Don't Even Think About It (28 page)

“Your pen,” he says.

“Pardon?”

“Your pen, George. Your pen. It’s leaking. It could spill and mess up your clothes.”

And I want to say, “Your oil, sir. Your
oil
. It could burn and destroy the biosphere.” Seeing that I have been invited to “report any unsafe behavior by your host,” there is a lot more that I could have said about the safety of selling products that dump 380 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

This obsessive focus on personal safety would be odd under any circumstances. The fact that it is so prominent within an institution involved in the most dangerous activity in human history suggests that a major oil company might be just as prone to developing irrational avoidance mechanisms and bizarre self-justifying narratives as any individual or social group. And why not? It is, after all, a social network with its own identity, internal culture, and social norms.

By this reckoning, is it surely relevant that Shell, like all the oil giants, deals with climate change within a single combined Health, Safety and Environment department.

Professor John Adams of University College London howls with laughter when I later tell him the Shell story. Adams is the author of the most popular textbook on the social construction of risk and has a particular loathing for health and safety policy, which he calls the “compulsive risk assessment psychosis” (a.k.a. CRAP). He recalls that when he gave a presentation at MI6, the secret intelligence service that supposedly employs James Bond, a hardened security operative complained bitterly about being chastised for unsafe stair walking in the head office.

Adams’s academic research concentrates on the role that our perception of control has on our perception of risk. He observes that the excessive focus on health and safety is common across all resource extraction industries and derives from a culture that sees risks as something that can be managed and controlled. There is, he agrees, a bias derived from definitions of influence and control behind Shell’s concerns about safety. “I see cultural bias everywhere I turn,” he says. “My own cultural bias is to see the world though cultural bias theory.” I guess that’s a meta-bias.

Safely seated with Horne, fortified by petits fours from the cornucopian nibbles buffet that fuels Shell’s power meetings, familiar cultural biases weave their way through our conversation: in groups, out groups, social norms, bystander apathy, self-justifying enemy narratives, and, as usual, the total separation between wellhead and tailpipe.

Horne is a straight-talking Australian chemical engineer who has worked for Shell all of his life. Like the people shown on the cards on the stairs, he finds it very
exciting
to be working in such a powerful company. He has just returned from Alberta, Canada, and talks with awe of Shell’s grand ambition for its operations in the tar sands. Once again, I am reminded that one person’s environmental disaster is another person’s engineering achievement.

Horne is fiercely loyal despite having the unenviable task of defending Shell’s role in an issue that he openly admits is an extremely “inconvenient truth” for his company. I am pleasantly surprised, having expected to hear a flow of carefully crafted PR lines, to find that Horne comes across as a decent and honest person. “It’s a bugger,” he says.

Back in 2009, he was filmed talking of his conviction, as a father, that it is a “no-brainer that we move to a new carbon pathway” and how excited (that word again) he was about the transformation under way in his company. A few weeks later, Shell froze all of its investment in renewable energy.

The climate activist Bill McKibben says, “This is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.” Well, I’m all up for meeting enemies and understanding how they operate. So I am intrigued to know how Horne squares his concerns about climate change with his loyalty to a company that apparently has no brain and has decided to spend ever greater amounts—currently more than thirty billion dollars a year—bringing more oil and gas reserves into production.

Horne’s argument, not surprisingly, adheres strongly to the tailpipe narrative: that the responsibility lies with the emitters who give Shell the “permission”
to extract the fossil fuels that they choose to burn.
Permission
is a key word for Horne, and it crops up throughout the interview. “We need the permission that society gives to us,” he says, but
the oil industry “is not being given the permission to make a transition out of fossil fuels.” And the main reason for this is that “the international agenda is driven by people with political agendas that are unrelated to solving the problem.”

These distracting agendas include development, social rights, and poverty campaigns, but especially environmentalists who, he says, have written climate change as the old socialist-versus-capitalist fight in a different format.

Horne wants it known that this familiar enemy narrative is his personal view rather than that of his company. Really though, it is just a blunter Aussie version of the language that permeates the future scenarios produced within Shell. The most recent of these warns of a future dystopia in which “powerful climate lobbies” demand “disruptively overreactive, ill-considered, politically driven knee-jerk responses”—including, shockingly, bans on the development of new sources of fossil fuels. This, by some complex self-serving logic, leads the tailpipe emissions to grow “relentlessly.”

Shell is understandably nervous about any restriction on its expansion. The British nonprofit organization Carbon Tracker Initiative has been warning institutional investors that the current carbon reduction targets (inadequate though they may be) cannot be met without leaving 60 to 80 percent of the currently listed oil and gas reserves in the ground. This in turn means that the share value of Shell, which is underpinned by these reserves, is grossly inflated. It is hardly surprising that Shell executives prefer to keep their eyes focused on the risks of slippery floors.

So climate change is a collective bugger of an inconvenient challenge. Shell wants to keep finding the stuff and digging it up. We keep burning ever more of it because we are addicted to energy. And everyone is threatened by climate change. The solution to this quandary, which, as usual, Shell is not being given the
permission
to develop, is carbon capture and storage (CCS).

CCS is a group of technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the waste flue gases (or in the case of gas, from the fuel itself) and then pump it into underground aquifers for permanent storage. Cynics suggest that all that dangerous carbon had been quite safely stored underground to begin with.

