The Guardian has reported that:
Green groups have reacted with fury to reports that BP has dropped a target to cut its oil output in the next five years, saying the company was prioritising profits over the health of the planet.
Campaign groups including Greenpeace and Reclaim Finance slammed the move that would potentially result in the oil company scrapping its plan to reduce oil and gas output by 25% by 2030 under a strategy reset by the company.
These rumours come days after Labour announced a plan to spend £22 billion on carbon capture and storage (CCS) to permit the continuing emissions from the burning of fossil fuels of the type BP supplies.
Coincidentally, the sum in question is exactly the same as that which will require austerity across the UK to close a supposed blackhole of claimed equivalent amount.
I don't believe in coincidences of this sort. BP will have lobbied very hard for CCS, and now, by no accident of chance, they are planning to reap the reward.
Meanwhile, for those who cannot afford their fuel bills this winter, there is only suffering in prospect.
Is this why all those new Labour MPs wanted office?
Was the best that they hoped for a continuation of fossil fuel burning as a consequence of the supply of massive subsidies from government whilst those in need are punished for simply being old?
Did they really think this was what going to Westminster would mean they would support?
Really?
I don't imagine for a moment that this was what they hoped for. How long will it be before they have had enough? It is the only hope we have. But it does feel desperate to have to say so.
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I do wonder at what point people will have had enough, what their understanding of the causes of getting to that point will be, and what will happen as a consequence. There’s no guarantee that people will see their predicament clearly and respond with that clear view. We live in a world of very significant lies (every day govt and associated institutions and media lie about money, to the detriment of many millions in the UK alone, including a staggering number of premature deaths). My fear is a misdirected reaction.
Regarding premature deaths a close friend died of cancer last Friday within a month of diagnosis, she is the fourth in my circle of friends to die of cancer in the last two and a half years, all aged between 64-73, all diagnosed at a very late stage, all had a very rapid decline, all had healthy and active lifestyles. I don’t beieve this is coincidence, I don’t blame any individual in the health service but it does tell the story of systemic malfunction due to consistent underfunding and fragmentation and the consequent inabilty to implement the advances in treatment that have been made. So sad.
Judith
That’s tough. Look afer yourself. Losing friends like that takes a toll.
Go well
Richard
I’m very sorry to hear that Judith.
More deaths in which Tory austerity played a part. Thanks you stupid right wing *******.
What I fail to understand though is that
1. Domestic Oil & Gas production is dropping, so
2. We will become increasingly dependant on imports and
3. The major oil exporters – Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq are not the sort of people you want to do business with if you can avoid it and politically unstable
So I suggest that for political and strategic reasons alone we should be reducing our dependence on imported fossil fuels.
Carbon Capture and Storage does nothing to address this
Much to agree with
This investigation, published yesterday, confirms those suspicions about lobbying: https://www.desmog.com/2024/10/07/uks-22-billion-carbon-capture-pledge-follows-surge-in-lobbying-by-fossil-fuel-industry-records-show/
Thanks
Interesting article here
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/08/britons-urged-to-dig-out-unwanted-electricals-to-tackle-copper-shortage
Shows the impact resource depletion is having
Reminiscent of the WW2 ‘Salvage’ drives
I agree.
So, we have a two tier government – or even a ‘front of house’ and ‘back of house government’ as an operation.
‘Font of house’ is all about winning under the FPTP system, using some form of populism race in the guise of a democratic function called voting which supposedly gives the people agency over/or with the people who rule over them – based on promises and ‘shared values’ and MPs.
And then we have the ‘back of house’ element which seems to be another beast altogether whose motivations are less transparent and where instead of individual votes of the ‘demos’ calling the shots we have a proxy form of voting where the single vote is essentially replaced with multiple votes that come in the form of multiples of money from individuals who out-vote their fellow citizens by the number ‘vote notes’ they have – the bank note replaces and usurps the humble voting slip. Thousands of bank notes and sofa/cabinet government (the drinks cabinet I bet with only the finest malt).
And now, our modern politicians job is nothing more than to manage the cognitive dissonance many of us feel as we ask for one thing and get nothing at all or something different, whilst our reasons for voting are negated by the power of someone else’s money. This management of dissonance is the metric by which modern politicians are judged by their paymasters.
