Fossil fuel company executives just do not care about the planet’s future

Fossil fuel companies are the greatest threat to life’s party – not greens People who argue it’s a good idea to respect nature’s thresholds get labelled spoilsports, but the real party-poopers are those who recognise no limits at all Guardian, Andrew Simms, 5 Feb 15 22 months and counting

“Will we go ahead?” asked Shell CEO, Ben van Beurden, rhetorically, about the oil company’s plans to drill in the Arctic. “Yes if we can. I’d be so disappointed if we wouldn’t.” Van Beurden had the grace to concede that his plans “divide society,” but he seemed unable to comprehend that they might condemn it.

From new research showing that recent sea level rise is “far worse than previously thought”, to updated confirmation of how far we are transgressing our planetary environmental boundaries, an almost daily accumulation of evidence seems unable still to connect van Beurden’s words to their full implication.

What if, instead, he had said to the press conference gathered to hear Shell’s quarterly financial results a few days ago: “We wish to inform you that our business plan is to destabilise permanently the climate on which you, your families and society depend.”

Harsh? Perhaps, but their strategy will end the party for the rest of us, so that their corporate party might continue. In fact, it seems that extreme weather in the form of drought is already breaking hearts in Brazil by forcing cities to cancel carnival, the greatest party of all.

It’s ironic. Those who argue it’s a good idea to respect nature’s various thresholds (like not making farming so toxic that you poison the bees who kindly pollinate our food crops) traditionally get labelled as fun-free spoilsports. But it seems it’s those who recognise no limits at all who represent the greatest threat to life’s party.

While the global industrial exploitation of nature drives a mass extinction event on land and sea, it becomes ever clearer that our own well-being is dependent on the general condition of the environment. Our health, both physiological and psychological, is deeply connected to and relies on the diversity of life.

Now, a new global calculator developed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, suggests a course of action to prevent irreversible warming that could be as good for the web of life as it is for our quality of life. Radical changes to farming, transport, food and fuel will be needed, but it envisages a world of spreading forest canopies, clean, quiet electric transport and healthy, increasingly vegetarian diets. With such a potential win-win, why would anyone choose bad times with business as usual? The status quo is tenacious.

If you look at the UK’s biggest lobbying groups at the centre of European power in Brussels, their scale seems to be in direct proportion to the damage they do and how likely they are to resist progressive change. Oil, finance and aviation are all in the top five. And, even as the economics of fracking and remote oil exploration, such as in the Arctic, have fallen apart, their lobbies remain persistent and audacious. How else could a Conservative party, which extols the notion of an English person’s home being their castle, be persuaded to promote changes in the trespass law to allow fracking firms to drill beneath homes without the owners’ permission?

Logic, consistency and science become inconvenient to indefensible positions. When the US Senate last month voted on whether climate change was real and caused by human activities it was creating future folklore. Accepting the first, but not the second proposition, the Senate put its debate on a par with the famous, and now seen as absurd, 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey’ case in theUS, which effectively put the theory of evolution on trial………http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2015/feb/04/fossil-fuel-companies-are-the-greatest-threat-to-lifes-party-not-greens