Insulate Britain activists block a road during a protest Photo: Insulate Britain
TRIALS of 18 climate activists who participated in non-violent action are set to begin next week as the government enforces authoritarian laws curbing the right to protest.
Five Extinction Rebellion activists are accused of causing criminal damage to the European headquarters of the half-a trillion-dollar financial firm JP Morgan, during a protest in September 2021 against its funding of fossil fuel firms.
Eight Insulate Britain supporters are accused of causing public nuisance by peacefully stopping traffic on the M25 motorway in the same month to press the government to insulate Britain’s homes to end fuel poverty and cut carbon emissions.
And five Just Stop Oil supporters face trial for alleged conspiracy to cause a public nuisance after they they occupied tunnels close to Grays oil terminal in August 2022 in pursuit for their demand for a halt to all new oil, coal and gas projects.
The trials coincide with fresh government attempts to undermine trials by jury.
Protestors call out bp and Shell during a demonstration in the City of London in 2021. Credit: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
Shell decreased spending on “renewables and energy solutions” last year, while bp’s spending on “low carbon energy” has flatlined, finds an Energy Monitor analysis of fourth-quarter results.
On Tuesday, UK oil major BP reported that in 2023 it raked in $13.8bn (£10.93bn) in profits. This represented its second-highest annual profit in a decade – despite it being nearly half the record-breaking $27.7bn bp amassed in 2022 after oil prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Days earlier, Shell also reported better-than-expected profits of more than $28bn, following a record-breaking $40bn in 2022. Yet both oil majors’ spending on renewables has flatlined, finds Energy Monitor‘s analysis of the companies’ filings.
Shell’s annual results show that investment in “renewables and energy solutions” fell from $3.5bn in 2022 to just $2.7bn last year. The company spent just 11.7% of its total capital expenditure (capex) on renewables in 2023 compared with 15.3% in 2022.
By contrast, bp slightly increased its spending on “low carbon energy” from $1.02bn in 2022 to $1.26bn in 2023, although as the chart below shows, spending on renewables by both companies has flatlined over the past five years.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
OIL giant BP raked in a profit of $13.8 billion (£11bn) last year as the company continued to prosper on the back of struggling households.
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Warm This Winter spokeswoman Fiona Waters said that while the figures were less than the record numbers reported in 2022, BP was “still making billions while people’s energy bills continue at unaffordable levels and more and more people are being pushed into poverty.
“Meanwhile, this government continues to hand massive subsidies to these international profiteers,” she added.
“We need real energy solutions, notably renewable energy and proper insulation, to stop this ongoing cycle of obscene profits and to keep ordinary people warm this winter.”
Charles David Keeling with Keeling Curve graphs. Credit: Keeling Papers, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.
Documents shed light on the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry, adding to growing understanding of Big Oil’s knowledge of climate change.
In 1955 in the wilds of Big Sur, a young Caltech researcher named Charles David Keeling gathered carbon dioxide samples among Northern California’s towering redwoods. Crawling out of his sleeping bag several times a night on research trips conducted over the course of 18 months, from January 1955 to June 1956, Keeling measured background levels of carbon dioxide across the western United States — at Big Sur, but also at desert and high mountain stations, in forests and grassland, above the city of Los Angeles, and over the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Keeling’s findings would lead him to conduct a separate series of experiments from the top of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa resulting in the famous Keeling Curve — a visual depiction of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by the burning of fossil fuels. His work underpins our understanding of manmade climate change.
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By December 1954, the Air Pollution Foundation had approved an allocation of $13,814 (approximately $158,000 in today’s money) to fund Keeling’s earliest CO2 investigations.
These never-before-seen documents from the Caltech Archives and the U.S. National Archives, along with material from the Charles David Keeling papers at the University of California, San Diego, and local Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s, establish the Air Pollution Foundation’s sponsorship of Keeling’s research at Caltech as the earliest-known instance of climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry. It’s possible it was also the first time that the oil industry was directly informed about CO2-induced climate change — five years before physicist Edward Tellerwarned the API of the disruptive consequences of burning fossil fuels.
