Ty dilemata

Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the oil and gas industry remains formidable. After all, it has made consuming its products seem like a human necessity. It has confused the public about climate science, bought the eternal gratitude of one of America’s two main political parties, and repeatedly out-maneuvered regulatory efforts. And it has done all this in part by thinking ahead and then acting ruthlessly. While the rest of us were playing checkers, its executives were playing three-dimensional chess.

Take this brief tour of the industry’s history, and then ask yourself: Is there any doubt that these companies are now working to keep the profits rolling in, even as mega-hurricanes and roaring wildfires scream the dangers of the climate emergency?
How 'Big Oil' works the system and keeps winning » Yale Climate Connections
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/12/how-big-oil-works-the-system-and-keeps-winning/

If you’re a regular listener of the New York Times podcast The Daily, you would have heard an ad for ExxonMobil’s carbon capture investments more than once in November.
The ad – which coincided with the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow – told listeners that carbon capture technology could remove more than 90% of CO2 emissions from “carbon-intensive industries” and that the company was working to “deploy this technology at scale”. It gave the sense of an oil company tackling the climate crisis with technology that could solve it – and quickly.
Similar ads have run on NPR podcasts, including Invisibilia and Up First. The American Petroleum Institute has also run ads in podcasts, including on Vox’s Ezra Klein Show (Klein has since left for the New York Times), highlighting that it is “producing more oil and gas while reducing emissions”.

Why some of your favorite podcasts are filled with oil company ads | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/04/exxon-podasts-oil-company-ads-climate-crisis

Tak tu mame zase Lomborga...

Lomborg wrote in the Australian that a study “in the renowned journal” Nature, “shows that reducing emissions 95% by 2050 – almost Biden’s promise of net zero – would cost 11.9% of gross domestic product, or more than $US11,000 ($15,300) for each American citizen every year”.
That seems like an eye-watering figure, or in Lomborg’s words “spectacularly costly”.
The cited figure does appear in a supplementary section of the paper. But the authors of the study (which actually appeared in Nature Climate Change, not Nature) have told Temperature Check they have been asking Lomborg since early November to stop making that claim.
Prof David Victor, of University of California San Diego, said Lomborg’s summary “took the results out of context and used them for a purpose that we explicitly said they were not to be used, and which he was reminded of when he asked for the underlying data”.
The study used models to examine the methods and costs of reducing emissions through state-based policies compared with nationwide approaches.
But the authors say that as they model different levels of ambition, the dollar numbers produced by the model become less reliable.
They say that’s why the model’s outputs for beyond 80% were only placed in the supplementary section of the paper as a way to show the sensitivity of the modelling, rather than to deliver a genuine cost estimate.

Climate cost study authors accuse Bjørn Lomborg of misinterpreting results | Graham Readfearn | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/02/climate-cost-study-authors-accuse-bjrn-lomborg-of-misinterpreting-results