The fatal flaw of intelligent, reasonable people (among whom I count myself) is the assumption that intelligent, reasonable arguments will persuade people to do the right thing, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. The absolute head-in-the-sand, fiddling while Rome burns, blind, deaf and dumb refusal to see the obvious and urgent changes needed is infuriating. It can leave one gasping, flailing, at a loss for how to proceed. But that would be a mistake.
Our moment has been compared to the days before the Civil War for a number of reasons: the indolence in the face of emergency, the seeming impossibility of reasoned discourse, the looming catastrophe that could have been averted by cooler heads. But what is often missing from those accounts is the reasons for resistance. They are not mindless. They are shortsighted. They are selfish. They are foolish in the extreme. But they are not without logic. Those who have gained immense wealth and power from the burning of fossil fuels simply see insufficient reason to surrender their current bonanza for the possible benefit of others in the future.
Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved, spent decades battling entrenched ignorance, selfishness and greed before, during and after the Civil War. He lived so long he felt compelled to revisit his autobiography twice, ultimately writing three separate versions. Douglass understood that some people didn't see the need for freedom for the enslaved, others just didn't see it as worth the trouble. But those who shaped the discussion, the wealthy and powerful who liked things just fine as they were, didn't care about noble purpose. They cared about power and money, and that he understood clearly. His words are as applicable today as they were then:
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Thank you as always, Bill. Princeton students have learned the lesson, and have been exposing Princeton's ties to the fossil fuel industry. "Smoke & Mirrors: Princeton's Ongoing Ties to the Fossil Fuel Industry (2024), produced by Sunrise Princeton" (link not readily available but see: https://www.commondreams.org/news/fossil-fuel-divestment )
"Their biggest “mistake” was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas—indeed they wanted to quadruple the amount of natural gas. It was a few years later that scientists led by Bob Howarth at Cornell began to explain exactly what folly this was—that you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane—but by then it was too late, and we were deep into the fracking era whose final chapter (overseas export of liquefied natural gas) is now the main goal of the fossil fuel industry."
Sadly, my province (Alberta) is governed by a pack of climate deniers who want to keep on burning fossil gas until the end of time. They're even using the large volumes of gas under our feet to try to convince builders of data centres to build here and build their own gas powered generating stations. Ironically, they also cite our cool climate as a reason to locate the heat generating data centres here. In the process they're willing to help heat the entire planet.
Those of us that see things otherwise are doing our best to unelect the present government but we have depended on fossil production for so many decades that it has been normalized.
Yes, for those of us who have worked our entire lives trying to get humanity to open our eyes to what fossil fuels were doing it is an infuriating and heartbreaking time. The fossil fuel execs and their enablers are fucking criminals, straight up. If anyone survives to chronicle the true events of these times it will go down that way. It is collective insanity. My heart aches for all the beings that call this planet home.
I'm currently reading Julia Shaw's (2025) book Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them. It sounds like Shaw will need to add another chapter to a later edition to address the actions of Socalow and Pacala - they have blood on their hands.
I was glad to see Retraction Watch also included ProPublica's article in their newsletter.
Try reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE or else Neal Stephenson’s TERMINATION SHOCK and see if you have any hope left for the future of humanity and our small but very special planet. There is NO PLANET B. 🌍 😢 🙏
You realize those books are fiction, don't you? "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" (Danish folk witticism), unless you are gifted with precognition. AFAICT, climate-change casualties are bound to mount until anthropogenic GHG emissions fall below the rate of natural atmospheric drawdown, capping the rapid rise of global mean surface temperature, albeit two, three, or more degrees higher than in 1900. Adaptation by individuals and communities will proceed, resulting in more inequity and injustice. But the global economy is already on a path to pervasive decarbonization, and it's far too soon to declare the outcome of the political struggle between carbon capitalists and everyone else. Presently, the USA is free-riding on the collective decarbonization investments of other nations, but it will only take a couple of million more Democratic or fewer Republican votes to turn us around again. I, for one, am not ready to give up on American popular sovereignty just yet!
Bill, the line that haunts me in this piece is "you're paying the bills, buddy." Not because it's surprising — Harry, the wilderness man in my novel Empty Earth, always said the problem wasn't ignorance, it was incentive. People knew. They were paid to act as if they didn't.
