Big Oil Reacts To Climate Change

For big oil, climate change looms large even in Trump era

James Osborne, David Hunn and Ryan Handy, March 10, 2017 (Houston Chronicle)

“…[President Donald Trump’s advisers Scott Pruitt and Peter Thiel may have lost the audience at a just-completed CERA international oil and gas industry-led conference by emphasizing the administration’s climate change skepticism because] energy ministers, CEOs, and other top executives showed that the industry is running ahead of policymakers on climate change, no longer treating it as an inconvenient theory, but rather as a hard reality to which it must adapt and change…Khalid al-Falih, the Saudi Arabian energy minister, called on his colleagues to find ways to ‘minimize the carbon footprint of fossil fuels.’ Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods said energy development can only move forward by protecting the environment and climate. Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, said the industry needed to produce more energy with fewer carbon emissions…

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Paying lip service to climate change has been a standard feature of a CERAWeek appearance for years…But in 2017, even with a brutal oil bust still weighing on profits, the issue was front and center, with numerous panel discussions devoted to everything from carbon taxes to renewable energy. Daniel Yergin, host of the event and vice chairman of IHS Markit, endlessly put the topic to CEOs and ministers from foreign petro-states…It became increasingly clear that days of denial or even skepticism around climate change is now out of bounds for executives of publicly traded oil and gas companies. Instead, they backed carbon taxes as an efficient, market-based way to control carbon dioxide emissions. They discussed increasing investments in wind and solar. They talked about unleashing the industry's innovative capacity to find technological solutions, such as carbon capture, to keep fossil fuels viable…” click here for more

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