SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The world's fossil fuel companies risk wasting billions of dollars of investment by not taking global action to fight climate change seriously, according to the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Fatih Birol, who will take the top job at the IEA in September and is one of the world's most influential voices on energy, warned that companies making this mistake would also miss out on investment opportunities in clean energy.
...
The World Bank and Bank of England have already warned of the serious risk climate action poses to trillions of dollars of fossil fuel investments and the G20 is investigating the risks. The think-tank Carbon Tracker has estimated that over $1tn (£0.6tn) of oil investments and $280bn of gas investments would be left uneconomic if the world's governments succeed in their pledge to limitglobal warming to 2C.
The warnings are based on policy proposals that are entirely creatures of human decisions rather than hard economic realities. Then again, all demand is ultimately the product of human decisions.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Funny) by fritsd on Wednesday July 15 2015, @04:30PM
I find it hard to believe that article.
Sure, the PR department of fossil fuel companies might say this kind of stuff, that is their job, but *inside* the company are lots of very smart people, trained to predict what the demands in the near future are, and whether or not the company should invest in a
$50,000,000 naphtha cracker, and in which country, and in which year, etc.
It's difficult to believe that those kind of large investment decisions, which cannot be broken into smaller bits (nobody wants half of a naphta cracker, or half of an LNG tanker), get overruled by some kind of CxO saying: "but the other day, at the polo club, my bestest friend told me over several cognacs that AGW is bullshit, they're not going to listen to the politicos, so neither should we".
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 15 2015, @07:19PM
Oh, yea, should be... otherwise how have they made so much money, right?
Like those too big to fail banksters which needed public debt based bailouts.
I suppose opinions like this are suppose to popup from time to time, using wealth as a metric for intelligence is soo tempting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford