Bishop Hill Where we went wrong
Sep 6, 2013 Energy: gas A couple of years ago I did a green week event at the University of Strathclyde on which I was, as is normal at these kinds of things, the only attendee not fully signed up to the green agenda. My report of the event is here. The "environmental officer from business" mentioned in the report was from Ineos, the huge chemical company that operates the Grangemouth oil refinery. At the time I had held out vague hopes that the Ineos chap might be on my side, but he was just as green as the rest of the panel, if not quite so rabid about it.
I was reminded of this by the FT article (reproduced here), which reveals that Ineos is considering shutting down Grangemouth entirely:
Ineos, the chemicals group, is considering shutting down its plant in Grangemouth, Scotland, due to rising costs and the decline in production of gas from the North Sea. Its chairman singles out energy costs, which he says has been driven up by high environmental taxes on consumers.
I wonder if things might have turned out a bit differently if big business had stood up to environmentalists rather than being co-opted by them. The funds of the big companies in the UK flow almost exclusively to the greens, so it's hard to be very sympathetic to their managements.
(As an aside, wouldn't it be great if there was a new source of gas to replace the declining North Sea production? Maybe even one located right next door to Grangemouth.)
Reader Comments (39)
I read the FT article over on the GWPF and yes, would it not have been great if people all over the country could have seen through the green agenda from the start. I mean there was good historical evidence of what happens to chemical industries when energy prices rise to high. The USA is only now getting back chemical companies who jumped ship for cheaper prices before Shale gas came along.
It has been said before but what is it that brings us together here on Bishop Hill? It would seem to be an attitude that makes us ask questions, that causes us to refuse to be bullied or bribed. What I do not understand is why this is not the normal reaction of all people :(
@Dung
I have now reached the age of 62 so I can remember when the "green agenda" was considerably different from what it seems to be now. Once it was all about genuine (i.e. NOT CO2) pollution and nuclear testing and needless waste.
Tom Gilb, the father of agile methods in software, once chided me in the 1980s when I complained about the irrationality of how people did software projects in those days. He said, in effect, that I had to look historically, at whole cultures and societies that died through avoidable foolishness, and not expect too much from mankind.
But, and it seems a good word at this point, the situation is far better today, even within some parts of government. I'm sure Tom was right in his counsel to me. But we can't rule out outbreaks of rationality and common sense either. The journey is the reward - or something like that :)
"I wonder if things might have turned out a bit differently if big business had stood up to environmentalists rather than being co-opted by them."
Big business doesn't mind green tape so much, since they have the big internal bureaucracies required to deal with it. There is an economy of scale there.
It's an absolute killer for smaller businesses though.
That's another bitter irony in the Greens' claim to be "standing up to Big Business". Environmental consultancy is another Big Business that has flourished, and is mostly just an unproductive drain on the economy.
Mr Montford. The Greens ARE big business Every business in the world signed up for this reason. Trillions of dollars of free money.
Carbon credits bring Lakshmi Mittal £1bn bonanza
LAKSHMI MITTAL, Britain’s richest man, stands to benefit from a £1 billion windfall from a European scheme to curb global warming. His company ArcelorMittal, the steel business where he is chairman and chief executive, will make the gain on “carbon credits” given to it under the European emissions trading scheme (ETS).
The scheme grants companies permits to emit CO2 up to a specified “cap”. Beyond this they must buy extra permits. An investigation has revealed that ArcelorMittal has been given far more carbon permits than it needs. It has the largest allocation of any organisation in Europe
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/business/article192167.ece
Much more here
http://www.scrapthetrade.com/intro
The "environmental officer from business" mentioned in the report was from Ineos, the huge chemical company that operates the Grangemouth oil refinery. At the time I had held out vague hopes that the Ineos chap might be on my side, but he was just as green as the rest of the panel, if not quite so rabid about it.
So he will be glad his job is disappearing as it helps the cause ;)
It is not surprising that the green agenda is so influential when you consider the attitude of organisations such as the BBC. I have just been watching the weather forecast and after mentioning that the summer has been the best for quite a few years the presenter said temperatures today are only half what they were yesterday. That creates a totally false impression. If the temperature was measured using the Fahrenheit scale it would be obvious that the temperature had not dropped by 50%.
