About that Kinder, Gentler, Cleaner Fossil Fuel Industry

Petro-states tend to become lap dogs for the fossil fuel giants that feed them revenues. They wind up, to some degree, in bed together.

Canada is no exception.

The federal government is so in thrall to the fossil fuel industry that it has bought a multi-billion dollar pipeline just to keep them happy, money that it may never recoup.

This is the same government that uses its other face to proclaim climate change the gravest threat facing the nation. Pretty neat trick, eh?

In recent years the fossil energy giants have gone to considerable lengths to greenwash their activities. They routinely tell us they're doing their bit to help our endangered planet.

But that is greenwash, eco-bullshit.

The largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change, according to a new report. 

Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil were the main companies leading the field in direct lobbying to push against a climate policy to tackle global warming, the report said. 

Increasingly they are using social media to successfully push their agenda to weaken and oppose any meaningful legislation to tackle global warming.

...After the Paris climate agreement in 2015 the large integrated oil and gas companies said they supported a price on carbon and formed groups like the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative which promote voluntary measures. 

But, the report states, there is a glaring gap between their words and their actions. 

The five publicly listed oil majors – ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total – now spend about $195m a year on branding campaigns suggesting they support action against climate change.

But the report said these campaigns were misleading the public about the extent of the oil companies’ actions because while publicly endorsing the need to act, they are massively increasing investment in a huge expansion of oil and gas extraction. In 2019 their spending will increase to $115bn, with just 3% of that directed at low carbon projects.

These guys, with the collaboration of political Quislings, are out to bring on catastrophic climate change. There is money to be made, many hundreds of billions of dollars to be raked in, some 27 trillion dollars of proven fossil reserves to be extracted, and that's enough to buy a planet's worth of politicians.

You think SNC-Lavalin has the government's ear? Whatever that is, it's nothing compared to having that government in bed, willing to spend many billions to build you a high-capacity pipeline to flood world markets with dangerously toxic, high-carbon bitumen.