What strikes me about the Wedges story is that it's not really about bad science. It's about what happens when the people funding the science get to define what counts as a solution. Carbon capture kept fossil fuels "part of things for another 50 years." That was the product. The paper was the packaging.
Harry would have recognized it immediately. He spent his whole life watching the packaging change while the product stayed the same.
Bill, you are the MLK of the climate movement and are an inspiration to so many of us who have been working on divesting our pension funds @calstrs for going on a decade. Thank you!
Bravo for working on divesting pension funds. These articles say fossil fuels are no longer safe investments. They are at risk of becoming stranded assets. There will be trillions of assets stranded. Don't let your fund get stuck with some of these losses.
This article says that not just coal but also oil is now past demand peak. That means that instead of being a poor performer as it has been the last five or six years, it's value can be expected to drop, hard and fast. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2022/08/peak_demand_importance.pdf
I remember how powerfully the wedges study entered the climate movement when it came out. It was all over the place. People were using it in slide shows, referring to it in articles and papers. So BP got some value for the money when it was laughably calling itself “Beyond Petroleum.”
So Princeton, BP, et al have been committing crimes against humanity. I'm not a big fan of Berkeley, but it's the public university, and I hope not to hear anything like this from them.
I think this “truly remarkable reporting” has some issues with integrity. Bill (BM) accepts the claims of the source article (the ProPublica/Drilled investigation on the “wedges” article) without question. Here are some of the places where I think that he and the source article may make mistakes:
-Bill writes: “For one thing, they’d picked a comparatively easy baseline, plotting to hold atmospheric concentrations of co2 to 550 parts per million.” However, I read in the paper that they picked 500 plus or minus 50, so their range was 450 – 550. A minor error, but still exaggerated in Bill’s preferred direction.
-Writing about the failures of the “wedges” study, BM writes: “Their biggest ‘mistake’ was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas.” BM also notes that Howarth proved that “you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane.” However, doing this has decreased CO2 emissions in the US since 2005, according to the EPA, which states also that methane emissions have also decreased, in part from “reduced emissions from natural gas systems.”
-The source authors and thus BM seem to cherry-pick some lines from emails and reports and then attribute motives and interpret them to fit their conspiracy narrative. For instance, although Pacala recalls thinking “you’re paying the bills, buddy,” when speaking with the BP CEO, this is not evidence that their report was rigged. He made this quote more than 20 years later, about changing the term “slice” to “wedge.” The source article does not show the context or proof of the “buddy” quote above. And, you could find plenty of historical quotes from BP CEO John Browne that show he cares about climate change, which would complicate the narrative.
-Likewise, consider the subtle manipulation in this statement from the source: “In an email to Socolow after the paper’s submission, Mottershead celebrated, writing that the target meant that ‘around 50% of primary energy could still come from fossil fuels.’” There is no proof that the BP scientist “celebrated,” judging by the language of the report.
-And: “Mottershead [the BP scientist] wrote [that 50 % of primary energy from fossil fuels] was ‘THE key piece of the framework for politicians and business, in my view.’” This statement doesn’t mean that the report advocated for this, necessarily. It seems that they were explaining the results in a way that the business and political world would most understand—how much of the future energy mix might be fossil fuel. The report authors claim that they extrapolated the 50% figure from “IPCC TAR data.” Mottershead notes that BP had a “legal duty” to “take a view on the future levels of fossil fuel emissions.”
-Also, from the source: “Socolow acknowledged, in another subsequent email, that the figure would keep the fossil fuel industry a ‘part of things for at least another 50 years.’” The source article does not give a link or note to verify this claim or its interpretation.
-BM writes it “blows his mind” how rigged the study was, and quotes the source article that states, “When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: ‘A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,’ the renewal document said. ‘This is still our job.’” This is a good example of how the source article and a gullible BM twist the truth, because the actual quote is: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared yet climate change is being forcefully addressed, and this is still our job.” Keep in mind that at the time of the wedges report, many years ago, BP and CEO Browne had high hopes about getting into clean energy to address climate.
I think Bill could tone down the conspiratorial thinking, in favor of immediate concerns, such as the huge investments in plastic production happening right now, that involve fossil fuel companies. Meanwhile, he takes yet another cross-country flight, but because he believes that individual carbon footprints are a BP marketing gimmick, he seems immune to self-awareness on this. In 2008, he recommended offsetting flight emissions, which are, for many people, a large source of fossil fuel usage. But BM seems to have taken a U-turn on that.