As for temperatures measured using the Kelvin scale ... well, I suppose that absolute zero is an alien concept to most of the people working for the BBC.
Dung
I am a little older than Jack Savage and I can remember how disgusted I felt that the US refused to sign up to kyoto.
Looking back, most if not all of my environmental views were formed from the mainstream press and as I was busy
earning a living, I relied on them for information.(sad I know) but that's the way it was.
Only since I have had time on my hands have I discovered how brain washed I was.
I now take every opportunity to divest friends,relatives,casual aquaintances and others, of any environmental sympathies
that they foster. Its hard going but very rewarding when someone says "Ithought the Arctic had nearly melted" for example.
The vast majority of people I meet; still rely on the press for their information.
The most frightening thing I have ever heard anyone say is, "its true I read it in a newspaper"
Shutting down Grangemouth could be a business decision stemming from declining North Sea production. It may pay to send the crude elsewhere, and the logistics and economics considerations could be complex.
Having said that, you Brits need to get on with shale. It is a competitive world, and those who have cheap energy are going to eat your lunch economically unless you also have it!
The senior managers of public companies are often made of very different stuff to the sort of people who actually create those businesses. .And they often wreck them. 'Lord' Browne of BP infamy didn't do many favours to the oil giant with his Green re-branding nonsense.
Bishop, you skeptics are as ineffective as a tit on a bull. And nothing will change until the great British people understand that they will have to vote differently. But as befits the dilettants, you blame all the wrong people.
It's just easier to pay tribute that to have a bunch of greasy hippies and a slavish media at your door step every day screaming that you are a filthy capitalist bastard.
George you really mean we have to counter, counter-enlightenment?
George
Slowly, the great British people are doing just that. And another two tranches of green policy induced swingeing fuel bill increases this winter and next will concentrate minds yet further...
Listen chaps. Put your slide rules down, lay your pipe and horlicks aside, and read the following. All written by right thinking, freedom loving types . All of it about Lord Browne and / or Enron who you will be thrilled to know he isn't a hippy after all. This is how big business and global warming came together.
****
An August 4, 1997 Oval Office meeting with Kenny Boy, (then-) Sir John Browne of BP, and the President and Vice President of the United States. Let that sink in. He didn’t know the guy. But anyone who can even spell “Beltway” can tell you that that kind of orchestration and attention takes serious influence. Ask Gordon Brown.
As revealed by the August 1, 1997 Kenny Boy briefing memo subsequently aired after the unpleasantness, in this meeting Kenny Boy was to demand that the Senate be ignored, that the administration agree to Kyoto, and most important that it contain a cap-and-trade scheme
http://www.globalwarming.org/2009/04/28/gores-inconvenient-enron/
****
Whatever its impact on the environment, the cap-and-trade carbon scheme is sure to boost the economic and political prospects of people and groups that are behind it. Before the company collapsed under the weight of financial scandal, Enron under CEO Ken Lay was a key proponent of the cap-and-trade idea. So was BP’s Lord John Browne, before he resigned last May under a cloud of personal scandal. In August 1997, Lay and Browne met with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Gore in the Oval Office to develop administration positions for the Kyoto negotiations that resulted in an international treaty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22663
***
Wall Street Extorts Kyoto Protocol: Lehman, Enron and other Cap-and-Trade Coincidences
This was a sufficiently serious endeavor that soon after I left Enron in 1997, Lay and BP boss John Browne met in the Oval Office with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Lay’s briefing memo reveals that they clarified what Enron needed from the treaty at the upcoming December Kyoto negotiations. Just the week before, a unanimous U.S. Senate had voted instructing Clinton not to agree to the pact.
The rest is history, if often misreported. The Clinton administration disregarded the Senate and agreed to Kyoto on December 11, 1997, and signed it – yes, signed it – on November 12, 1998. Score: Lay and Browne 1, Senate 0. However, then as now, and every year in the interim, the Senate has refused to bind the U.S. to such an agreement.
