Shell CEO Invited To Climate TED Talk, For Unknown Reasons; Things Do Not Go Well
On Thursday, a strange scene unfolded at the International Conference Centre in Edinburgh. Shell CEO Ben van Beurden took the stage with a prominent climate scientist and Christiana Figueres, the woman who negotiated the Paris Agreement, at a TED Countdown conference. Van Beurden was there to ostensibly talk up the climate bona fides of one of the largest oil companies in the world that has promised to get to net zero while simultaneously fighting against a Dutch court ruling requiring it to lay out concrete plans to reduce emissions. Instead, he was roasted by youth activists for Shell’s complicity in worsening the climate crisis and egregious human rights abuses.
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The Shell CEO shared the stage with Scottish climate activist Lauren MacDonald, Figueres, and Chris James, the founder of Engine No. 1, the small fund that led an Exxon shareholder revolt earlier this year. During van Beurden’s talk, he blamed consumers for using so much oil, a note he’s sounded before, and said his daughter asked him if he was destroying the planet. His response, according to a Twitter DM from social entrepreneur and B Corp movement supporter in France Elizabeth Soubelet, who was in the room, was, “Do you trust me to do the right thing for you?”
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MacDonald was finally invited to ask van Beurden a question, and things changed quickly. She said she’d like to “offer a little bit of context” for the CEO’s remarks. According to a source with knowledge of the matter, TED organizers helped MacDonald write a question and “toned down her speech, but the “one she gave was not the one TED organizers were expecting her to give.” Looking van Beurden straight in the face, she explained that Shell is pushing a plan to build a new oil field in Cambo, off the coast of her home country. “You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself,” she said.
MacDonald went on to say that Van Beurden is “responsible for so much death and suffering” and called him “one of the most evil people in the world,” as she broke into tears. She chronicled Shell’s long history of knowingly polluting the planet and ushering in the climate crisis. She also called the company out for its reported complicity in the horrific killing of Nigerian activists in the 1990s. “If you’re going to sit here and act like you care about climate action, why are you appealing the recent court ruling that Shell must decrease its emissions by 45% by 2030?” she asked, referring to a landmark May ruling from a Dutch court. “Will you repeal this?”
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https://gizmodo.com/shell-ceo-roasted-at-ted-climate-conference-he-was-fool-1847862767?rev=1634231783651
= new reply since forum marked as read
Because they had no idea what was going on, and they really care about the future.
'Time is Running Out,' American Petroleum Institute Chief Said in 1965 Speech on Climate Change
And 1965, according to a letter by Stanford historian Benjamin Franta published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, was the year that President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee published a report titled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” whose findings Ikard described at that year’s annual API meeting. “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts,” Ikard presciently added, according to excerpts from his speech published in Nature.
https://www.desmog.com/2018/11/20/american-petroleum-institute-1965-speech-climate-change-oil-gas/
Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models
“Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged regarding the expected climatic effects of increased atmospheric CO2,” Cohen wrote to A.M. Natkin of Exxon Corporation’s Science and Technology Office in 1982. “The consensus is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial revolution value would result in an average global temperature rise of (3.0 ± 1.5)°C.” (Equal to 5.4 ± 2.7°F). “There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092015/exxon-confirmed-global-warming-consensus-in-1982-with-in-house-climate-models/
Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price
Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate”. “It’s a long and dangerous leap to conclude that we should, therefore, cut fossil fuel use,” he said. Documents show that his company’s scientists were telling Exxon’s management that the real danger lay in the failure to do exactly that.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment
The Big Oil Side Hustle: Where 'Renewable' Money Is Really Going
"Last Year" - 2019.
