Elizabeth Douglass at InsideClimate News, writes
Wall Street Warned About $91 Billion of High-Risk Oil Megaprojects:
Critics of environmentally risky oil projects proposed for deep undersea and Canada's tar sands got new ammunition last week when a report labeled those ventures and others as the industry's most financially questionable pursuits.
The new report, published by the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), identifies a host of drawing-board oil projects that would cost a combined $91 billion over the next decade—and that would lose money if lower demand, carbon restrictions or other factors forced crude prices below $95 a barrel. Many of the projects need oil prices to settle substantially higher than $110 a barrel to break even, CTI said.
It's the latest in a string of offerings from London-based CTI, a non-profit that has been highlighting climate-related risks and costs that they believe are not being addressed by fossil fuel companies or reflected in financial markets. Through a pair of earlier reports, the group helped popularize the notion that fossil fuel companies could end up with valueless "unburnable carbon," or stranded assets, if governments move to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
By highlighting the financial risk of specific mega-projects in its latest work, CTI hopes to convince more Wall Street analysts and oil company investors to pressure ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and others to justify the expenses or cancel development.
"I think by drawing attention to the questionable nature of some of these projects, this gives investors more power to challenge the [money] that's being spent on them," said Andrew Grant, financial analyst for CTI and primary author of the new report. "The more [spending] that gets cancelled, the fewer projects that go ahead, the less carbon emitted into the atmosphere." […]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—A Sense of Urgency, Please:
It's difficult to appreciate the magnitude of self-censorship in the American media until you're exposed to how the foreign press reports on a given conflict. Watching the news here in Greece has helped to put things into perspective.
Here, and in nations across the globe, America's dirty little secret is exposed for the entire world to see. It's a difficult transition to make, the one from filtered news dolled up in blazing graphics and theme music to this unadulterated version of reality pouring into television sets around the globe. The anchor will usually preface the segment with a warning ("the images you are about see are disturbing, but we feel we have to show them to you"), and before your heart has a chance to tell your mind to look away, you're looking at Iraq. The camera pans the street. It's strewn with debris, not flowers. The blackened skeleton of some family car is in the foreground. There's a screaming woman on her knees, slapping her hands on the ground (the puddle of blood she's in, the reporter kindly reminds us, is that of her son). And suddenly, you feel that all-too familiar feeling as your eyes begin to sting and tear up for the death of a stranger.
Of course, it's not just the death of this particular Iraqi, this stranger that affects us so. It is the death of thousands who preceded him that weigh like a million anvils on our conscience, and it's the inevitable death of thousands more that make the shame rise so quickly to our cheeks when we're confronted with the consequences of our action (or inaction, as it may be).
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Tweet of the Day
It would be a huge mistake to excuse the latest #Ferguson area murder by police because victim allegedly had a knife
http://t.co/...
— @peterlauer
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: Ferguson news continues this morning, as the bigger name national press declares it OK to consider the situation outrageous. GunFAIL is back in the news this morning, with the accidental shooting of a 7-year-old boy by his grandmother, who mistook him for an intruder. Again.
Greg Dworkin brought us another round of Rick Perry indictment news, and a thought or two about Ferguson. Updates via
Rei and
WaPo on volcanic rumblings in Iceland. 3-D printed guns actually made out of metal have arrived. And
GideonAB calls in to give us the overseas observers' view of Ferguson, and point to
Phoebe Loosinhouse's diary on the subject.
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