With that bit of history out of the way and as Lehman Brothers lies in ruins, let us take notice of certain coincidences. For example, as Lehman melted down, observers spotted the web of climate-specific similarities connecting that company’s priorities and activism and Enron’s. Like Enron, the bank was a strong promoter of carbon pricing, and its recommendations on the subject had begun to be adopted by governments around the world. Lehman was also the banker for Gore’s private equity firm, Generation Investment Management.
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=1023&idli=3
****
While that was happening, Enron commissioned its own internal study of global warming science. It turned out to be largely in agreement with the same scientists Enron was trying to shut up. After considering all of the inconsistencies in climate science, the report concluded: "[T]he very real possibility that the great climate alarm could be a false alarm. The anthropogenic warming could well be less than thought and favorably distributed."
One of Enron's major consultants in that study was NASA scientists James Hansen, who started the whole global warming mess in 1988 with his bombastic congressional testimony. Last month, he published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicting exactly the same, inconsequential amount of warming in the next 50 years as the scientists that Enron wanted to gag. They were a decade ahead of NASA.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3388
Investigate Oct 05, The Kyoto Conspiracy - How Enron hyped global warming for profit
Enron commissioned its own internal study of global warming science. It turned out to be largely in agreement with the same scientists that Enron was trying to shut up. After considering all of the inconsistencies in climate science, the report concluded: “The very real possibility is that the great climate alarm could be a false alarm. The anthropogenic warming could well be less than thought and favorably distributed.” One of Enron’s major consultants in that study was NASA scientist James Hansen, who started the whole global warming mess in 1988 with his bombastic congressional testimony. Recently he published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicting exactly the same inconsequential amount of warming in the next 50 years as the scientists that Enron wanted to gag. They were a decade ahead of NASA.
True to its plan, Enron never made its own findings public, self-censoring them while it pleaded with the Bush administration for a cap on carbon dioxide emissions that it could broker. That pleading continues today – the remnant-Enron still views global warming regulation as the straw that will raise it from its corporate oblivion. Some greenie campaigning in America is still directed from this source. On July 7, 2004, Kenneth Lay was indicted by a federal grand jury for his involvement in the scandal.
Everyone knows that a few hundred votes in Florida tipped the election to George W, but few are aware that West Virginia, normally a Democrat stronghold, went for Bush because the coal industry in that state decided to back him because he would not endorse Kyoto. Without West Virginia, the vote in Florida would have made no difference.
”Enron stood to profit millions from global warming energy-trading schemes,” said Mike Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Association and American Coal Coalition. The investigation into the collapse of Enron will reveal much more about the intricacies of the Baptist-bootlegger coalition which was promoting the Kyoto cause within the Republican Party and within US business circles. Coal-burning utilities would have had to pay billions for permits because they emit more CO2 than do natural gas facilities. That would have encouraged closing coal plants in favor of natural gas or other kinds of power plants, driving up prices for those alternatives. Enron, along with other key energy companies in the so-called Clean Power Group – El Paso Corp., NiSource, Trigen Energy, and Calpine – would make money both coming and going – from selling permits and then their own energy at higher prices. If the Kyoto Protocol were ratified and in full force, experts estimated that Americans would lose between $100 billion and $400 billion each year. Additionally, between 1 and 3.5 million jobs could be lost. That means that each household could lose an average of up to $6,000 each year. That is a lot to ask of Americans just so large energy companies can pocket millions from a regulatory scheme. Moreover, a cost of $400 billion annually makes Enron’s current one-time loss of $6 billion look like pocket change. Little wonder Americans and the incoming Bush administration did not want a bar of it.
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/archives/2006/03/investigate_oct_5.html
Green *IS* big business. Oddly, Greenpeace, WWF and FoE all have generous pension schemes for senior staff - just in case things kind of play out normally and the world does not turn to custard.
I think this is just posturing by Ineos to gain support from the Scottish and Westminster governments for the use of imported shale gas to make ethylene. Or possibly the use of our own gas. There was a report in the Herald on this last month.
