Shell have committed to being net zero by 2050, including the products they sell and have some kind of a plan in place to make it happen.
There's bits of their plan that seem dubious to me, like mentions of carbon capture but overall, since I believe that the problem of climate change wasn't "oh no, we can't do this, because it's impossible" but rather "we're not going to do this", that commitment and plan is all I'm really looking for.
It would be like the USA implementing a carbon tax. Is it instantly going to solve all the problems tomorrow? Will it magically fix all the previous carbon they've emitted. No, but it would be a really smart thing to do and just based on their size, would have a massive impact over time accelerating the transition.
> Shell have committed to being net zero by 2050, including the products they sell
How is this remotely possible in any real sense? It doesn’t hold up to any form of scrutiny. They would literally have to remove thousands of tonnes of carbon from the air every year and put it back in the ground. That is not possible.
No, they’ve built a few wind farms and intend to trade carbon credits. Pure greenwashing.
> They would literally have to remove thousands of tonnes of carbon from the air every year and put it back in the ground. That is not possible.
They don't need to remove it from the air, that's kind of the last resort, though some people do think that'll be part of the answer eventually and are investigating ways to do it. The simplest and cheapest option to reach their goal will generally be to avoid emitting carbon in the first place.
So yes, building wind farms is a good thing, as is running an EV charging network. Lots of things they can do to make money as a business that don't involve greenhouse gas emissions. Lots of ways they can save money as a business, which as a side effect reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon credits are a boring, sensible answer that economist like, it's basically equivalent to a carbon tax. It literally pays people to do the right thing, and charges them if they don't. It's one of the policies that enabled Tesla and EVs generally to succeed and get to the point where they are better than what we had before.
They also keep raising the ambitions of their goals over time. Basically, big corporations don't want to be the only one doing this, because their competitors would screw them. But if they all do it, then it's in everyone's benefit, you just need some system to make sure that the other corporations aren't cheating.
On the S and the G, I could imagine Tesla doing quite bad. With e.g. "work fro. Hone is fine, as long as you work from the office at least 40 hours a week".
Besides, shell is apparently so green that activists investors are asking it to split out the green energy part from the oil part. The idea of activists is that oil lovers undervalue shell because of the green stuff, whilst green lovers undervalue shell because of the oil. Hence if you split it the parts have a higher combined valuation.
Point being, shell has a very significant green energy investment.
My rough and ready sums put 30,000 pounds of petrol through the lifetime of an average ICE car.
Meanwhile, I see numbers like this a lot and they always seem to trend high. You're talking 250 tons of ores to make perhaps 250-1000kg of the car; an efficiency of between 0.1 and 0.4 percent over some pretty straightforward, widely available ores. That doesn't really stack up with the numbers you get if you look at the efficiency of commercial ores for those minerals.
So I think the mining is comparable between battery and petrol, but as others point out, you can recycle the battery; the petrol had become problematic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
If nothing else, you could grind up the batteries and treat them as ore for any single one of the minerals used, and by your numbers you'd be way better off.
This is basically just an appeal to big numbers. "500,000 pounds? That's a lot! ICE cars must certainly be less polluting. I mean, just look at the numbers: you have to dig up FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS of Earth's crust! FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND! That's HALF A MILLION!"
Can they? I've seen people make this claim, but I've not seen it actually substantiated. Who has successfully recycled one, what was their yield, what was the cost?
The techniques that separate lithium from ore are extreme overkill for separating lithium from dead batteries. Recycling lithium is like mining lithium on easy mode: better yield and cost. If an EV can justify the raw resource extraction within one car lifetime -- and it can, handily -- it justifies the recycling. We should expect recycling to be (average EV lifetime) behind on the scale curve, though, which will make it a prime source for anti-EV talking points until the market saturates in a decade or two.
Well why shouldn't they be? Most major auto makers are phasing out development of new ICE drivetrains, and phasing out ICE manufacturing altogether. Meanwhile Tesla is certainly not without criticism.
YMMV on exactly what counts as "political", but I can easily imagine someone having an honest, good faith belief that investing in Toyota's transition to EVs is just as good for the planet as investing in Tesla's from-scratch EVs.
A electric cars are mostly a luxury item for rich people to feel better. Not sure why you think Tesla should have a good rating.
They are harmful in that they are actively distracting from the proper solution: that people shouldn't have private cars.
The environmental cost to produce car, the space they take up in the cities, in the end private car ownership can not be made sustainable even if they run on electric. Tech wont solve the climate crisis, only societal change will.
Whenever I see an argument like this I'm confused by how hand-wavey "just achieve societal change" is. Like, sure, there's various issues with various technological approaches, but it's not as if the kind of broad social change that'd see private cars outlawed develops overnight.
If anything, the last couple of decades demonstrate pretty convincingly and depressingly that putting together real momentum (read: won referendums on things like carbon taxes, _not_ push polls) is capital-H Hard. It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either. Consider [1]: this is in a constituency electorally dominated by one of the most avowedly socially-liberal cities in the US and year after year it goes down by similar margins, and that's incredibly anodyne compared to straight-up getting rid of private cars.
Conversely, supply-side energy mix changes have, over the same timeframe, made drastic improvements in emissions-per-capita without requiring much/any self-sacrifice. Martyrdom doesn't really scale in the same way.
So: what's your plan for gaining the power required to implement your scenario, taking into account the apparent ineffectiveness of decades of messaging? "just ban the cars" would be sensical if you were emperor for a day, but failing any miracles it seems to me that the real distraction is this sort of utopianism.