My first major career was in space: ICBM and satellite developments. I learned that the transition from theory to practice could be tortuous. My second career, beginning in 1970, was in transferring my space-based knowledge to cities: reducing traffic and all its side effects. I learned an uncomfortable thing: know-nothing was, and continues to be, a serious challenge to know-how. The past has enormous inertia.
Unfortunately, it often takes a disaster to get our attention, Covid-19 was the disaster that forced people out of their offices and their cars. Made them spend more time at home. AI may do even more, even if accompanied by uncomfortable side effects. There are multiple possible futures ahead of us. Should we decide which one to strive for or just wait for something to happen? Waiting has not proven fruitful in the past.
Yes, inertia is huge. It is our enemy. Yes there are many possible futures.
Fossils have inertia. In the past, fossil fuels, with $50 trillion in fixed assets, was the world's largest industry. All those refineries, pipelines, etc. Now London says green companies are the third biggest group. It pays 12% better than other stocks so will continue to grow. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19062026/green-economy-hits-10-trillion-in-market-value/ I guess finance and data centers are bigger.
The inertia in fossil fuels is in the story that they will always grow. Many, many has told a new story, but not enough. They need our help. Their story is that oil and coal demand have peaked and now are in decline. Natural gas demand may not have peaked yet.
Old stories die hard. At every COP meeting, they try to pass a resolution that fossils are on the way out. It fails. One reason is the fossil companies have packed the COP meeting. After the last COP they officials chose to hold another meeting without the fossil people. At their by-invitation only meeting they had fun and got a lot of good work done.
As capital abandons fossil fuels for better investments, fossils have begun to shrink. They lay off workers.
We can help the people putting an end to the old story "Fossil fuels will continue to grow." A start is to root out of our minds the idea that fossil fuels are the Devil, ten feet tall and covered with hair, omnipotent.
Bill, only 58% of Canadians even believe that climate change/ global warming is a reality. And here in Canada our P.M. Carney is doing dirty deals with Alberta’s Premier to build still more pipelines to carry dirty polluting LING to be exported to impoverished Asian nations who will burn it because they have nothing else to burn except even dirtier coal. 🇨🇦 🇱🇷 🌍 😢 🙏 🙏
I'm surprised that only 58% of Canadians believe climate change is real. What is your source for that? And give Mark Carney a break - he has a country to keep together. Separatism is increasing in both Alberta and Quebec and he has to avoid giving it more ammunition. He is an environmentalist and knows the risks of increased fossil fuel use. Admittedly he has agreed to a new oil pipeline to the west coast, but I suspect that he is hoping that before it is completed the business case will no longer make sense and no oil will flow.
My sources are 350.org. based on the U.N.’s Climate Change Committee’s very Strong Warnings, as well as upon today’s sad evidence that already thousands of Europeans are sick or dying from intolerable wet bulb HEAT!
As for Mark Carney, climate champions like Stephen Guibault and several Liberal MPs are already leaving the Liberal Party because they are disgusted with Carney’s dirty deal with Alberta’s Premier to build still another pipeline carrying dirty oil and gas overseas to poor Asian peoples —- fueling still more extreme weather events!
Oil demand has peaked and now is in decline. I just googled "oil demand peak" and lots of media say "Yes, it has peaked." OPEC says "Not yet", but they suffer from wishful thinking.
After peak oil, the dynamics change says a 2022 report from Rocky Mountain Institute. Capital gets more expensive. Profits decline. Oil people are used to gutting it out through downturns. They need to recognize the difference between a temporary downturn and structural decline. The difference between hard times and a dying industry. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2022/08/peak_demand_importance.pdf Coal is further along in the process says RMI.
The process can be scary for oil people. We can explain it to them.
Oil people won't talk about how their industry is dying. That would scare investors away and so is a bad tactic for them. They are having enough trouble already getting investors. Their cost of capital is way up. Renewables are paying much less for capital. Besides their story has been "Oil is the path to profits".
Several groups have been telling the new story "Oil is a dying industry". Rocky Mountain Institute tells it neatly in this 2022 report https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2022/08/peak_demand_importance.pdf But they need our help. A start is for us to give up the story "Oil is a wicked monster."
