petroleum – Page 3 – Desdemona Despair

Images taken of offshore oil and gas production facilities. (A) Small satellite facilities around a central hub facility. (B) Forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera imagery of hydrocarbon emissions from a central hub facility. Two sources are identified: cold venting and an unknown piece of equipment. (C) Other shallow water facilities. (D) Deep water facilities with flaring. Graphic: Negron, et al., 2023 / PNAS

April 4, 2023

Gulf of Mexico oil worse for climate than thought, study – “Expanding production in shallow waters, the way it’s been done historically, would have disproportionately high climate impacts”

By Drew Costley 3 April 2023 (AP) – Offshore oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico are releasing far more climate-changing methane than official estimates show, according to a new study published Monday. Using data collected from aircraft in part, climate scientists found the additional methane coming from oil and gas platforms in the Gulf […]

Percentage of OECD countries experiencing higher-than-average inflation, 1970-2022. The global inflation shock that began in the United States in 2021 and took hold worldwide in 2022 will have powerful economic and political ripple effects in 2023. It will be the principal driver of global recession, add to financial stress, and stoke social discontent and political instability everywhere. Today’s historically high inflation comes from multiple sources. First was the Covid-19 pandemic, which prompted governments to cushion the fall in incomes with extraordinary fiscal and monetary stimulus at the same time that it disrupted global supply. Then, just as the United States and Europe were coming out of the pandemic thanks to vaccines, China doubled down on its zero-Covid policy, locking down the global economy’s most important manufacturing and shipping hubs. Finally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s sanctions in response put a strain on the global supply of energy, food, and fertilizer. This unprecedented confluence of overlapping shocks pushed inflation to levels most countries hadn’t seen in nearly 50 years. Graphic: Eurasia Group

January 22, 2023

Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2023 – “The risks this year are the most dangerous we’ve encountered in the 25 years since we started Eurasia Group”

By Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan 3 January 2023 (Eurasia Group) – Russia has no way to win in Ukraine. The European Union is stronger than ever. NATO rediscovered its reason for being. The G7 is strengthening. Renewables are becoming dirt cheap. American hard power remains unrivaled. Midterms in the United States were decidedly normal […]

Climate activist Greta Thunberg of Sweden listens as Vanessa Nakate of Uganda speaks at a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on 19 January 2023. The activists urged attendees to give less power in the climate-change fight to oil companies. Photo: AP

January 21, 2023

Greta Thunberg: It’s “absurd” to think oil companies causing the climate crisis have a solution to it – “As long as they can get away with it, they will continue to invest in fossil fuels, they will continue to throw people under the bus”

By Rachel Koning Beals 19 January 2023 (MarketWatch) – Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, age 20 and arguably the face of a generation that wants to roll back decades of reliance on oil and gas by means of alternative energy sources, had a message Thursday as she mingled with the corporate and political bigwigs meeting […]

Summary of all global warming projections (nominal scenarios) reported by ExxonMobil scientists in internal documents and peer-reviewed publications (gray lines), superimposed on historically observed temperature change (red). Solid gray lines (and asterisked numerical labels) indicate global warming projections modeled by ExxonMobil scientists themselves; dashed gray lines indicate projections internally reproduced by ExxonMobil scientists from third-party sources. Shades of gray and numerical labels scale with model start dates, from earliest (1977: lightest, “1”) to latest (2003: darkest, “12”). Numerical labels correspond to panels in Fig. 1, which displays all original graphical projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists. Observations reflect the smoothed annual average of five historical time series. Graphic: Supran, et al., 2023 / Science

January 21, 2023

Exxon disputed climate findings for years. Its scientists knew better. “ExxonMobil scientists knew about this problem to a shockingly fine degree as far back as the 1980s, but company spokesmen denied, challenged, and obscured this science.”

By Alice McCarthy 12 January 2023 (The Harvard Gazette) – Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to an analysis published Thursday in Science by a team of Harvard-led researchers. Despite those […]

A youth runs over what remains of the glacier that lost most of its volume during the last years, on top of the Zugspitze Mountain near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Saturday, 25 June 2022. Once the world had hope that when nations got together, they could stop climate change. Thirty years after leaders around the globe first got together to try, that hope has melted. Photo: Michael Probst / AP Photo

December 23, 2022

Climate negotiations: 30 years of melting hope and U.S. power – “Such innovative, exciting proposals were put forward in the early years, which if they had been implemented, we would be in a so much better situation”