Ineos may talk of shutting the site down, but the cost of decommissioning would be enormous.
I looked at Greenpeace UK's end of year accounts today.
They employ 118 people with a combined salary of £4,832,137. This means that the average Greenpeace employee gets £41k per year. The average UK wage is £26,500.
Of those 118 people, 29 were recharged to Greenpeace International at a cost of £1,465,286 which is an average of £50.5k so it seems that Greenpeace International are paid even more.
Being an activist looks to be quite a profitable business.
Many years ago, in a previous life, the Director of a regionally-significant advocacy group shared with me their strategy.
He drew a bell curve distribution. He said, "these guys - pointing to the right side of the curve - the top 10%, we praise publicly. Those guys - pointing to the left tail of the curve - we do our best to embarrass. The lumpen mass in the middle we just let be. It's these guys - pointing to the area just to the right of the top 10% - those are the people we focus on, encouraging them to try to earn their way into the batch that gets praised, that gets an easy ride on applications, and so on". Paraphrased a bit.
So any time a corporate guy, at one of those conferences or regulation writing consultations, goes along to get along, it means that company thinks they can work their way up to the good guy level, or thinks they are at risk of dropping down into the make-an-example of them Bench W group and better be careful. In either case, it is unlikely the corporate environmental guy is freelancing; almost certainly he or she is following a corporate strategy. Mr. Brown and BP being a perfect example of a company concluding it was in their interest, all things considered, to be perceived, by the ENGOs, to be in the top 10%.
Consequence: no one in the room speaks for what is best for society.
Co-opted? Schmo-opted!
I think I will be prescriptive and say that at some time in the past most “big business” – say about 20-15 years ago – Mmm say just after the period where Naomi Oreskes had studied up to and then made her career pretending it is still the same today - that time, thereafter they made certain commitments in a political stance.
Then again for a tacitly libertarian site why be enamoured of “big business” stance on social issues Bish?
The temptation to be a government social dependent is too much - particularly for “big business” ;)
This is cognitive dissonance on a cosmic scale.
This is how the oil companies first opposed AGW then promoted it.
Opposing Views on Global Warming: The Corporate Climate Coup
by Prof. David F. Noble - York University, Toronto, Canada
The second -“positive”- campaign, which emerged a decade later, in the wake of Kyoto and at the height of the anti-globalization movement, sought to get out ahead of the environmental issue by affirming it only to hijack it and turn it to corporate advantage. Modelled on a century of corporate liberal cooptation of popular reform movements and regulatory regimes, it aimed to appropriate the issue in order to moderate its political implications, thereby rendering it compatible with corporate economic, geopolitical, and ideological interests. The corporate climate campaign thus emphasized the primacy of “market-based” solutions while insisting upon uniformity and predictability in mandated rules and regulations.
At the same time it hyped the global climate issue into an obsession, a totalistic preoccupation with which to divert attention from the radical challenges of the global-justice movement. In the wake of this campaign, any and all opponents of the “deniers” have been identified – and, most importantly, have wittingly or unwittingly identified themselves – with the corporate climate crusaders.
Google scholar (doc file)
rachel_news-canadian_dimension_corporate_climate_coupe_07-05.doc
[Raise the tone please]
[Raise the tone please]
Successful large corporations employ very skilled people to scan the zeitgeist and advise on strategies that maximise the company's position in that context. Nonsense like triple-bottom-line accounting, public displays of good "corporate citizenship", salads at McDonald's and all the rest is cheerfully acceded to by smart players. Some of their senior executives even believe their own propaganda.
Things like carbon markets are as manna from heaven to them. Money for nothing, none of that hard stuff like competing in the marketplace, what's not to like?
Governments are frequently outgamed by private sector regulatory chess-players. Not that they will ever admit it.
eSmiff and the Leopard are two of the most interesting commenters here. Does their lively disagreement mean that BH is mutating from a feelgood cult for persecuted outsiders into a proper political movement?
@TerryS - thanks for doing that research. Interesting find.
The irony, it burns!