That's true, though the intent behind posting the referendum was as a reflection of (lack of) direct public support for potentially personally painful measures. Getting something done through legislative channels obviously isn't worthless or meaningless, but it's not as direct of a reflection of a willingness to incur changes as a referendum is. In a unipolar state like WA, the actions of the legislature can be pretty divorced from actual popular sentiment, and runs the risk of being undone by referendum - which has a lot of precedent in fairly recent WA history.
Transitioning from car-centric to human-centric cities is not about sacrifice. It is about understanding how cars actually keep cities from being places that could be much more enjoyable to live in.
Having finding trouble an apartment? Without all the wasted space for cars we could have much denser cities. Problem solved!
Want to have a place where children can actually play outside safely? Again, ban cars and you don't have to move to the country or suburbia.
Tired of how loud cities are? Oh boy, do I have a solution for that.
I am not preaching sacrifice, I am saying if we change some things we can achieve much better living conditions for everyone, a plus in living standard.
So it is more of a matter of getting people to be conscious about how things actually work.
So no, I am not Utopian. The point still stands that Tech wont solve the issues. It is sink or swim for humanity.
OMG . Not personal, but you're delusional and/or straight up lying.
Denser cities are more enjoyable to live ? Wrong.
Denser cities safer for children to play outside ? Wrong.
Cities are loud because of cars ? With all that increased density you will have your surroundings much noisier when it hurts most - at the end of the day, when everyone is back from the job, and having a good time at home. Loud music, celebrations, brawls, arguments, etc.
No, cramping more people in the same space will not this space more livable; ask Chinese .
You're preaching to the choir: I personally agree with much of this (lived in metro Tokyo), but that's honestly quite irrelevant. The point of contention isn't whether it'd be better in some absolute sense - it's whether you can convince enough people of the correctness of your vision to attain the support required to implement it.
It's not like your average American isn't aware of these arguments; they're just not broadly convincing (even if, from your or my perspective, they are). If they were, population flows would be headed in the other direction.
I'm pushing back here because your solution appears to be to continue to make the same arguments that have, so far, failed to convince enough people to deflect us from our current trajectory. More of the same, but louder? And given the urgency of the position, it's not like waiting on natural generational shift is much of an answer.
That's more or less why I take the exact opposite position and am bullish on anything that involves supply-side efficiency and bearish on anything that involves people having spontaneous moral awakenings.
I don't live in a city. I'm 20 miles from the nearest grocery store. I build real physical things with my hands that require physical materials like lumber to haul around. I can't haul 2000 lb of lumber on the back of my road bike.
What would be the issue with just having your stuff delivered then?
And yeah every rule needs exceptions, of course there should be ways to rent cars for special occasion, I am just against general private car ownership for most people.
Edit: General private car ownership of people living in the cities that is
I hate cars as much as the next guy, but transitioning all urban life away from cars is a much more difficult project than transitioning urban life to electric cars.
The no-cars world requires a huge amount of political buy-in and you’d be going through the most politically annoying group in the US – homeowners. The transition to electric cars can be done through simple laws that change the incentives (like by implementing a federal gas tax so it’s cheaper to drive electric, or heavily subsidizing electric cars)
I think your view is skewed towards living in a city. your solution doesn't work for a number of reasons. if I wanted to go somewhere I would call an Uber and they would drive 20 or 30 miles to pick me up and then 40 or 50 miles more to drop me off and then the reverse would happen when I wanted to go home Rather than me just driving the 100 miles there and back You have additional overhead of somebody having to come pick me up doubling the miles driven. That person has to get paid which makes it even more expensive. And there are still cars! I'm just not allowed to own one. if I'm sharing a ride which is unlikely it will take up way more time which is also an expensive drag on the economy.
delivery here is unreliable and expensive. if I'm picking out wood I have to go through dozens of boards to find ones that aren't fucked up. I need to find ones that are suitable for the job that I'm trying to use them for. A delivery guy would just grab whatever and throw it in the truck. It's not like I'm ordering an iPod off of Amazon. no mileage savings would be had because it is unlikely that anybody else would be having something delivered in the middle of nowhere.
> it's absolutely truthful the allegations and lawsuits are there.
I want to make sure I understand you. You don't know if people's accusations are true, but you do know that they are making accusations. Is that correct?
You see how bizarre it gets. If you discuss workplace safety and racism (even without any proof of any wrongdoing, just talking about how to treat people better - and I'm sure there are always ways to treat people better), you get a ding on the score. If you suppress any discussion on the matter, you score is perfect.
There's absolutely no evidence Tesla is more racist or unsafe place to work than Shell. If anything, Shell should be, in theory, more risky, safety-wise - they are much bigger, so more opportunity to screw up, and they do some things that are inherently risky, like mining and extraction. But I have a serious suspicion that the score has much less to do with safety statistics than with politics and donating to certain people and NGOs, somehow.
I don't know the actual statistics (does it exist even?), all I say is making decisions on the basis of "discussions" as if it were derogatory information makes no sense. It doesn't also make sense to treat accusations as if they were a proof of wrongdoing - though a lawsuit slightly raises the probability of there being some wrongdoing, as we can assume at least some potential claimants would be deterred by the fact that their accusations are false - but we should not overestimate it, there are a lot of false accusations flying around, and even more accusations that aren't provably false but also not proven true - e.g. when a person has no success working for the company and claims it was because of discrimination of one sort or another. The person may genuinely feel that way - but it does not mean necessarily that's actually what happened.
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...
Higher than TSLA