By Seth Borenstein 4 November 2022 (AP) – Thirty years ago there was hope that a warming world could clean up its act. It didn’t. The United States helped forge two historic agreements to curb climate change then torpedoed both when new political administrations took over. Rich and poor nations squabbled about who should do what. During […]

Rising sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea since 1901. The waters around Puerto Rico have warmed by heat two degrees Fahrenheit. Data: EPA Climate Change Indicators in the United States. Graphic: EPA

December 20, 2022

Big oil is behind conspiracy to deceive public, first climate racketeering lawsuit says – “What’s different about this case is that we have their enterprise in writing: the decision by rival companies, their front groups, scientists, and associations to act together to change public opinion”

By Nina Lakhani 20 December 2022 (The Guardian) – The same racketeering legislation used to bring down mob bosses, motorcycle gangs, football executives and international fraudsters is to be tested against oil and coal companies who are accused of conspiring to deceive the public over the climate crisis. In an ambitious move, an attempt will […]

Inside the King Abdullah research center in Riyadh, a space station-like compound powered by 20,000 solar panels. Photo: Iman Al-Dabbagh / The New York Times

December 20, 2022

Inside the Saudi strategy to keep the world hooked on oil – “People would like us to give up on investment in hydrocarbons. But no.”

By Hiroko Tabuchi 21 November 2022 (The New York Times) – Shimmering in the desert is a futuristic research center with an urgent mission: Make Saudi Arabia’s oil-based economy greener, and quickly. The goal is to rapidly build more solar panels and expand electric-car use so the kingdom eventually burns far less oil. But Saudi […]

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres, Saudi Adel Al-Jubeir, Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Hassan Shoukry, Crown Prince and the Prime Minister of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and other leaders pose for a family photo during the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 7 November 2022. Photo: Mohammed Salem / REUTERS

November 19, 2022

At COP27, climate change framed as battle for survival – “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”

By William James, Valerie Volcovici, and Simon Jessop 7 November 2022 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) – World leaders and diplomats framed the fight against global warming as a battle for human survival during opening speeches at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt on Monday, with the head of the United Nations declaring a lack of […]

Components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties, 1960-2021 and projected to 2022. Components are presented individually for (a) fossil CO2 and cement carbonation emissions (EFOS), (b) growth rate in atmospheric CO2 concentration (GATM), (c) emissions from land-use change (ELUC), (d) the land CO2 sink (SLAND), (e) the ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN), and (f) the budget imbalance that is not accounted for by the other terms. Positive values of SLAND and SOCEAN represent a flux from the atmosphere to land or the ocean. All data are in GtC yr−1 with the uncertainty bounds representing ±1 standard deviation in shaded colour. Data sources are as in Fig. 3. The red dots indicate our projections for the year 2022, and the red error bars the uncertainty in the projections. Graphic: Friedlingstein, et al., 2022 / Earth System Science Data

November 19, 2022

Global Carbon Budget 2022: Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – No sign of decrease in global CO2 emissions – “This year we see yet another rise in global fossil CO2 emissions, when we need a rapid decline”

11 November 2022 (Global Carbon Project) – Global carbon emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the Global Carbon Project science team (Global Carbon Budget 2022). If current emissions levels persist, there is now a 50% chance […]

Map showing population-weighted mean changes in extremely-high and very-high fire danger days in 2018-2021 compared with 2001-2004. Human exposure to days of very-high or extremely-high fire danger increased in 61% of countries from 2001-2004 to 2018-2021. Globally, people experienced an average of nine more days of very-high or extremely-high meteorological wildfire danger in 2018-2021 compared with 2001-2004, with 110 (61%) of 181 countries having an increase—a pattern caused by climate variation rather than demographic shifts. The yearly average wildfire exposure increased by 9.17 million person-days between 2003-2006 and 2018-2021. Increases were observed in 21 (64%) of 33 low HDI countries compared with 27 (42%) of 65 very high HDI countries, which could reflect differences in wildfire prevention and management. Graphic: Romanello, et al., 2022 / The Lancet

October 29, 2022

Over-dependence on fossil fuels risks the health of current and future generations – “Climate change is driving severe health impacts all around the world, while the persistent global fossil fuel dependence compounds these health harms amidst multiple global crises”

26 October 2022 (UCL) – The 2022 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, published today, has found that ongoing crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, conflict in Ukraine, and a global energy and cost of living crisis, have caused countries to become over reliant on fossil fuels – compounding climate change and its […]