I just researched the last coal plant built in the US. Sandy Creek in Texas. Back then, the Governor was doing a Trump and fast-tracking permits for dozens of coal plants in 2007 or so. Citizens opposed it. (I was there.) The original proponent of Sandy Creek, Dynegy, had started working on it even though he didn't have all the permits. But then he cut a deal with the citizens to drop Sandy Creek and others. Sandy Creek seems an example of a stranded asset. Which means loss and failure.
Dynegy dumped his investment in Sandy Creek onto an independent power company. The power plant, it seems, ran for ten years. Or maybe not. Not long enough, I'll bet to pay back the bankers. But then had technical difficulties and won't be back up before 2027. If ever. There has been bankruptcy talk. https://www.gem.wiki/Sandy_Creek_Plant
The independent set up the largest lithium battery site in the US. It caught fire and burned for 5 days. The independent has continued with battery installations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LS_Power
Today I wrote a letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle today about another coal plant. It too is troubled but not as much as Sandy Creek. It wears a green halo but is operating the largest coal plant in Texas.
Now that oil is past peak demand, the dynamics will get crazy like this.
Thank you so much for sharing about my new book! “Radically Reframing Climate Change: A Guide to Saving Ourselves.” Here’s my publisher’s link for anyone who’d like to learn more: https://tinyurl.com/yc85zy3b.
The fatal flaw of intelligent, reasonable people (among whom I count myself) is the assumption that intelligent, reasonable arguments will persuade people to do the right thing, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. The absolute head-in-the-sand, fiddling while Rome burns, blind, deaf and dumb refusal to see the obvious and urgent changes needed is infuriating. It can leave one gasping, flailing, at a loss for how to proceed. But that would be a mistake.
Our moment has been compared to the days before the Civil War for a number of reasons: the indolence in the face of emergency, the seeming impossibility of reasoned discourse, the looming catastrophe that could have been averted by cooler heads. But what is often missing from those accounts is the reasons for resistance. They are not mindless. They are shortsighted. They are selfish. They are foolish in the extreme. But they are not without logic. Those who have gained immense wealth and power from the burning of fossil fuels simply see insufficient reason to surrender their current bonanza for the possible benefit of others in the future.
Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved, spent decades battling entrenched ignorance, selfishness and greed before, during and after the Civil War. He lived so long he felt compelled to revisit his autobiography twice, ultimately writing three separate versions. Douglass understood that some people didn't see the need for freedom for the enslaved, others just didn't see it as worth the trouble. But those who shaped the discussion, the wealthy and powerful who liked things just fine as they were, didn't care about noble purpose. They cared about power and money, and that he understood clearly. His words are as applicable today as they were then:
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Here are some easy actions for our climate.
https://www.kiva.org/lend/3200760
https://www.kiva.org/lend/3192962
https://thirdact.org/events/
The truth is that we all should be furious, so no need to apologize.
The only acceptable source of smoke should be coming out of all of our ears.
Thank you as always, Bill. Princeton students have learned the lesson, and have been exposing Princeton's ties to the fossil fuel industry. "Smoke & Mirrors: Princeton's Ongoing Ties to the Fossil Fuel Industry (2024), produced by Sunrise Princeton" (link not readily available but see: https://www.commondreams.org/news/fossil-fuel-divestment )
This is also true, perhaps more so, at Columbia. See: https://sunrisecolumbia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complicit-Columbia-The-Influence-Of-Fossil-Fuel-Funding-on-Climate-Research-Website-Version.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com.
In general check out the Climate Campus Network: https://www.campusclimatenetwork.org/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
There is hope!
Indeed!
"Their biggest “mistake” was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas—indeed they wanted to quadruple the amount of natural gas. It was a few years later that scientists led by Bob Howarth at Cornell began to explain exactly what folly this was—that you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane—but by then it was too late, and we were deep into the fracking era whose final chapter (overseas export of liquefied natural gas) is now the main goal of the fossil fuel industry."
Sadly, my province (Alberta) is governed by a pack of climate deniers who want to keep on burning fossil gas until the end of time. They're even using the large volumes of gas under our feet to try to convince builders of data centres to build here and build their own gas powered generating stations. Ironically, they also cite our cool climate as a reason to locate the heat generating data centres here. In the process they're willing to help heat the entire planet.
