The Enemy Within. At Some Point You Have to Take Sides.

Don't waste your breath.  It's futile to try to work with energy giants on environmental issues at least according to one of Britain's leading environmentalists, Jonathon Porritt, who has thrown in the towel after years of trying to work with companies such as BP and Shell.

Jonathon Porritt said “hydrocarbon supremacists” at the companies had successfully ousted reformers wanting to diversify into green energy.

The founder director of non-profit consultancy Forum for the Future (FFF), said: “We came to the conclusion that it was impossible for today’s oil and gas majors to adapt in a timely and intelligent way to the imperative of radical decarbonisation. We felt we had no option but to end our long-standing partnerships with both Shell and BP.”

Writing in the Guardian, Porritt said: “These are companies whose senior managers know, as an irrefutable fact, that their current business model threatens both the stability of the global economy and the longer-term prospects of humankind as a whole. It got harder and harder for me to look them in the face knowing what they knew, and witnessing at first hand the intricate patterns of denial and self-deception that they were forced to adopt.”

“There was a time when I seriously persuaded myself that it was still just about possible for companies like Shell and BP to find some way of transitioning into ‘fully-integrated energy companies’, investing as much in renewables, storage and efficiency as in hydrocarbons, instead of reverting to what they are today: pure-play hydrocarbon dinosaurs,” he wrote in a recent blog. “It didn’t happen. Worse yet, the lengths they went to to justify their continuing investments in new hydrocarbons have become more and more extreme.”...

“With BP the moment [for transition] came and went under the leadership of John Browne and with Shell, it pretty much died after Mark Moody-Stuart moved on,” Porritt wrote in the Guardian. “In both companies, the hydrocarbon supremacists rapidly regained the ground they’d lost: doing renewables as Corporate Social Responsibility was fine, but anything that threatened to go seriously ‘beyond petroleum’ was deemed to be deviant heresy.”

Meanwhile, on the home front, a Burnaby man has failed to persuade a court to quash Kinder Morgan's SLAPP suit against him.  The Texas infrastructure giant is using its financial muscle to crush opposition. In a system in which you get as much law as you can afford the little guy is toast.

It strikes me that if bullies like Kinder Morgan intend to treat us like ants to be crushed under their corporate boot, then it's time we responded like ants, fire ants in particular, and swarmed them.  They pick on a few, make examples of them, to intimidate the rest.  The target isn't those they sue, it's all of us.  At some point you have to take sides.