Oil Majors Double Down On Fossil Fuels While Climate Scientists Go To Prison – CleanTechnica

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Something is seriously out of whack when ExxonMobil and Chevron double down on their plans to extract every molecule of fossil fuels on Earth while climate scientists go to jail for telling the truth about the nexus between burning oil and methane and a rapidly overheating planet. The Matrix had it right. Humans are a virus, one that will only stop when it has totally consumed its host.

October of 2023 is the month when Big Oil decided to go full tilt boogie into an increasingly dark future, despite overwhelming evidence that their activities are driving global heating that could kill billions of innocent people. The urge for profits is so great that nothing must be allowed to stand in its way.

As Reuters reports, two weeks ago ExxonMobil agreed to acquire Pioneer Natural Resources for nearly $60 billion. This week, Chevron, the second largest oil company in the world, agreed to pay $53 billion for Hess. The Exxon acquisition is the largest in the company’s history since it acquired Mobil Oil nearly 20 years ago.  The driving force behind the Chevron deal is that it gives it access to a new fossil fuels reserves being developed in Guyana, a country in northeast South America between Venezuela and Brazil.

Limiting Emissions Of Fossil Fuels

According to The Nation, Exxon has pledged to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2050 while increasing its oil and gas production. CleanTechnica readers may wonder how those two mutually exclusive goals can possibly be met. The answer is, by lying to the world. Companies who promote fossil fuels separate their emissions into three categories.

Scope 1 are emissions from a company’s own operations such as its factories, stores, and vehicles. Scope 2 are emissions from the production of electricity that a company purchases. Reducing this means buying or generating power from renewable sources like solar and wind. Scope 3 are emissions from the production of goods that companies buy from suppliers (“upstream”) and from customer use of products (“downstream”).

In the fossil fuels industry, Scope 3 emissions account for about 90% of the total, The Nation says, as burning oil produces much more carbon than drilling for it. But Exxon’s net zero pledge is carefully worded to avoid any mention of Scope 3 emissions. Exxon is promising only to make its own operations carbon neutral, including buying electricity, or generating its own, from renewable sources.

Exxon apparently sees a future where the company’s drill rigs will run on clean solar power while pulling up more fossil fuels, which will dump more carbon into the atmosphere when consumed. This is what “net zero” means in Exxon language.

Profits From Fossil Fuels

Both companies are flush with cash thanks to the Covid pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. But such external concerns are of no interest to the executives at ExxonMobil or Chevron. Reuters says they intend to use their wealth to increase dividends to stockholders and to repurchase outstanding shares in their companies. Chevron said this week it plans to buy back $20 billion worth of stock every year for the next three years. That’s money that could be used to promote renewable energy technology or other techniques that might mitigate the searing heat expected worldwide in the years to come.

Exxon says it will spend 12% of its annual budget on climate solutions. The other 88% will be used to produce more fossil fuels that will make the climate emergency worse. But under the rules of commerce that nations adhere to today, that’s perfectly OK.

Scientists Jailed In Germany

What is not OK is mounting any kind of challenge to an idiotic system that approves such bizarre and destructive behavior. This week in Germany, the Munich Regional Court sentenced four climate scientists turned activists to fines totaling €1680 each. If they do not pay the fines, they will be required to serve 105 days of prison. The four were convicted of criminal damage and trespassing during their peaceful protest against Germany’s policy failure regarding the climate crisis last year in Munich.

In an email to CleanTechnica, Scientist Rebellion said the scientists argued their actions were necessary to stop a looming climate and ecological catastrophe by pressuring the government to act in line with international agreements and data supplied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That data spells out the urgent need to transform the global economy and decarbonize global societies as quickly as possible. For the penalty, which was lower than the original sentence, the judge took into account that the major aim of the actions was not to damage property but to call attention to the climate crisis, which he called “the greatest challenge for humanity.”

Still, the law is the law. Those who cause the climate crisis are celebrated as heroes of capitalism, while those who protest are sanctioned and threatened with prison. Is there something wrong with this state of affairs?

The trial in Munich this week was the first of several court cases against 16 members of Scientist Rebellion. The cases begin one year after the academics’ protests, for which they were held in pre-trial detention for a week in Stadelheim Prison in Munich. As part of the protest campaign “Unite Against Climate Failure” in October 2022, the scientists participated in three nonviolent direct actions in Munich against the investment company BlackRock, the car manufacturer BMW, and the German government, for their responsibility as major contributors to the climate crisis.

On its website, Scientist Rebellion says, “Scientists have spent decades writing papers, advising governments, briefing the press: all have failed. What is the point in documenting in ever greater detail the catastrophe we face, if we are not willing to do anything about it?”

“Academics are perfectly placed to wage a rebellion. We exist in rich hubs of knowledge and expertise. We are well connected across the world and to decision makers. We have large platforms from which to inform, educate, and rally others all over the world, and we have implicit authority and legitimacy, which is the basis of political power. We can make a difference. We must do what we can to halt the greatest destruction in human history.”

The Takeaway

The Nation says Exxon believes it is swimming with the tide, not against it. The company recognizes that carbon emissions will have to be cut more than two-thirds from their current rate of 37 gigatons annually to 11 gigatons by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 2° C (3.6 ° F) — the limit beyond which global catastrophe looms.

But Exxon simply believes this will not happen. In 2050, fossil fuels “will still be required to drive critically needed economic growth,” it predicts. Despite growth in renewable energy and carbon capture technologies, “oil and natural gas are still projected to meet more than half of the world’s energy needs by 2050.” Instead of falling to 11 gigatons annually, the oil giant believes emissions will be more than twice that: 24 gigatons. And a significant portion of that will come from Exxon itself.

Although Exxon no longer denies that climate change is real, it believes that weaning the world off fossil fuels would come at an unacceptably high price. In a filing earlier this year with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said, “It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE [the net zero emissions simulation of the International Energy Agency].”

Which begs the question, too high a price for whom? Certainly not the billions of humans who would like not to be roasted to death by accelerating global temperatures, so we have to assume the ones who think the price will be too high are fossil fuels companies. In the final analysis, the wrong people are being threatened with prison in this situation. As Elie Wiesel, the noted chronicler of the horrors of the Holocaust often said, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but we must never fail to protest.”