Those of us that see things otherwise are doing our best to unelect the present government but we have depended on fossil production for so many decades that it has been normalized.
Yes, for those of us who have worked our entire lives trying to get humanity to open our eyes to what fossil fuels were doing it is an infuriating and heartbreaking time. The fossil fuel execs and their enablers are fucking criminals, straight up. If anyone survives to chronicle the true events of these times it will go down that way. It is collective insanity. My heart aches for all the beings that call this planet home.
I'm currently reading Julia Shaw's (2025) book Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them. It sounds like Shaw will need to add another chapter to a later edition to address the actions of Socalow and Pacala - they have blood on their hands.
I was glad to see Retraction Watch also included ProPublica's article in their newsletter.
Try reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE or else Neal Stephenson’s TERMINATION SHOCK and see if you have any hope left for the future of humanity and our small but very special planet. There is NO PLANET B. 🌍 😢 🙏
You realize those books are fiction, don't you? "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" (Danish folk witticism), unless you are gifted with precognition. AFAICT, climate-change casualties are bound to mount until anthropogenic GHG emissions fall below the rate of natural atmospheric drawdown, capping the rapid rise of global mean surface temperature, albeit two, three, or more degrees higher than in 1900. Adaptation by individuals and communities will proceed, resulting in more inequity and injustice. But the global economy is already on a path to pervasive decarbonization, and it's far too soon to declare the outcome of the political struggle between carbon capitalists and everyone else. Presently, the USA is free-riding on the collective decarbonization investments of other nations, but it will only take a couple of million more Democratic or fewer Republican votes to turn us around again. I, for one, am not ready to give up on American popular sovereignty just yet!
Bill, the line that haunts me in this piece is "you're paying the bills, buddy." Not because it's surprising — Harry, the wilderness man in my novel Empty Earth, always said the problem wasn't ignorance, it was incentive. People knew. They were paid to act as if they didn't.
What strikes me about the Wedges story is that it's not really about bad science. It's about what happens when the people funding the science get to define what counts as a solution. Carbon capture kept fossil fuels "part of things for another 50 years." That was the product. The paper was the packaging.
Harry would have recognized it immediately. He spent his whole life watching the packaging change while the product stayed the same.
Bill, you are the MLK of the climate movement and are an inspiration to so many of us who have been working on divesting our pension funds @calstrs for going on a decade. Thank you!
Bravo for working on divesting pension funds. These articles say fossil fuels are no longer safe investments. They are at risk of becoming stranded assets. There will be trillions of assets stranded. Don't let your fund get stuck with some of these losses.
This article says that not just coal but also oil is now past demand peak. That means that instead of being a poor performer as it has been the last five or six years, it's value can be expected to drop, hard and fast. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2022/08/peak_demand_importance.pdf
Before the Iran War, there was a bad glut in oil. Now that Hormuz is opening up the glut may return say Morgan Stanley. China is buying less and other countries have replace oil buying with electric vehicles. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/2/with-hormuz-reopened-has-the-oil-shortage-turned-into-a-glut
Green companies pay better than most now. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19062026/green-economy-hits-10-trillion-in-market-value/
I remember how powerfully the wedges study entered the climate movement when it came out. It was all over the place. People were using it in slide shows, referring to it in articles and papers. So BP got some value for the money when it was laughably calling itself “Beyond Petroleum.”
Yep
So Princeton, BP, et al have been committing crimes against humanity. I'm not a big fan of Berkeley, but it's the public university, and I hope not to hear anything like this from them.
I think this “truly remarkable reporting” has some issues with integrity. Bill (BM) accepts the claims of the source article (the ProPublica/Drilled investigation on the “wedges” article) without question. Here are some of the places where I think that he and the source article may make mistakes:
-Bill writes: “For one thing, they’d picked a comparatively easy baseline, plotting to hold atmospheric concentrations of co2 to 550 parts per million.” However, I read in the paper that they picked 500 plus or minus 50, so their range was 450 – 550. A minor error, but still exaggerated in Bill’s preferred direction.
-Writing about the failures of the “wedges” study, BM writes: “Their biggest ‘mistake’ was to advocate replacing much of the world’s coal-fired power with natural gas.” BM also notes that Howarth proved that “you were simply trading reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for increases in heat-trapping methane.” However, doing this has decreased CO2 emissions in the US since 2005, according to the EPA, which states also that methane emissions have also decreased, in part from “reduced emissions from natural gas systems.”
