
Shell made a film about climate change in 1991 - lunchladydoris
https://thecorrespondent.com/6285/shell-made-a-film-about-climate-change-in-1991-then-neglected-to-heed-its-own-warning
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75dvtwin
Definitely worth the watch.

here are my cliff notes:

> human energy consumption, by means of burning fossil fuels, is the reason
> for green house gases, that in turn trap more heat, then our environment can
> sustain.

> technology to reduce CO2 emission, assuming the same level of electricity
> consumption -- is far from being available. They had talked about Nuclear,
> sun, geo, nuclear fusion.

>more efficient means to convert to electricity:

>35% of coal energy is transformed to electricity

> incandescent light bulb converts only 5% to light If larger city (NY,
> Moscow, Bombay etc) switch to better light bulb, 1 million ton of C02
> emissions every year, each.

> simply changing from coal to gas cuts carbon emission by 40%

>half of worlds oil is used by 500mln road vehicles. 400 mln of those are
private cars. each producing 4 times its weight in CO2, each year. Internal
com engine is only 20% efficient. Cars can improve by 3 times (not clear, if
they assumed electric only or not).

> when gas is not available option, coal can be gasified

> >Taxation can work both ways, already there is a talk of carbon tax. But how
> to achieve compliance across national borders.

>Global warming calls for global response. but world is not a common market.
Examples they used is Easter Europe, other developing regions.

>How could this countries advance, but leap-frog energy developments?

Future must be different, developing countries cannot take the same path as
the developed countries in the past.

~~~
sitepodmatt
Private car ownership should be banned imho. People will claim that public
transport including taxis isnt up to the task of point to point travel but Id
wager this void would be quickly filled up by enterprising private companies.
Vanity, materialism.. A bloody shame..

~~~
JohnDotAwesome
I live in Texas. Private car ownership definitely has a materialistic
component. However, owning a car is almost a necessity in every city in Texas.
You see a lot of big, decked-out pickup trucks here (vanity). I drive a Prius
because there aren't good public transit options (necessity) and I like to
visit family in Dallas (I'm in Austin). I end up driving _a lot_.

I understand that some governments have penalized car ownership by way of
license plate restrictions and other tax situations (I've heard that license
plates in China get auctioned for $12k USD because they're so rare). This
turns owning a car into a vanity symbol for the wealthy. It may not even be an
intentional symbol, but I'm sure that's the way it's perceived by those who
don't own a car.

My point being that for some, car ownership isn't so bad. No need to go
shaming people.

~~~
rtpg
I think the idea is to penalize car ownership in places where you "shouldn't"
need one.

If you're courageous, you could live in downtown Dallas without a car (can
move around a bit with DART). Making it harder to own a car (combined with
more "dense-city" developments) doesn't seem like the worst idea. Mainly
because we could recover the huuuge parking lots.

And when you want to go to Austin for the weekend you can rent a car.

In any case, even if the entire state is still very much "car necessary", you
can still try to incentivise pockets of the state to be less so.

~~~
exprA
I wonder which has a bigger impact on human consumption levels: a person that
decides to save his time by driving a car instead of waiting for a bus, or
Africa's population increasing from 250 million in 1960 to about 5 billion by
2100.

Let's focus on the selfish car guy, that's the big picture all right in
“saving” the world.

~~~
rtpg
Pour que no los dos?

The "selfish car guy" is why the American lifestyle consumes twice as much as
the Japanese lifestyle. Everything gets built around it.

And of course there's the fact that the American lifestyle gets exported to
other places as well.

------
theprop
Sadly, this is the norm & the way the current system works...if you can profit
now & collect a huge bonus now, your incentive is to do that no matter what
happens to the future. Cigarette companies knew of the harms of their product
for decades. Bankers knew many of their home loans and other products would
fail (but it would be after they got paid massive bonuses...insane speculation
didn't happen when investment banks were partnerships and bonuses could be
clawed back). Dupont knew PFOAs were harmful for more than half a century and
a decade into a massive lawsuit before they finally stopped producing them.

~~~
sidcool
It's inherent to most capitalist systems. Hence Laizze free doesn't work well.

~~~
amval
Do you mean "Laissez faire"?

~~~
sidcool
Yes. I hope the downvotes were not for the spelling and because people
actually disagree with me.

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stefek99
Need systematic change - example - Kickstarter becoming public benefic
corporation - [https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-
benefi...](https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefit-
corporation)

Otherwise the goal of the company is to make profit for shareholders -
anything else would be illegal (against the law)

Need to change the "operating system of economy" to that environment is
included in the balance sheets:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Bottom_Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Bottom_Line)

------
nailer
The 'greenhouse effect' (which was the umbrella term for what is now called
climate change) was widely discussed in the 80s and 90s and taught in schools,
at least in Australia.

