By Camille Aubin
[email protected]
One of the five biggest companies on the planet, one of the biggest oil companies in the world, and one who recorded revenues of nearly $400 billion U.S. in 2018: This brilliant yellow shell that sells you gasoline now asks us, citizens, to do our part. The company is trying to lecture the oil industry to recognize the importance of putting a carbon price. Astonishing!
At the beginning of November, Shell tweeted, “What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions? #EnergyDebate”. The response from several climate activists, such as Greta Thunberg, reminds the group that they knew they were “destroying future living conditions for countless generations for profit and then trying to distract people and prevent real systemic change through endless greenwash campaigns”.
Shell Canada, one of the biggest manufacturers of petroleum products, has introduced a new program that allows consumers who refuel their vehicles at Shell’s 1,400 service stations across Canada to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The program offered by Shell through their self-paying service will be free until the end of December. Those wishing to continue the initiative can contribute at a rate of two cents per litre once the initiative reaches its end.
Why would Shell do this? Is it pure greenwashing or true environmental awareness? There are several reasons behind the company’s actions. First, let’s stop sticking our heads in the sand, it’s to position themselves among the most avant-garde companies in its sector. Shell must serve its interests to the best of its ability, both financially and politically. The company clearly feels it needs to position itself now regarding carbon pricing, since this will undoubtedly be an increasingly prominent issue in the coming years. Shell Canada is well aware of this. The company is represented by a member on the current Climate Solutions Advisory Council that B.C. government has established.
Is Shell Canada’s action better than nothing? Perhaps. It is ironic that an oil company, whose actions contribute to climate change, has the audacity to ask its customers to decrease their emissions and act as a result. Shell should consider the consequences of oil companies on the environment, and ask themselves who’s partially responsible for that, rather than asking others to take actions for them.
It is interesting how everyone is on the CO2 and climate change bandwagon when it is all a made up story. Oh, I know you’ll say here’s another denier and dismiss me as not believing in the “settled science”. But 2 things, Check out a few of the CDN (Climate Discussion Nexus) videos on Youtube and when is science ever settled? Science helps us learn about the way things are, but it is never perfect. One discovery leads us to others. The knowledge we gain when we find empirical evidence that something is true every time, leads us to use until it we find out well, it isn’t quite always true. And then we can further adjust the experiment and see if we get even closer to a constant, provable reality.
For example, people will say the climate is worse today than 100 years ago. So the CDN Youtube channel shows us the graph of 1919 and 2019 weather for Ottawa. Can you tell which is which? Or how about the dire climate predictions made by the government in 2001. Of the 6 claims, all were proven wrong by our own weather measuring systems.
Ever since Regan and Mulroney told us that corporations really do care for us and look after us, we’ve gotten worse and worse off. Because what do corporations care about? Their corporate survival and constantly growing profits. We have given everything over to private enterprise and this is their only guiding principle.
Corporations like Shell and all the rest have found a new way to take our money…Carbon taxes. None of it goes to fixing anything because in reality, there’s nothing to fix. I have been suspicious of this ever since the Kyoto protocol. And the CDN Youtube site uses publicly available facts and figures to debunk all the carbon related, climate changing, end of the world stories they keep telling us we caused and we have to pay for. While the rich and corporations get richer.
I urge you to take a few minutes (the videos are only about 10 minutes or so in length) and see if it doesn’t convince you of the fiction of climate change. It is just that…a fiction. Not even a science fiction.
It was all summed up in the first paragraph, “heres another denier”, ridiculous point of view in todays world. Same option as Donald! Thank god Biden will try to reverse the damage that denier has done!