatically…

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Capitalism Will Ruin the Earth By 2050, Scientists Say

October 29, 2020

Capitalism Will Ruin the Earth By 2050, Scientists Say

The good news is, by cutting our consumption, there’s another way.
GettyImages-1161614032
IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

A spate of new scientific research starkly lays out the choice humankind faces in coming decades:

By 2050, we could retain high levels of GDP, at the price of a world wracked by minerals and materials shortages, catastrophic climate change, and a stuttering clean energy transition —paving the way for a slowly crumbling civilization.

Or, we could ditch the GDP fetish and enter a world of abundance, with energy consumption safely contained within planetary boundaries, and high-tech economies that support jobs, health and education for everyone without costing the earth.

On the first option, scientists backed by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program have concluded that capitalism-as-we-know-it cannot support a successful clean energy transition.

Not only that, but capitalism is on track to lead the world into mineral shortages and supply bottlenecks that could cut short efforts to decarbonize transport systems, guaranteeing dangerous climate change.

The new study published in the journal Energy Strategy Reviews finds that electrifying our cars, trucks and trains so that they run on renewable energy is only viable if we reduce the endlessly growing levels of consumption in industrial societies. That, effectively, means fundamentally transforming the very sinews of capitalism.

The good news is that separate research published in September proves that such an economic transformation is perfectly feasible while still maintaining a good quality of life for people all over the world.

Modeling the world

The transportation study is based on a highly sophisticated ‘integrated assessment model’ (IAM) that brings together a vast amount of empirical data. Known as the MEDEAS-World model, it incorporates feedback relations between global and regional economies; renewable, fossil fuel energy flows and energy infrastructure; technology developments and costs; minerals and land requirements; climate change and water; and many other sectors.

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Catastrophic Hurricanes Are the ‘New Normal,’ and They Will Cost Trillions

September 13, 2020

Catastrophic Hurricanes Are the ‘New Normal,’ and They Will Cost Trillions

Taxpayers and already struggling communities are largely bearing the brunt of the costs for climate change-fueled disasters created by big oil and big business.
Screen Shot 2020-08-31 at 11

“We got a little bit lucky,” said President Donald Trump about the storm which killed at least six people in Louisiana, ripped apart buildings, left more than half a million homes without power, and triggered a chemical fire from an industrial plant over Lake Charles.

Of course, Trump was glad he didn’t have to postpone his speech at the Republican National Convention.

But while Hurricane Laura did not, thankfully, produce the catastrophic storm surge some predicted—weakening into a tropical storm—it represents an unmistakably escalating trend of extreme weather events due to increasing global temperatures.

Hurricane Laura had followed hot on the heels of Hurricane Marco. The Atlantic hurricane season has already broken records with 13 named storms, which meteorologists consider well above-normal activity.

Recently published scientific studies suggest that the devastation wrought by Laura, and the potential catastrophe only narrowly avoided, are likely to become a ‘new normal’ if we continue to pump carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Billion dollar disasters

Earlier in August, the US-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) published a major report on exactly this issue, titled Climate Change-Fueled Weather Disasters: Costs to State and Local Economies.

The report brought together data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database with other studies, to build a stark picture of what we now know about extreme weather risks.

The report points out that since 1980, the number of extreme weather events per year in the United States has increased fourfold, with annual direct cost of these disasters increasing fivefold.

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Western Industrial Farming Is Eating Our Forests and Accelerating Climate Change

April 18, 2019

Image: Shutterstock

Western Industrial Farming Is Eating Our Forests and Accelerating Climate Change

The dynamics of deforestation are increasingly inseparable from the growing demand for food from consumers in the most developed countries.

Humans are eating the world’s forests. Not directly, of course—but a spate of new studies shows we might as well be.

This is, of course, extremely bad news for the climate—which is bad news for all life on earth.

Deforestation is the world’s second largest source of human-induced carbon emissions, which are the main driver of climate change. Currently we are on course to breach the climate danger threshold within 12 years according to the UN. ADVERTISEMENT

But a new scientific study by a team of European scientists reveals that the biggest cause of deforestation is industrial farming—and the major culprits include some of the most well-known names in Western agribusiness, such as Cargill and Bunge. 

Eating the planet

The study, published in the journal Global Environmental Change at the end of March, is the first of its kind to demonstrate the extent to which deforestation in the tropics is directly driven by industrial food production. 

Focusing on the period between 2010 and 2014, it shows that beef and oilseed products account for over half of emissions from tropical deforestation, with Europe and China among the major importers. And overall, global trade in such products accounts for up to 39 percent of emissions. 

The paper, whose lead authors are Florence Pendrill and Martin Persson at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, demonstrates that deforestation is driven chiefly by land uses for crops, pastures, and forest plantations to produce specific commodities which are widely consumed around the world by industrial nations.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

For Hollywood, ‘Vice’ Remarkably Astute about Politics

January 11, 2019

For Hollywood, ‘Vice’ Remarkably Astute about Politics

Adam McKay’s movie may be flawed, but it’s still must-see for his depiction of how Cheney amassed power by exploiting Watergate, an inexperienced president and 9/11, writes James DiEugenio.