There are currently eight large-scale CCS projects and eight more under construction, which, between them, will soon be storing thirty-six million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. This sounds promising until one considers that we will need sixteen thousand more plants on this scale to deal with current emissions. Emissions are still increasing so fast that we will need another thousand plants each year just to keep up with the annual increase. And transport emissions—which are growing even faster—cannot be captured by any technology.

Legitimate debates continue about whether these technologies could ever be economically viable, whether the carbon dioxide could really be stored permanently, and whether there is enough space to put it. The costs of CCS are extremely uncertain, running at $150 per metric ton of CO2, and the technology becomes viable only if CO2 can be captured at a cost of $25 per metric ton. There is a long way to go.

David Reiner, an expert in CCS at Cambridge University, is convinced that it is technically possible, providing that there is economic pressure and political will. He tells me that CCS has no economic justification on its own: It is entirely linked with concern about climate change and, he says, “CCS development moves forward only when there is a lot of interest or concern in climate change.”

Of course it does. CCS is the card that gets everyone out of jail. CCS allows governments to carry on talking big on climate change while continuing to expand oil and gas production. It provides the reason that oil and gas companies can stay in business. And it fits perfectly into the industry worldview of engineering solutions. As ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says, “Maybe I’m biased because I’m an engineer, but I have enormous faith in our technology’s ability to find solutions as they present themselves to us.” Tillerson named it correctly: There is an explicit bias at work.

Maybe CCS can work. I hope it does—this is one engineering technology that could make a genuine contribution to the transition out of fossil fuels. My fear, though, is that CCS is less of a real solution than a much-needed narrative ploy, providing the vital missing piece in a story that is unstable and incomplete without it. For narrative purposes, CCS does not need to work on a large scale. It doesn’t need to be economically viable or ever be competitive with renewable energy. It scarcely needs to work at all. All that is required is that it exist tangibly enough to provide an alibi for the wellhead—a few demonstration sites, some chunky reports. And then lots of creative storytelling about human ingenuity.

Shell, for example, says that CCS is, along with nuclear, the “hinge” on which future emissions depend. BP says that CCS is a “critical technology for reducing emissions.” A high-level working group on the future of coal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 also concluded that CCS is the “critical enabling technology.” Shell does not anticipate large-scale deployment of CCS until 2030, but then, within twenty years, it predicts that the developed world will convert 90 percent of coal- and gas-fired plants to CCS. There is some textbook temporal discounting and optimism bias going on here.

“Never forget,” says Steve Kretzmann, founder of the environmental campaign group Oil Change International, “never,
ever
forget that the oil industry is the most extraordinary wealth-generating machine ever invented by man. That is what it is designed to do and it does that very well. I haven’t seen a single intelligent thought about how you could transition the industry out of oil and keep it just as profitable.”

Kretzmann has spent twenty years campaigning against oil companies and has watched the same cycle over and over again: “Every so often when they think something is going to happen, they buy a whole load of wind, sun, algae, CCS, whatever. Then their lobbying arms do their jobs, the threat recedes, and they say, ‘Nah, we’re not going to do this.’”

The journalist Ross Gelbspan interviewed six U.S. energy and oil company presidents for his book
The
Heat Is On
. All but one of them agreed that climate change was happening. Like David Horne, they all said the same thing: that as soon as governments regulate climate change, they would become “energy companies.” In the meantime, says Gelbspan, they admitted, off the record, that the competitive environment forced them to suppress the truth about climate change and ensure that those regulations do not happen.

Gelbspan tells me he has “pondered a great deal how these men could be loving grandfathers and such cold-minded executives.” His only conclusion is that they are outstandingly good at compartmentalizing different areas of their lives and preventing any connections from jumping across those boundaries.

Kretzmann is surprisingly empathetic when he talks about oil company employees and recognizes that many are struggling with these contradictions and “genuinely believe that their chance of changing things is better on the inside.”

That being said, when it comes to the battle for public opinion, it’s gloves off. One of the TV commercials produced by Oil Change International contains smiling “executives” chatting to the camera in the intimate way currently favored by corporate advertising: “Begging a fortune in subsidies, destroying your kids’ future. At Exxon, that’s what we call good business. Here at Exxon we hate your children.”

“They don’t like it much,” Kretzmann says, and chuckles. He makes no bones that the public fight is not really about policies and climate data; it’s about identifying enemies and reframing oil. “Whenever the oil industry wants to talk about their great benefits, they talk about energy. When we want to talk about their impacts, we talk about oil—that black gooey stuff.”

34

Moral Imperatives

How We Diffuse Responsibility for Climate Change

When Dick Cheney, former U.S.
vice president, accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington in the face, he drew on his forty years in politics and the oil industry to create four stages to the process. “Ultimately,” he said, “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry.” His boss, George W. Bush, added yet further levels of detachment—”He heard a bird flush, and he turned and pulled the trigger, and saw his friend get wounded.”

Even when they shoot their friends, it seems, politicians will do everything they can to create multiple stages between themselves and responsibility. It is a peculiarity of English that it doesn’t distinguish between intentional events and accidental events. In many languages, you would say “I broke my arm” only if you went mad and broke it. But English makes up for this weakness with the ingenious passive voice, which removes intentionality: My arm was broken; my friend got wounded; the climate got fried.