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Yesterday, the world’s leading oil producers, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), projected a larger decrease in oil demand than was predicted earlier in the pandemic, The Hill reported. OPEC also predicts an increase in demand next year, but that increase will not be as large as this year’s drop.
Why This Matters: Big oil and gas companies like BP may be starting to pivot away from oil, while they try to remain sunny about gas. But then The New York Times breaks a story like the one this weekend about industry lobbyists who were working hard to get the Trump administration to put in place laxer methane leak rules while knowing about the excess methane gas pollution occurring. “Pesky natural gas.” Their words, not ours.
BP Says Business As Usual is Unsustainable
BP says in its report, “The world is on an unsustainable path: the scenarios show that achieving a rapid and sustained fall in carbon emissions is likely to require a series of policy measures, led by a significant increase in carbon prices. These policies may need to be further reinforced by shifts in societal behaviors and preferences. Delaying these policy measures and societal shifts may significantly increase the scale of the challenge and lead to significant additional economic costs and disruption.”
CNN reported that this year’s report was markedly different from last year’s when they predicted demand for oil would continue for more than a decade. Analysts, according to CNN Business, say the pandemic accelerated the changeover to renewable energy. BP is releasing a new strategy in which the company reportedly will make a 10 times increase in annual low carbon investments to $5 billion by 2030, “when it expects its oil and gas production to have fallen by 40% from 2019 level,” according to CNN.
Pesky Gas Flares
The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi broke the story of a recording of an oil and gas industry meeting in 2019 in which industry lobbyists lamented how methane gas flaring was giving the industry a bad name. Apparently, on the recording, the lobbyists discuss the practice of burning it off methane that created a “huge, huge threat” to the industry’s efforts to portray natural gas as a “clean and climate-friendly” fuel source. The lobbyists believed that flaring overall was damaging to the industry’s reputation. One asked, “What’s going to stick with those young people and make them support oil and gas?” As if anything could.
To Go Deeper: This seems a bit like the drug pusher telling an addict that he’s not healthy. It’s a tough pivot for BP to make, but they have launched quite a campaign.
by Amy Lupica, ODP Staff Writer Less than two weeks after being confirmed, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has announced that the Biden administration is resuming an Obama-era program that gave billions in loans to clean energy companies. Granholm, during talks at the CERAWeek energy conference on Wednesday, pointed the clean energy businesses the Department of Energy loan program […]
by Natasha Lasky, ODP Staff Writer The world desperately needs more sources of emissions-free energy, yet as these power sources are brought online, we must also contend with their impact on animals and ecosystems. In California, government officials are trying to rescue California condors, which are critically endangered, from being killed by the blades of […]
In the wake of one of the largest power losses in United States history, the conversation about green energy in Texas is back in the headlines. Emily Holden and two other investigative reporters collaborated on a story that ran in The Guardian, The Texas Observer, and San Antonio Report exposing how the Texas Gas Service was successful in significantly watering down a plan by the city of Austin to reduce the use of natural gas there in the future.
Why This Matters: The oil industry has spent billions to manipulate the national conversation around green energy.
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