On a more sober note, I feel for all those people who will lose their livelihoods should the chemical works shut down due to greenie lunacy and poor business leadership.
We're going to have Russki nukes to green our land. Good or bad, you decide‽
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Russia-Signs-Deal-to-Build-New-Nuclear-Reactors-in-the-UK.html
I'd suggest that the capitulation of business to the ecofreeks began with Shell acceding to the Greenpeace demands regarding Brent Spar.
I tried to get British Airways to stand up against the green nonsense. They have a climate change officer. I assume his livelihood depends upon him supporting the nonsense. Other big business will be the same. How many times do you see stupid statements on buses and lorries telling us how they (big business) are cutting CO2 emissions by x%. As long as they think it will help (or at least not harm) their commercial interests they will persist in going through the motions.
A bit like swimming in the Med.
Waiting on the Australian election result
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/labor_getting_a_kicking_over_carbon/14004#.UisB_z-2eUU
Drop over to Unthreaded. Bottom line is, Labor is gone, and the only question is by how much. Oh, and Green vote is down, down, down. WOO-HOO!
PS - I was a Labor voter for many years, and still think they have a lot to offer. But this government was truly horrible and needed to get the royal order of the boot.
Skeptics have been as useless as teats on a boar hog in some ways: We are still largely dismissed out of hand as 'flat earthers' and denialist scum or paid conspirators of big oil seeking to kill polar bears and children.
But skeptics have been the ones who got climategate into the popular mind far enough to kill Copenhagen; make Kyoto a dead end; sustain people like Inhoffe in the US; toss out that wretched Australian PM; See Canada get a PM who is reasonable on climate; raise awareness of just how stupid wind power is; support the few academics willing to stand up against the AGW consensus; have skeptic writers produce a body of work that clearly shows IPCC problems and AGW promoter scams; etc, etc.
"I'd suggest that the capitulation of business to the ecofreeks began with Shell acceding to the Greenpeace demands regarding Brent Spar."
That's an interesting one, because even Greenpeace eventually admitted that they got it wrong and that Shell's original plan was less likely to release polluting fluids into the sea.
It's also when it became obvious that the important thing to Greenpeace was not minimising pollution, (since the option they forced actually increased pollution) but scoring a victory over a "Big Oil" company. Perhaps that's why they are now attract more "anarchist loon activists" than conservationist.
Read this and weep:
http://www-static.shell.com/content/dam/shell/static/gbr/downloads/e-and-p/brent-spar-dossier.pdf
kellydown, that highlights my point above about how it is all smoke and mirrors and marketing - on both sides.
Well knock me down a Kalgoorlie nickel mine!
Abbot wins landslide victory!
To all readers in Aus - split a tube or ten - strewth!
Hip bloody hooray, now that will give the OWG internationalists and their allies, those misanthropic green to88ers all over the world - something to think about.
Why, thanks, o.b.o. Australians generally (blush, blush).
It's been fun watching all the Labor supporting "journalists" on the ABC tonight. They were reduced to asking questions like "How come your victory was not as great as some people predicted?".
Tee hee.
The Tyndall Centre did a report on the UK chemical industry in May. Its conclusions are pretty scary.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/goodbye-to-the-uks-chemical-industry/
To sum up, a very large proportion of "environmentalists" are actually in the pay of "Big Oil" since the companies need to retain huge environmental departments to negotiate their way through all the green tape and prevent PR disasters such as Shell suffered with Brent Spar.
A very, very small part of this work actually helps with things like preventing pollution and leaving sites neat and green.
It's rather ironic to those of us who have occasionally done work on a Shell project to find that they run about the strictest regulatory environment you could ever work in, to the point of screaming inanity, and that's not a recent thing. It was ever thus with them. So one must conclude that Greenies , like schoolyard bullies, pick on them ahead of other "Big Oil" companies not because they're the worst polluters, but because they're the easiest target, timidly ready make concessions, and of course, employ more "environmental scientists" and PR people. On some projects I've worked on, these people outnumbered teh actual drillers. Perhaps it's like that generally - I don't know.