Jun 6, 2021 Hot Take

Big Oil Had a Bad Month

Hey Hot Cakes,

We're back! Today the season 3 finale of the podcast is out too so make sure to check that out wherever you get your pods. Now on to the newsletter!

Big Oil Had a Bad Month (Which Means We Had a Good One)

By Amy Westervelt

On the heels of the first negative report the International Energy Agency (IEA) has ever put out about fossil fuels, the Oil Majors had a really bad month...which made it a great month for us! In today's podcast episode—the Season 3 finale—we get into most of that news, but we already have some updates.

First, Follow This, the same shareholder activist group that pushed Chevron to account for its product emissions when it's talking about emissions, showed up at the Shell shareholder meeting too. They put forth a resolution that basically said Shell's climate plan still doesn't go far enough, that the company has to start tracking and reducing carbon emissions and winding down fossil fuel development. That proposal got over 30 percent support. Which doesn’t mean it passed, but is *much* closer to passing than previous proposals along these lines have gotten. (They put forth roughly the same one last year and got 14 percent of the vote, for example.) And because it’s over 20 percent, the board has to seriously consider the proposal and report back to shareholders next year, which is a pretty big deal.

And then there's the additional Exxon news. When we taped this episode, shareholder ballots were still being tallied; since then the count has finished and activist investor group Engine No. 1 has actually picked up *three* out of Exxon's 12 board seats. They ran on a promise of pushing the company away from fossil fuels and toward climate action, so again, a big deal. Possibly an even bigger deal? Shareholder resolutions that were passed at the meeting. One requires the company to disclose how their lobbying spend lines up with the Paris Climate Agreement—it passed by 55.6 percent of the vote. Another compels Exxon to freaking lobby for climate policy, and it got 64%. Forcing the company that invented lobbying against climate action to lobby for climate policy? Beautiful, no notes. You can catch up on the rest of the news—from the court case Shell lost at The Hague to the slap in the face Black Rock delivered to BP—in the episode!

This is the last podcast episode for a while, we're taking some time off over the summer, but the newsletter will continue and we'll keep you posted on the podcast's return. Thank you all for your continued support, it's so appreciated!

Reading list:

The little engine that could, and the oil giant that couldn't, by By Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Jennifer Hiller for Reuters
No new oil, gas or coal development if world is to reach net zero by 2050, says world energy body, by Fiona Harvey for The Guardian
Rebel shareholders with percent of the vote, by Steven Mufson for The Washington Post
Shell Loses Climate Case That May Set Precedent for Big Oil, by Diederik Baazil, Hugo Miller, and Laura Hurst for Bloomberg Green
BlackRock goes against BP board in climate resolution vote, by Ron Bousso and Simon Jessop for Reuters

Week in Greentrolling: Chevron Has No Friends

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

Whenever the greenwashing fails, you can count on the oil majors to resort to woke-washing. They’re diverse! They support women! They believe Black Lives Matter! Whatever. This week, they tried it with the onset of PRIDE month, and….it did not go pretty.

I’m on a Twitter break, but I still heard about Chevron’s PRIDE masterpiece with a whole ass video and could not help going to take a look myself. While I was thrilled to see so many people calling them out and forcing them to reconcile their rhetoric with their record, I was even more tickled to see them getting trolled from the right. It’s not the first time either. Chevron pissed the right off royally when they called for a peaceful transfer of power after the insurrection.

Look, it’s ridiculous in a lot of ways. Chevron has given a shit ton of money to Republicans, and that’s why trying to “play woke” on the internet doesn’t cut it. But also the r(wh)ite wing has whipped their base up with a potent recipe of white supremacist populism, which means they don’t take kindly to big corporations. So, a company like Chevron has enemies on both sides.

So I guess they should...I dunno...die?

*** Bonus troll tip from Hot Take researcher Julianna Bradley! Chevron wasn’t the only one with the rainbow-washing this week. API made their twitter photo a rainbow for PRIDE which spurred this twitter thread

More reading:

They’re Still Out There

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

One of the things that I find most disturbing about the Biden era thus far is the drop in conversation about white supremacist extremism. Once we kicked these folks off the internet, it seems like we went into a collective “out of sight, out of mind” kind of place. Even though these folks legit stormed the Capitol and came damn close to hanging the Vice President mere months ago.

From my vantage point as a Black woman, I can’t forget that right around this time last year, they were gearing up to infiltrate and cause chaos at BLM protests. From my vantage point as a Black Climate Person, I can’t forget that they set up armed checkpoints in wildfire-ravaged states. In Louisiana, a whole town refused to allow evacuees from Hurricane Laura because of “bad actors” at BLM protests.

Y’all, these folks were not locked up. They didn’t die. They most likely multiplied. And while I understand why they were deplatformed and kicked off the internet, I am fearful about what they wind up doing when we’re not looking. As we gear up for another summer of protests and fires and storms, we can’t afford to ignore this part of the story. Just like climate change intersects with literally everything, so does white supremacy. In fact, that’s how we GOT climate change.

And one thing we know about white supremacy is that it doesn’t fade away, it doesn’t go quietly or gradually. It has to be erased, which means we have to talk about it.

A Window into the Climate Crisis in Mexico

By Amy Westervelt

I've been obsessively watching El Tema, a docuseries from actor/producer/director Gael García Bernal and writer and linguist Yásnaya Águilar that offers a fascinating window into how the climate crisis is unfolding in Mexico (and in some cases the role the U.S. plays in exacerbating climate impacts south of our border). I found out about the docuseries from political scientist Pablo Montaño, who also worked on the project. He sent me a link to it on Twitter and a DM, joking that hopefully we wouldn't give it the same review we gave Seaspiracy.

Fear not, Pablo! Honestly, it's troublingly hard to find climate content that's not afraid to go into specifics but can do so without making your eyes glaze over. And El Tema pulls it off. In the first episode, Agua, for example, you learn about a recent protest over water in Chihuahua, Mexico. It centers around a dam, three rivers, and a totally outdated treaty with the U.S. In broad strokes, a 1944 treaty between the U.S. and Mexico governs who gets what water from which rivers and when. The treaty doesn't take the current context--which includes not only climate change-exacerbated drought but also the build-out of several new cities and major increases in population—into account. So in 2020, when Mexican officials were scheduled to open the dam and send water to the U.S., it would have left the state of Chihuahua and its citizens with no water. Protesters stopped the release for a time, but ultimately couldn't stop it. With rainfall at about 30 percent belowthe average last year, farmers are desperate. The tensions continue and it's clear that treaties like these need to be updated to reflect the impacts and current realities of climate change.

I won't spoil the rest for you, there are episodes on air pollution, carbon, energy, oceans and more, all using very specific Mexican stories as a window into the complexities of the global climate crisis and the need for humans to operate as not only an interconnected species but also as part of the global ecosystem. Netflix should be running *this* kind of content! In the meantime, you can catch El Tema (in Spanish with English subtitles) streaming on YouTube.