Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:
We know that we cannot continue to burn fossil fuels as we have done for hundreds of years - the climate is already changing and global warming is having an effect in many parts of the world. It seems that the oil companies don’t share our concerns and are continuing to explore for new fields as if nothing is happening. Those in charge of the big five oil companies have been encouraged in their work by bonus payments linked to $1 trillion of exploration and extraction.
Even when the price of oil has dropped so dramatically, projects to find more reserves have gone ahead though companies know that the world will be unable to burn the fossil fuels they find. Shell’s chief executive has actually endorsed warnings that reserves cannot be burned unless some form of carbon capture is available. At present, only trials of carbon capture and storage (CCS) are going ahead and no commercially viable project is in the offing. If CCS were up and running, there would be so much carbon dioxide removed that we would be unable to find places to store it.
We have to remember that shareholders in oil companies are ‘in it for the money’ and therefore would not approve of oil companies putting their money into renewable technologies to produce clean energy because the returns would be so much less. Shell has only invested $1billion each year on green schemes out of $33 billion of capital expenditure.
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