-The source authors and thus BM seem to cherry-pick some lines from emails and reports and then attribute motives and interpret them to fit their conspiracy narrative. For instance, although Pacala recalls thinking “you’re paying the bills, buddy,” when speaking with the BP CEO, this is not evidence that their report was rigged. He made this quote more than 20 years later, about changing the term “slice” to “wedge.” The source article does not show the context or proof of the “buddy” quote above. And, you could find plenty of historical quotes from BP CEO John Browne that show he cares about climate change, which would complicate the narrative.
-Likewise, consider the subtle manipulation in this statement from the source: “In an email to Socolow after the paper’s submission, Mottershead celebrated, writing that the target meant that ‘around 50% of primary energy could still come from fossil fuels.’” There is no proof that the BP scientist “celebrated,” judging by the language of the report.
-And: “Mottershead [the BP scientist] wrote [that 50 % of primary energy from fossil fuels] was ‘THE key piece of the framework for politicians and business, in my view.’” This statement doesn’t mean that the report advocated for this, necessarily. It seems that they were explaining the results in a way that the business and political world would most understand—how much of the future energy mix might be fossil fuel. The report authors claim that they extrapolated the 50% figure from “IPCC TAR data.” Mottershead notes that BP had a “legal duty” to “take a view on the future levels of fossil fuel emissions.”
-Also, from the source: “Socolow acknowledged, in another subsequent email, that the figure would keep the fossil fuel industry a ‘part of things for at least another 50 years.’” The source article does not give a link or note to verify this claim or its interpretation.
-BM writes it “blows his mind” how rigged the study was, and quotes the source article that states, “When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: ‘A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,’ the renewal document said. ‘This is still our job.’” This is a good example of how the source article and a gullible BM twist the truth, because the actual quote is: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared yet climate change is being forcefully addressed, and this is still our job.” Keep in mind that at the time of the wedges report, many years ago, BP and CEO Browne had high hopes about getting into clean energy to address climate.
I think Bill could tone down the conspiratorial thinking, in favor of immediate concerns, such as the huge investments in plastic production happening right now, that involve fossil fuel companies. Meanwhile, he takes yet another cross-country flight, but because he believes that individual carbon footprints are a BP marketing gimmick, he seems immune to self-awareness on this. In 2008, he recommended offsetting flight emissions, which are, for many people, a large source of fossil fuel usage. But BM seems to have taken a U-turn on that.
My first major career was in space: ICBM and satellite developments. I learned that the transition from theory to practice could be tortuous. My second career, beginning in 1970, was in transferring my space-based knowledge to cities: reducing traffic and all its side effects. I learned an uncomfortable thing: know-nothing was, and continues to be, a serious challenge to know-how. The past has enormous inertia.
Unfortunately, it often takes a disaster to get our attention, Covid-19 was the disaster that forced people out of their offices and their cars. Made them spend more time at home. AI may do even more, even if accompanied by uncomfortable side effects. There are multiple possible futures ahead of us. Should we decide which one to strive for or just wait for something to happen? Waiting has not proven fruitful in the past.
Yes, inertia is huge. It is our enemy. Yes there are many possible futures.
Fossils have inertia. In the past, fossil fuels, with $50 trillion in fixed assets, was the world's largest industry. All those refineries, pipelines, etc. Now London says green companies are the third biggest group. It pays 12% better than other stocks so will continue to grow. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19062026/green-economy-hits-10-trillion-in-market-value/ I guess finance and data centers are bigger.
The inertia in fossil fuels is in the story that they will always grow. Many, many has told a new story, but not enough. They need our help. Their story is that oil and coal demand have peaked and now are in decline. Natural gas demand may not have peaked yet.
Old stories die hard. At every COP meeting, they try to pass a resolution that fossils are on the way out. It fails. One reason is the fossil companies have packed the COP meeting. After the last COP they officials chose to hold another meeting without the fossil people. At their by-invitation only meeting they had fun and got a lot of good work done.
As capital abandons fossil fuels for better investments, fossils have begun to shrink. They lay off workers.
