“When you have a very successful and profitable core oil and gas business, it can be quite difficult to justify investing in renewables,” says Robert Redlinger, who ran a previous effort at Chevron to develop large renewable-energy projects before he left in 2010. “It requires significant commitment at the most senior levels of management. I didn’t perceive that kind of commitment from Chevron during my time with the firm.”
.. A pullback from renewables doesn’t surprise some analysts, who say returns of even 20 percent can be bested by oil and gas projects that can generate profits of 25 percent to 35 percent. “Renewables for oil companies are sort of like the coffee shop inside Bloomingdale’s,” says Oppenheimer analyst Fadel Gheit. “On their list of priorities, it will always be at the bottom.”
Nebraska Rallies against TransCanada Pipeline
Kleeb had spent the last 15 years looking for dramatic, visual stories to advance political agendas, working on the principle that the best way to convert people was to show them others who were affected by an issue.
.. One of Kleeb’s tenets of organizing is that if you want to reach a specific group of people, you have to use someone from that group to help you make your case. “One thing the climate organizations don’t get is that the scientific numbers don’t move people,” she said. “People here care about their neighbors. So we were looking for a face.”
.. He knew people in the area and was at ease talking publicly. (During an appearance on “The Ed Show” on MSNBC this year, in reference to TransCanada’s claims about the pipeline’s safety, he asked dryly, “What was the safest ship that was ever built?”)
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt: Defending the Drama
The scholars attribute this bias to the norms of scientific discourse: “The scientific values of rationality, dispassion, and self-restraint tend to lead scientists to demand greater levels of evidence in support of surprising, dramatic, or alarming conclusions.” They call this tendency “erring on the side of least drama,” or E.S.L.D. for short.
Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans as Antarctic Ice Melts
The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.
The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.