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   Bread and Circuses (breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Sep-2023 23:28:20 JST Bread and Circuses

   Left to themselves, the fossil fuel industry will never stop polluting the planet, killing the biosphere, and raking in immense profits.

   It's what they do. It's what capitalism demands.
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   "Europe's Biggest Oil Company Quietly Shelves a Radical Plan to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint"

   Six months after becoming the chief executive at Shell, Wael Sawan quietly ended the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, the environmental projects designed to counteract the warming effects of CO2 emissions.

   In an investor event in June, Sawan laid out an updated strategy for the European oil major that included cutting costs and doubling down on profit drivers like oil and gas. As important was what he omitted: any mention of the company’s prior commitment to spend up to $100 million a year to build a pipeline of carbon credits, part of the firm’s promise to zero out its emissions by 2050.

   Those goals for the offsets program have been retired, the company confirmed, along with the plan to harvest a whopping 120 million carbon credits annually by the end of the decade from projects that sequester carbon with trees, grasses, or other natural resources, many of which Shell would develop itself.

   That would have accounted for about 10% of the company’s emissions. It hasn’t made public any new targets for developing offsets or specified how it now plans to deliver on its future climate commitments.

   The pullback reflects both Sawan’s renewed commitment to the oil-and-gas business that generates most of Shell’s profits, and an admission that the prior goals were simply unattainable.

   Over the past two years, Shell barely made a dent. It spent $95 million, less than half of its initial budget, to build or invest in a portfolio of carbon projects from Western Africa to the Brazilian Amazon to Australian farmlands. They’ve generated few if any offsets.
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   As you might expect, this article posted at Bloomberg is "fair and balanced," giving Shell equal time to extol its virtues. But the facts are simply damning.

   FULL ARTICLE -- https://archive.ph/Q2nV6#selection-4735.0-4747.136

   #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

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     SewBlue (sewblue@sfba.social)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Sep-2023 03:16:36 JST SewBlue

     in reply to

     @breadandcircuses It's like the British landlords during the Irish Potato famine. People starved while Ireland produced a grain surplus. The rights of the rich to earn their money was more important than the lives of the starving Irish. Food was exported while people died of starvation.

     All the excuses you hear about climate change were used against the Irish - they are lazy and not minding their personal carbon foot print, oh sorry, farming their potatoes well. The Irish need to pull themselves up by their boot straps so they don't starve. The market needs to rule and famines are natural. Even: it is good and natural to reduce overpopulation.

     I'm far too cynical today to think that things will change before crops start to fail, given what it took to get Britian off corn subsidies. The corn laws subsiding grain exports didn't end until 1 in 10 people died.