Aging oil and gas industry engineer/project manager and environmentalist here. I really like this campaign! It provides an effective counter to the millions (billions?) of dollars the oil and gas industry expends in advertising and lobbying.
In my 25 year experience, the western oil and gas industry is on the balance very responsible when it comes to health, safety and environmental protection. I would much rather have Shell explore the Arctic than say Lukoil.
However, Greenpeace and other environmental activists are good part of the reason why western oil and gas companies are so concerned about the environment. In places where Greenpeace has low influence/support/visibility, things like this are pretty common:
I have dealt with enough pointy haired bosses in my work to realise that without effective activism, health, safety and environment would often be improperly compromised wrt cost, schedule and throughput.
It's very true what you are saying about non-western oil and gas. People forget that the biggest oil spill ever was caused by a totalitarian government on purpose and not by a multinational oil corporation by accident.
In the west, corporate brands make easy targets, but since the companies want to protect their brands it is quite effective at making things better.
I'm still perplexed that Oil companies bother to advertise at all. What's the point? I'd keep a low profile if I were them. People don't really choose where they fill their car on the company do they? It's more dictated by price and whether the station is en route to work.
Good point about Greenpeace keeping the oil companies on their toes. Sad though that it has to be this way.
To me drilling for oil - is almost money for nothing. I'm baffled that these companies aren't behaving more responsibly.
> To me drilling for oil - is almost money for nothing.
You might want to learn about the high costs of exploration and building rigs and wells and all the innovation that has been occurring for decades to extract greater percentages of more kinds of oil out of more kinds of places. Something like gold diggers in the 1800's might have been a lot closer to "almost money for nothing." Maybe even oil back then. But any resource that was easy enough to get for almost nothing has already been used.
BP's deepwater disaster indicates that not enough is being done to protect the environment, it hasn't stopped risky drilling. That should never happen again. Some of those profits could be turned over into environmental preventative protection. These companies smack of pure greed to me.
Exxon made a profit of $41bn on a turnover of $480bn - about an 8% profit margin. That's not really "money for nothing". That's a healthy return on a gargantuan investment.
Some tech stocks profit margins: AAPL: ~30%, MSFT: ~30%, GOOG: ~25%. 3-4 times higher than Exxon. Do those companies all make money for nothing too?
But it would be much lower if these companies were held accountable for the massive environmental impacts that they have (beyond the direct impacts of a spill). Excluding things that are even "debatable" like climate change, pollution and the effects thereof are not. These socialized costs would make oil companies unprofitable.
I agree that oil companies benefit from externalities that aren't accounted for, but I'd really like to see a numerical demonstration that it would make them unprofitable - I'm totally unconvinced that oil demand is that elastic, and I think they'd be able to pass the increased costs on to customers.
Oil is more scarce and useful than money, it's hard to see what would make extraction unprofitable. A carbon tax would mostly disincentive wasteful consumers. I wonder if anything could prevent exploitation of shale gas with a really low EROEI.
Wouldn't another tax on fuel just hurt low-income consumers?
I'm not rich - I drive because I want/need to, not because it's cheap. Sometimes I drive for fun, to get out of town for a bit, and I don't have the most fuel efficient vehicle, so that could be considered wasteful. If gas cost $5,$6,$10/gallon where I live (Chicago) I would still drive. Someone working minimum wage, students, kids, and retirees, increased fuel cost could prevent them from driving altogether.
It will hurt some consumers if they change nothing, but cheap oil is not a right, and being dependent on it now or in the future should be discouraged for good reason (mostly because a lasting ecological catastrophe is worse than diminished standards of living). Some hints that will help commuters save money: better public transport, carpooling, working from home, moving out of suburbia.
There was a good TV program of a tear down of a decommissioned shell/esso rig from the North Sea oil field. On yesterday (Sun 22nd July.)
Apparently there was a shift in European law, that now forces companies to tidy up after they've finished. Brought about after pressure from Greenpeace for Shell trying to ditch the Brent Spar in an underwater trough.
Quite how you'd do this with anything deep sea is beyond me. Worth a watch though.