That is why there is no coincidence with these issues. In his book ‘On Freedom’ (2024), Professor Timothy Snyder says this (pp. 242-244):
‘The supreme court has ruled that spending money on election campaigns is freedom of speech, and it has acted to make it easy to spend private money (and hard to spend public money) on campaigns. The ideological basis of these decisions was a very explicit libertarianism, which is a belief system at odds with freedom. It is farcical to imagine that an election can be considered from the premise that the distribution of wealth at any given moment is somehow sanctified, and from the norm that the only unnatural action is to limit the power of the wealthy in any way.
These court rulings begin with artificially limited situations that frame the question of free expression and elections in a catastrophically narrow way…….If we do not immediately see this oligarchical nonsense for what it is, this is perhaps because we have been trained to think of freedom of speech as negative, as only a matter of preventing the government from doing something, rather than as a positive such as protecting human beings who take risks speaking truth to power……… No supporter of a republic can accept the absurd notion that a central concern in elections is conferring explicit and additional political privileges upon those already dominant in society thanks to their wealth. Two thousand five hundred years of recorded political thought and political practice reveal the basic fallacy. The point of freedom of speech is to challenge accumulated power, which means accumulated wealth……….privileging wealth in elections is a direct endorsement of oligarchy.’
Snyder is of course talking about America as a republic which is bad enough.
But it was either von Hayek or Friedman in a rare moment of honesty who noted that market liberation in places like the UK might exacerbate inequality because of their more rigid social systems like the class structure (they both seemed to believe in the ‘American Dream’ then).
So if things are bad in America, they can only get much worse here.
Make no mistake therefore, that the funding of our politics is the soft-underbelly of our problem and we would be wise to concentrate on it a lot more. This is why there is no such thing as a coincidence.
Thanks
I must read it – but I have no time for more than a month
Any dissident Labour MP will be denied the Whip, thus isolating them from their CLP, and major efforts made centrally and at region to remove them. Unless a note of confidence is overwhelming (viz Sultana in Coventry) they will be vulnerable to the corruption of Anonyvoter, where huge online votes will appear (via Sam Tarry). It’s coercion, fear, and in cases like my own MP, cheerful agreement.
Absent a mass walk out of LINO MPs, there will be no change of gov for the next 5 years. Starmer/LINO is infested with lobbyists and the CCS/BP saga will be just the first of many. Short of Starmer emulating Johnson, he will not go. Perhaps “a nice little war” will come along to save his bacon. Absent that, the next 5 years looks grim and the ones after that look grimmer.
I fear so….
As long as oil companies do not pay for the remediation costs of their “externalities” then why should they GAF about increased carbon emissions. ?
Extracting and selling fossil fuels is immensely profitable, yet the true costs of that production do not and never have fallen to the energy corporates.
Until this changes, and their lobbying power and disinformation has already put climate change actions back to the absolute brink, then there is zero chance of sufficient action in dealing with the climate crisis.
On a related point I see the 3 million folks in the Tampa Bay area are highly vulnerable to the passage of Hurrican Milton, and wish the best of good fortune and personal safety to our frequent Tampa Bay based blog correspondent.
The carbon capture storage scam. https://dearscotland.substack.com/p/the-carbon-capture-storage-scam
So-called ‘carbon capture’ is nonsense.
Limestone (and chalk) works, but little else does and we don’t have that much time.
Or do we?
No we don’t.
Carbon capture means burying time bombs for future generations to deal with. Let’s not do that. (?)
Keir, what are you thinking about? Clothes? God help us every one.
Oops!. Sorry figure of speech warning. (Literary reference to Tiny Tim is my excuse)
This looks where we are heading, I find it all very frightening…..
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/08/earths-vital-signs-show-humanitys-future-in-balance-say-climate-experts
Down in the New Forest we have just achieved a big win in stopping ExxonMobil’s proposed CCS scheme to support Blue Hydrogen production at Fawley.
Clearly I’d love to believe the community coming together in opposition was the reason, whilst suspecting it was the fact that Government didn’t give them a load of financial support.
I did a paper on the emissions impact of blue hydrogen and it’s not good! Supporting CCGT power and blue hydrogen only benefits one group – those oil majors who want to ensure full utilisation of their gas fields.
Clearly investing these funds in developing future Green technologies works create more well paid jobs and promote the UK’s energy security and position as a global green tech leader
Thanks
Is there a link to that paper?