Extreme Makeover: The Oil and Gas Edition is afoot. The companies we’ve long known as fossil fuel companies are telling us they’re actually energy companies committed to finding solutions to climate change. We’re not so sure, so we’re parsing it out using greenhouse gas accounting and discussing the concept of emission scopes along the way.

Show Notes:

1:40 The Carbon Accounting, Reporting, and Management Lab (CARML) at Northern Arizona University

2:46 “And because we are so dependent on these fossil fuels, we consume A LOT—just take oil for example. Around the world humans burn about 4.2 billion gallons of oil every single day. 

4:36 Current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere measured at Mauna Loa, Hawai’i

6:42 Keeling Curve

12:57 Drilled podcast homepage

• Petroganda: Drilled’s series on “The fossil fuel industry’s favorite narratives.” This is the series we reference in Episode One when Erica says “You can check out another great podcast called Drilled for fantastic reporting about how oil & gas companies, particularly ExxonMobile, have a long history of spreading misinformation about climate change.

18:12 "Most captured CO2 is used in enhanced oil recovery" 2022 IEEFA analysis

18:40 “[T]ools we can use to investigate the question of branding claims vs. reality”

• Paper: Li M, Trencher G, Asuka J (2022) The clean energy claims of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell: A mismatch between discourse, actions and investments. PLoS ONE 17(2): e0263596. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263596
• This examination of oil majors’ discourse, business strategies, and financials concluded: “We found a strong increase in discourse related to “climate”, “low-carbon” and “transition”, especially by BP and Shell. Similarly, we observed increasing tendencies toward strategies related to decarbonization and clean energy. But these are dominated by pledges rather than concrete actions. Moreover, the financial analysis reveals a continuing business model dependence on fossil fuels along with insignificant and opaque spending on clean energy. We thus conclude that the transition to clean energy business models is not occurring, since the magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse. Until actions and investment behavior are brought into alignment with discourse, accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.
• “Oil Companies Are Trying to Rebrand Themselves on Social Media” Reporting from the Natural Resources Defense Council contrasting oil companies’ ad campaigns with how they spend their lobbying dollars, from 2019

21:53 “For example, burning one gallon of gasoline in a motor vehicle results in about 20 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.” See the EPA’s GHG Emission Factors Hub.

31:35 “Today, we're zooming in on ExxonMobil's recent $60 billion acquisition of Pioneer Gas in October 2023.”

35:43 The Climate Registry emission factors (2023)