Net Zero Hits Snag As Petroleum Companies Abandon Plan… Someone Give AOC A Tissue

Green activists just lost out on a MAJOR point of leverage they were using on their war against the rest of us.

For those of us who drive a car that doesn’t plug into a wall, we can celebrate the wonderful news that gas companies are still going to be making the lifeblood of the North American economy. It is, after all, a product absolutely vital to heating so many of our homes so that we don’t freeze in the dark in a blizzard or when a ‘polar vortex’ plunges temperatures to 20 or even 40 below.

But for anyone who has swapped out any celebration of Christmas, Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July for Earth Day? Buckle up. This one’s gonna sting.

Big Oil abandons part of their Green agenda

Shell (SHEL.L) and other leading energy groups have abandoned a six-year-long attempt to define a net zero emissions strategy after being told that such a standard would require them to stop developing new oil and gas fields, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing documents seen by the newspaper.
Shell, Norway’s Aker BP (AKRBP.OL), opens new tab and Canada’s Enbridge (ENB.TO) have all quit the expert advisory group of Science-Based Targets initiative since late last year, the FT reported.

The Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a leading assessor of company climate goals, confirmed it has paused development of the oil and gas standard due to “significant, resource-intensive development” it still required. —Reuters

In plain English — to remain in this working group, these energy companies had to commit to NO new oil fields. It’s a little like a farmer pledging not to renew a lease on his farmland. At some point, you will stop growing crops. It’s the same thing with oil producers. If you stop digging new wells, the old ones will eventually dry up. And just like that, you’re suddenly not an oil company any more, and the world has no choice but to rely on OTHER energy products.

It’s a slick way that the globalist left can force a change on ordinary people that they never asked for and didn’t want.

But energy companies have clued in that we aren’t even close to having a viable alternative yet, and to abandon drilling would be to commit economic suicide.

Even if this is only a short-term committment to normalcy for the energy conglomerates, here’s why this is a big win for the ordinary citizens of Western nations.

Pivoting to opinion and analysis, the agenda of rabid environmentalists took a body blow with this decision, but maybe not how you think.

Lefites take an ‘L’

There are parts of our daily life that have been identified as ‘the enemy’. The official reason is because it is harmful to the environment. Another reason — and perhaps more honest — is that energy is the lifeblood of the modern economy. Without energy, the economy craters.

And there is a subset of socialists who think that cratering the economy is the path to remaking it in their image. Don’t take ClashDaily’s word for it. When all of the Democrats were still pretending to hate AOC’s ambitious Green New Deal (and before Biden’s government started implementing those policies on the sly under legislation with an entirely different name) her original chief of staff admitted that the Green New Deal wasn’t about environmental objectives at all, but about forcing a kind of economic change down the throats of the American public, as the last part of our piece on AOC’s Chief of Staff quitting cites him as saying:

“According to the report, Chakrabarti told an aide for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), a presidential candidate, that his boss’s Green New Deal “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti says, “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” You can’t get much more revolutionary than that.” —ClashDaily

Fast forward six and a half years closer to AOC’s apocalyptic warning that the “world will end in 12 years’ and the left’s political urgency has been set aside for other political flavors of the day, from Palestine, to ICE, to general anti-Trump antipathy. One might almost forget that we’ve only got 5 more years before the world ends.

Things were going according to plan. New restrictions and red tape were popping up all over the place. A new front on the culture war was quietly advanced on gas stoves even as the left called it a conspiracy theory — using EPA guidance and restrictions to shut down options the same way they forced change on incandescent lights and low-flow toilets.

They were charging ahead toward their goal of ending the sale of traditional gas powered cars in just a few more years, not because the public was persuaded that their sparky cars better met the public’s needs, but because because their authoritarian ‘betters’ have been telling the plebs which choices they are allowed to make.

There may be a day when the electric car is so much better than the other choice that everyone will make the switch, just like most everyone has switched from manual to automatic transmission. Ditto electric windows.

But unless and until the public is persuaded to make the change, only the authoritarians will insist that everyone else comply with their vision of the future. And for all of their hand-wringing about Trump… he isn’t the one micro-managing both our lives and our speech.