As a child I learned that many metropolitan cities would be underwater by the
year 2000.

~~~
PaulKeeble
The science confirming man made climate change was presented in the 1970's,
many have known since then we are the cause of the earths warming. It has been
settled science for the better part of 30 years. It has been taught in schools
around the world since the mid 1980's as part of Science and Geography
Curriculums including some of its known impacts such as the rise of sea
levels.

~~~
nailer
I'm not sure what you're adding there. Sure, we knew about global warming
then, but we also knew New York would be underwater.

~~~
jmanderley
I don't think "we" knew that.

~~~
nailer
'We' meaning people who were exposed to the concept of the greenhouse effect.

------
staticelf
This is why you should, if possible, refuel at Statoil/Circle K. Statoil is
(partly?) owned by the norwegian government and is basically the only oil
giant that try to preserve the environment and to reduce it's impact.

Please support companies like that.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I agree it's good Statoil is making an effort, and they are most definitely
trying to pivot into renewables (mainly offshore wind). But they also do some
stupid shit, like oil sands in Canada.

However I don't know if they're unique in this aspect, e.g. Saudi Aramco,
ExxonMobil, Total are all huge oil companies that are pivoting into solar and
wind. At this point it just makes pure business sense; renewable energy has
(or will soon, depending on which tech) become profitable even without
subsidies. These companies have a lot of engineering talent and money they can
invest in projects. They see that oil and gas long term future prospects are
bad (production costs are going up while demand is going down). Renewables are
the opposite, costs going down and demand increasing. They are already energy
production companies.

You can also see they're playing on their strengths, like Statoil doing
offshore wind because of their experience with offshore structures in adverse
weather, while Saudi Aramco know lots about building and operating production
equipment scattered around the desert so they focus on solar, etc.

~~~
staticelf
Yeah sure, other companies does that as well. But in the meantime they deny
that climate change is even a thing (at least in the US) but Statoil does not
do that.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
[http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-
po...](http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-
policy/climate-perspectives/our-position)

------
peatmoss
Some other industry players also made a movie about climate change at about
the same time, but their conclusion was basically, "Don't worry about it,
because plants will just love all the excess CO2." I remember this film
because of an otherwise good, but somewhat dogmatic conservative high school
physics teacher.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greening_of_Planet_Earth)

------
rmbeard
Nothing new, we all knew about it as students back in the early 80's. The
denial came much later, climate change is not a new issue, but we have been
incredibly slow to react to it.

------
trentlott
I'm only a few minutes in, but they lay out the basics of anthropogenic
warming really, really well.

------
fovc
Isn't it the same motivation as ExxonMobil supporting a carbon tax? I.e., "buy
natural gas from us to replace the coal furnaces" I wouldn't be surprised if
before putting out this film they the relative difficulty/cost of displacing
coal vs gasoline/diesel

Edit: XOM stance: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/exxon-
s-n...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/exxon-s-new-chief-
endorses-carbon-tax-to-combat-climate-change)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
They probably just underestimated the gullability of the average American
voter.

Imagine if some nerd had spoke up at a Shell meeting and said his analysis of
the American voter suggested that they could just claim it was a Chinese hoax
and that would be accepted. Most intelligent people would find it hard to take
that seriously, so they only found out by continually pushing the boundaries
of what they thought the public would accept.

Unfortunately for the world, there was a certain group of Republican voters
that were very susceptible to their propaganda and so they could keep pushing
into the absurd.

------
musgrove
The title left off "...and You Aren't Going to Believe What Happened Next"

------
jlebrech
we need to start burning methane as it releases less CO2 when burnt than it
reaching the atmosphere.

------
aaron695
So they did something positive but we'll somehow turn it into a negative to
further our cause.

What is wrong with people.

~~~
Shinkei
Really? The negative is that they didn't act in the best interests of humanity
--the very people that make up their shareholders, employees, customers, etc.

For example, it's well documented that DuPont fought to continue using CFCs
until they had secured patents on replacement products and suffered public
humiliation by our government.

Companies will not generally act in the best interests of the citizens, which
is why we have a government which should be independent of influence by
leaders of companies.

~~~
aaron695
My point is if DuPont put out a doco warning everyone about CFCs don't put
them down for that.

Use logic and talk about what they did do that's bad.

Shell is a mega corp full of different people and different departments.

Why are we using the fact part of the mega corp tried to make a positive
change against them?

Why are we being negative about positive behaviour?

~~~
zbyte64
Seriously? This is an industry that is actively undermining climate policy. So
yes, we are going to use this video against them and other oil companies until
an actual (aka substantial) positive change happens.

Lastly, warning labels do not absolve a company of all responsibility.