Re the low profile: regularly paying a large media group for ad space in exchange for no bad publicity would make sense to these companies. Large groups buy unprofitable newspapers for similar reasons.
>It provides an effective counter to the millions (billions?) of dollars the oil and gas industry expends in advertising and lobbying.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Oil companies continue to exert immense influence over governments because of the taxes they pay and the contributions they make to politicians and their parties. That's meant to be "countered" with mundane jokes on fake twitter profiles and memes on reddit? Forgive me for being cynical. If anything it's a great situation for oil companies. It gives people the illusion they're actually doing something when really it means nothing and the status quo remains.
He's not being sarcastic, I think. I've got a somewhat similar background and I agree with his stated view.
Citizen and consumer activism keeps the bastards (more) honest. One thousand motivated and angry citizens with a plan can act as a very good counterweight to hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing (and lobbying). Really!
Mundane jokes seem trivial, occupation of capped oil wells in the North Sea seem like a bit of a jape. But the effect of these and all the (cute) Greenpeace donation collectors is consciousness-raising and creation of citizens and consumers who ask hard questions, and that scares the politicians no end. It scares Big Oil too and keeps them (more) honest.
The status quo that you speak of is vastly different to that during the 80's and totally alien to the status quo in the 50's, at least in the rich West. Perhaps you've not really noticed the change. I've worked on and off in the oil and gas industry since the 80's and I see a vast, vast change both in the public's attitude, and also in the mentality within the companies themselves.
I'm by no means suggesting that citizen/consumer activism short of violence is useless. In the past the 'Yes Men' and other groups have dragged the 'forgotten' issue of the Bhopal incident back into the news, generated significant bad PR and gotten politicians attention. I just fail to see the value of this particular stunt. Have people learned anything new? I doubt it. Are people writing to their elected officials, organizing petitions or boycotts? Not that I see. It's actionless preaching to the choir - "oil companies are evil" etc.
A lot more people have seen one of these banners via social media than the real Shell advertisements. Some of them will have talked about it. Some more will look at the cute animals and hate Shell. I suspect that Greenpeace will be able to count on some of these people next time a cute fundraiser knocks on their doors...
Here's the thing tho': pranks are fun. Developing alternative energy sources is hard work, and what sponsorship does Greenpeace do in that area? Not much...
That, and not any conspiracy theory, explains everything.
I agree: I don't give money to Greenpeace because they're a marketing organisation that raises cash to do more marketing.
But: there is a school of thought that without broad community support, all the hard work won't add up to much.
They might be partly right, I pay more for "green power" than my neighbours do for "glowing-in-the-dark power", and don't own a car despite how much easier it'd make my life. I guess someone's marketing worked on me...
There are people working on alternative energy. They get less subsidy money from the government than the oil industry, which is plenty profitable on their own. You can re-read that sentence if you didn't believe it the first time.
It takes all kinds. Science and PR to protect the science. The political can be very connected to the scientific when the industry threatened with displacement is very politically active.
I'd be really interested to see a detailed accounting of the oil industry subsidies you refer to. When I've looked into this in the past, all I've been able to find are things like the depreciation of capital assets, which, while it could be considered a subsidy, is not specific to the oil industry. The numbers are very big, but that is because the oil industry makes some of the largest capital investments in industry.
Oil companies don't really pay taxes in the US. Or they do at effectively very low rates, but they are given right back in the form of subsidies. The power they wield is largely through the amount of lobbying and advertising they can do, which means they can destroy the careers of most politicians with a minor opex increase (and that is probably something they can write-off in their taxes, because of other laws they have bought). Essentially it's extortion.
In my 25 year experience, the western oil and gas industry is on the balance very responsible when it comes to health, safety and environmental protection. I would much rather have Shell explore the Arctic than say Lukoil.
However, Greenpeace and other environmental activists are good part of the reason why western oil and gas companies are so concerned about the environment. In places where Greenpeace has low influence/support/visibility, things like this are pretty common:
http://www.tropix.co.uk/region_files/azerbajn_03.htm
I have dealt with enough pointy haired bosses in my work to realise that without effective activism, health, safety and environment would often be improperly compromised wrt cost, schedule and throughput.