by Anne MacLennan
Plastics are increasingly important as the squeeze comes on petrochemical companies (even if they don’t seem to realise it). Carbon Tracker has long warned investors about the risks of putting resources into coal and petrochemical industries which are doomed to fail as the race to cut emissions kicks in, causing them to become ‘stranded assets’.
Their latest warning points out that many oil and gas companies are persisting with Business as Usual, planning new exploration and extraction and thereby ‘over-building the existing fossil fuel system’ with significant risk to financial backers.
Meantime, Extinction Rebellion is targetting the insurance sector as the ‘Achilles Heel’ for fossil fuel companies. Insurance is critical for the oil and gas industries, but insurance companies are acutely aware of the impacts, costs – and causes – of climate change. They are therefore more likely to respond to calls to pull out, effectively hobbling the petrochemical giants.
Carbon Tracker highlights the wastefulness of fossil fuels and their emissions : ‘About 67% of all fossil fuels used are lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, other oxides, and water vapour. Only the remaining 33% is actually used to power things, transport things and heat things.’ Further losses occur throughout the extraction, transport, and refining processes.
In fact the economics are so poor due to waste and harm (health, environment and emissions) that fossil fuels have only been able to play such a role in global energy due to lack of competition in the past, along with ‘the cartel behaviour of OPEC propping up prices via production cuts whenever prices fall’.