In 2015, director Adam McKay did something unusual in Hollywood.  He made a good film out of a good book.  In fact, one could argue that McKay’s movie “The Big Short” is even better than Michael Lewis’ book.  It is funnier, has a faster pace and is much more innovative stylistically.

McKay has now done something even more unusual for Hollywood.  He has made a good film about an unattractive and unlikeable character, former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Appropriately, the film is called “Vice.” I am going to say some critical things about “Vice.”  But let me start by recommending that everyone who reads this website see this film. It’s not often that Hollywood produces a film this honest, ambitious and intelligent about the contemporary American political scene.

Vice: Portrait of the abuse of power. (@vicemovie on Twitter)

Early in his life, Cheney flunked out of Yale and was tagged with two DUI’s.  His wife Lynne—who later became a prolific author—helped straighten him out  and put him on a path toward a political career.  From that point on, McKay, who also wrote the script, frames Cheney with the following epigraph, which is written across the screen at one point:

“Beware the quiet man.  For while others speak, he watched. And while others act, he plans.  And when they finally rest, he strikes.”

The warning applies to three key sections covered by the film.

Watergate Power Vacuum

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VICE – The Dick Cheney/Rumsfeld Conspiracy

January 1, 2019

VICE – The Dick Cheney/Rumsfeld Conspiracy

I went to go watch VICE – the story about how Dick Cheney took over the government with the aid of his wife – Lynne Cheney. Vice is a film that seeks to bring complicated information about the inner corruption in Washington and transform it into a digestible and entertaining format. There is no question that Christian Bale delivered a very impressive performance of how Dick Cheney really is – a secretive and distant man whose eyes were always filled with naked contempt. Amy Adams gave a fantastic performance as well and captured the real character of the former Second Lady Lynne Cheney who was very much like her husband – ambitious, and equally just as ruthless.

While the film captures the reality of what took place, it completely misses the real story behind the scenes as to even how Cheney came to be Vice President. The film shows that he was out of politics and had effectively retired for some time. It pretends that George Bush called him to be his Vice President and they negotiate that Cheney will have most of the power and Bush was too stupid to understand what he was agreeing to.

As always, for whatever reason, I seem to be always in the middle of just about every major event for the past 30+ years. I have stated before that I was asked to fly around the country and meet with Republicans who wanted to run for President. Prior to 1999, they were told I was there to advise them on the world economy and how it functioned. I have been to White House dinners and testified before Congress. I have taken calls from Washington in times of crisis. So meeting with people who wanted to run for President was nothing unusual for me.

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The Bailouts for the Rich Are Why America Is So Screwed Right Now

September 15, 2018

The Bailouts for the Rich Are Why America Is So Screwed Right Now

Did they prevent a full-scale collapse? Yes. Was it necessary to do it the way we did? Not at all.

These guys got off pretty easy. (Photo by Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images)

In 1948, the architect of the post-war American suburb, William Levitt, explained the point of the housing finance system. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” he said. “He has too much to do.”

It’s worth reflecting on this quote on the ten-year anniversary of the financial crisis, because it speaks to how the architects of the bailouts shaped our culture. Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, and Hank Paulson, the three key men in charge, basically argue that the bailouts they executed between 2007 and 2009 were unfair, but necessary to preserve stability. It’s time to ask, though: just what stability did they preserve?

These three men paint the financial crisis largely as a technical one. But let’s not get lost in the fancy terms they use, like “normalization of credit flows,” in discussing what happened and why. The excessively wonky tone is intentional—it’s intended to hide the politics of what happened. So let’s look at what the bailouts actually were, in normal human language.

The official response to the financial crisis ended a 75-year-old American policy of pursuing broad homeownership as a social goal. Since at least Franklin Delano Roosevelt, American leaders had deliberately organized the financial system to put more people in their own homes. In 2011, the Obama administration changed this policy, pushing renting over owning. The CEO of Bank of America, Brian Moynihan, echoed this view shortly thereafter. There are many reasons for the change, and not all of them were bad. But what’s important to understand is that the financial crisis was a full-scale assault on the longstanding social contract linking Americans with the financial system through their house.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the Mexican Government Spying on Journalists?

November 23, 2017

Is the Mexican Government Spying on Journalists?

On the season finale of ‘CYBERWAR,’ Ben Makuch investigates why government spyware is cropping up on Mexican reporters’ smartphones.

On Tuesday, VICELAND is airing the season finale of CYBERWAR, sending Ben Makuch to Mexico to investigate the government’s potentially fraught use of hacking tools. Mexican authorities purchased spyware for their fight against drug cartels—but now a spate of watchdog journalists covering government corruption have detected the invasive software on their smartphones.

Edward Snowden Demonstrates How To “Go Black”

May 29, 2016

Edward Snowden Demonstrates How To “Go Black”

When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden first exposed the world tojust how easily the government could compromise their technology and spy on them, many immediately sought ways to secure their data and protect their gadgets.

But, as Wired.com reports, Snowden is here to help. “‘Going Black’ is a pretty big ask,” he tells VICE’s Shane Smith, but not impossible, as Snowden shows how to “make sure your phone works for you… instead of working for someone else.”

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