Fossil Fuel Fingerprints
Carbon atoms contain a combination of the isotopes carbon-12 (C12), carbon-13 (C13), and carbon-14 (C14). Carbon atoms from fossil fuels, however, contain relatively little C13 and almost no C14, which is radioactive and decays over time.
In the 1940s and early 1950s, a carbon isotope scientific revolution was underway in the United States. Scientists had learned that they could measure the different ratios of carbon isotopes in materials to accurately determine the age of ancient objects: carbon dating. By analyzing the isotopic fingerprint of carbon atoms in tree rings, scientists could also identify whether the carbon dioxide absorbed by trees through photosynthesis had been produced naturally or as a result of burning fossil fuels. And, by measuring the isotopic ratios in tree rings of various ages, researchers could also estimate how far CO2 concentrations had risen since the Industrial Revolution as a result of burning fossil fuels.
In a proposal sent to the Air Pollution Foundation in November 1954, Keeling’s research director Epstein wrote, “It is clear that several factors contribute to the variations in the isotopic composition of carbon in trees.” Among these factors, Epstein explained, were the various ecological conditions under which the tree grew, including the isotopic composition of the carbon in the atmosphere. “Since 1840, the carbon-isotope ratio (C12/C13) has increased in the trees so far investigated,” he continued — an increase which could be explained by a change in the carbon-isotope ratio in atmospheric carbon dioxide “resulting from the burning of the C12-enriched coal and petroleum.”
Samuel Epstein’s Proposal to the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation for the Study of Carbon Isotopes in the Atmosphere, 1954. Read the entire document on DocumentCloud.
Epstein’s research proposal for the Air Pollution Foundation left no doubt about the potential significance of this research. Approximately sixty years before the Paris Agreement, he described the “concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere” as a matter “of well recognized importance to our civilization” and explained that the possible consequences of“a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization.”
Samuel Epstein’s Proposal to the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation for the Study of Carbon Isotopes in the Atmosphere, 1954. Read the entire document in DocumentCloud.
Confident in the accuracy of his measurements, Keeling communicated his findings to an employee of the U.S. Weather Bureau and, in the summer of 1956, its director of meteorological research, Harry Wexler, invited him to Washington, D.C., to present his data. Impressed, Wexler suggested that the young researcher continue his investigations by measuring CO2 at the newly built observatory on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa. Keeling secured federal sponsorship for this work and measured atmospheric CO2 on Mauna Loa, observing a rising trend of CO2 increasing year on year from approximately 313 ppm in 1957 to 320 ppm in 1967. Caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, the depiction of this trend would come to be known as the Keeling Curve — a key piece of evidence that climate change is human caused.
Former Tory Cabinet minister Alok Sharma tore apart the Government’s new oil and gas bill before it passed through the Commons, as he stressed that the UK’s promise to phase out fossil fuels will be broken.
On Monday evening, the Government’s Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill passed through its second reading in the House of Commons despite widespread condemnation from climate campaigners.
The legislation seeks to maximise North Sea oil and gas production, requiring the industry regulator to run regular rounds for new oil and gas licences, pushing fossil fuel production.
Alok Sharma, who was the Cop26 president, abstained from voting, as he spoke out in Parliament against a law which will merely “reinforce the unfortunate perception about the UK rowing back from climate action”.
“We have seen the impacts of the changing climate around us daily, 2023 was the hottest year on record globally, in recent weeks many people have faced flooding again in our country including in my own constituency, we really shouldn’t need anymore wakeup calls to put aside the distractions and act with the urgency the situation demands,” Sharma said.
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Reacting to the vote last night, Greenpeace UK’s political campaigner, Ami McCarthy, slammed the result as a win for the government, but a loss for the planet and everyone on it.
“Literally no-one benefits from this nonsensical, climate-wrecking Bill except the oil and gas industry and its shareholders,” said McCarthy.
“The government has failed to act in the national interest tonight and those MPs who chose not to rebel have placed themselves on the wrong side of history.