In 2023, RMI reported that half of energy capital had moved to cleantech. This in their free report The Cleantech Revolution. This flight has continued. The oil people moan about it in the Houston Chronicle. Exxon declined so much in 2020, they took them out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. https://www.eenews.net/articles/exxon-yanked-from-dow-after-nearly-a-century/ It was just removed from another index, Russell 1000 Dynamic Index, https://www.marketscreener.com/news/exxon-mobil-corporation-nyse-xom-dropped-from-russell-1000-dynamic-index-ce7f5fded88eff26
We can help the people putting an end to the old story "Fossil fuels will continue to grow." A start is to root out of our minds the idea that fossil fuels are the Devil, ten feet tall and covered with hair, omnipotent.
Bill, only 58% of Canadians even believe that climate change/ global warming is a reality. And here in Canada our P.M. Carney is doing dirty deals with Alberta’s Premier to build still more pipelines to carry dirty polluting LING to be exported to impoverished Asian nations who will burn it because they have nothing else to burn except even dirtier coal. 🇨🇦 🇱🇷 🌍 😢 🙏 🙏
I'm surprised that only 58% of Canadians believe climate change is real. What is your source for that? And give Mark Carney a break - he has a country to keep together. Separatism is increasing in both Alberta and Quebec and he has to avoid giving it more ammunition. He is an environmentalist and knows the risks of increased fossil fuel use. Admittedly he has agreed to a new oil pipeline to the west coast, but I suspect that he is hoping that before it is completed the business case will no longer make sense and no oil will flow.
My sources are 350.org. based on the U.N.’s Climate Change Committee’s very Strong Warnings, as well as upon today’s sad evidence that already thousands of Europeans are sick or dying from intolerable wet bulb HEAT!
As for Mark Carney, climate champions like Stephen Guibault and several Liberal MPs are already leaving the Liberal Party because they are disgusted with Carney’s dirty deal with Alberta’s Premier to build still another pipeline carrying dirty oil and gas overseas to poor Asian peoples —- fueling still more extreme weather events!
Oil demand has peaked and now is in decline. I just googled "oil demand peak" and lots of media say "Yes, it has peaked." OPEC says "Not yet", but they suffer from wishful thinking.
After peak oil, the dynamics change says a 2022 report from Rocky Mountain Institute. Capital gets more expensive. Profits decline. Oil people are used to gutting it out through downturns. They need to recognize the difference between a temporary downturn and structural decline. The difference between hard times and a dying industry. https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2022/08/peak_demand_importance.pdf Coal is further along in the process says RMI.
The process can be scary for oil people. We can explain it to them.
Oil people won't talk about how their industry is dying. That would scare investors away and so is a bad tactic for them. They are having enough trouble already getting investors. Their cost of capital is way up. Renewables are paying much less for capital. Besides their story has been "Oil is the path to profits".
Several groups have been telling the new story "Oil is a dying industry". Rocky Mountain Institute tells it neatly in this 2022 report https://rmi.org/app/uploads/2022/08/peak_demand_importance.pdf But they need our help. A start is for us to give up the story "Oil is a wicked monster."
I just researched the last coal plant built in the US. Sandy Creek in Texas. Back then, the Governor was doing a Trump and fast-tracking permits for dozens of coal plants in 2007 or so. Citizens opposed it. (I was there.) The original proponent of Sandy Creek, Dynegy, had started working on it even though he didn't have all the permits. But then he cut a deal with the citizens to drop Sandy Creek and others. Sandy Creek seems an example of a stranded asset. Which means loss and failure.
Dynegy dumped his investment in Sandy Creek onto an independent power company. The power plant, it seems, ran for ten years. Or maybe not. Not long enough, I'll bet to pay back the bankers. But then had technical difficulties and won't be back up before 2027. If ever. There has been bankruptcy talk. https://www.gem.wiki/Sandy_Creek_Plant
The independent set up the largest lithium battery site in the US. It caught fire and burned for 5 days. The independent has continued with battery installations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LS_Power
Today I wrote a letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle today about another coal plant. It too is troubled but not as much as Sandy Creek. It wears a green halo but is operating the largest coal plant in Texas.
Now that oil is past peak demand, the dynamics will get crazy like this.
Thank you so much for sharing about my new book! “Radically Reframing Climate Change: A Guide to Saving Ourselves.” Here’s my publisher’s link for anyone who’d like to learn more: https://tinyurl.com/yc85zy3b.
And Mongabay profile: https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/new-book-offers-tips-to-translate-climate-science-into-political-gains/