After a long history of helping Putin, the Western oil giants are only now leaving Russia. Perversely this may benefit China.
Thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several fossil fuel giants are severing long-standing relationships with Russia and its oligarchs, which would seem to put the brakes on the further growth of fossil fuel production in Russia. Foreign Policy reviews the sordid history of these these and similar associations in the past, and considers their likely impacts on the climate emergency, autocrats and their oligarchs, and the fossil fuel special interests.
For example, BP has owned 19.75% of Russia’s Rosneft, supplier of the fuel being used to invade the Ukraine. It’s divestment only executed after the invasion started, has knocked the bottom out of the Russian oil market and may delay key development projects. It should stop financing and technology transfers Rosneft needs for its future growth.
Despite people being shocked by BP’s Russian involvement, Foreign Policy notes that this goes back to before 2014 when Russia invaded and annexed the Crimea – and was clearly favorable to BP’s bottom line – let alone Putin and his cronies.
In fact, Western oil companies often partner with autocratic, corrupt and repressive governments, e.g., in Africa, Arabia, and in the Americas to the detriment of almost everyone else as described in the Foreign Policy article:
Working pumpjacks are seen in the Montebello Oil Field in Montebello, California, on February 23, 2022. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images / via FP
The profits from these associations, make big oil even more powerful and damaging to the environment than they would otherwise be. One wonders how much Big Oil has contributed to the Australian COALition Government’s love and support of the fossil fuel industry in our country? The political context and implications are crystal clear.
For years as Scotty says below in his own words, our LNP COALition puppet Government has been supporting the mindlessly greedy fossil fuel special interests in preference to ordinary people. Both the industry and the puppets work first, to deny the science that shows us the world is warming at an accelerating rate from the continued burning of fossil carbon; and secondly, to fill our thought space with endlessly distracting humbug and blather so we won’t pay attention to what they are doing. Burning fossil fuel clearly comes first before acting on the climate emergency!
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Featured image: oil refinery plant Yaroslavnefteorgsintez in Yaroslavl town, Russia. Русский: нефтеперерабатывающий завод, вечер / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en / via Wikimedia Commons / Author Svtk44
Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'.
Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry.
After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology.
In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne.
In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract.
Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'.
Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe.
As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.
