Why do BP and Shell serve the strategic policy and propaganda initiatives of global finance?

Q: 
(published with permission)

Dr Rancourt:

I find your writings and your interviews to have a unique perspective with regard to the global warming/climate change mania that seems to have gripped the country (and certainly Europe). Especially so with regard to your taking a very broad based view----like this global warming craziness is part of something much larger. (I share this sentiment.)

I have a question and possibly in your busy schedule you can find the time to answer or point me in the right direction for some clarity with regard to this:

I have been perplexed and frustrated by the seemingly counterintuitive reaction that many large petroleum companies (BP, Shell, etc) seem to have.  They appear (in their PR, web sites, position statements) to be going along with/agreeing with the premise that fossil fuels are
1)immoral and
2)we need to transition away from them asap, etc etc.

You would think they would champion (and in fact scream form the rooftops!) many of the ideas expressed by Alex Epstein in his book “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels”. (I just read your very interesting review.)

Can you point me in the direction of any articles which might explain this reaction on the part of the large petroleum companies? (Might they actually benefit from excessive regulation/taxation/expenses of litigation, in the sense that they can absorb such costs more effectively than their smaller competitors, thereby excessive regulation/taxation/litigation in their industry actually benefits them by elimination of many of their smaller competitors?)

Thank you for your time.  Please feel free to call me if more convenient for you.

Most sincerely,
Peter Guske PT

A:

Hi Peter,

My sense is that the energy mega-corporations are an integrated and inseparable part of the US-based system of global finance, which is itself integrated with the US industrial-military apparatus. The military is the real physical threat that keeps most countries in line and subservient to global financial and corporate predation and to the obligatory use of the US dollar in trade. (The US prints the dollar at will.) Likewise, military sales to client "allies" is a major wealth transfer mechanism, such as from Saudi oil revenues, while the energy mega-corporations play their role and have on-site knowledge and control.

This structure implies that the said energy mega-corporations will always support the strategic policy and propaganda initiatives of the overall US-based energy-finance-military system of global occupation. Clearly, the said strategic initiatives includes legitimizing and installing a global so-called carbon economy.

This global carbon economy, including its national and sub-national carbon tax implementations (all management layers are to be integrated), is a bold new model for global coercion and taxation; which will be controlled by the same finance elite that has so effectively prevented national economic liberations, under the guise of "free-trade" efficiency and development.

The big plus is that Western populations and the Western state service intellectuals (including scientists) have enthusiastically invested in what can only by called The Carbon Religion. All humanitarian and environmental good will has been reduced to atmospheric concentration of CO2 and the impending fireball earth. Incidental (on the global scale) incentives for "green technologies" are part of the propaganda (see this).

Of course there are somewhat-competing US blocks. Exxon Mobil has more of an interest in developing US continental energy resources and may want to monopolize shale. It also probably has a different array of mega-finance connections. This reflects the competing Democratic and Republican corporate alliances: The former is more "globalist" while the latter is more traditionally "empirist". You only need to follow how continental pipeline routes change with Democrat/Republican and Liberal/Conservative (Canadian satellite state) election results...  Exxon appears not to like the idea of submitting to global carbon rules that are overly controlled by competitors?

Furthermore, it should also be said that BP and Shell may be attempting to reduce consumer guilt at the gas tank. It's easier to buy "green" gasoline, and from a company that is committed to "going green". The consumer effect may be less in Exxon territory.

Just my tentative thoughts.

See the list of links to my articles about climate HERE.

Cheers,
--Denis

Suggested links from Climate Change LIES:

How Big Oil Benefits From Global Warming Alarmism
http://www.forbes.com/…/how-big-oil-benefits-from-global-w…/

Rockefeller's (Standard Oil) fund 350.org:
http://opinion.financialpost.com/…/rockefellers-behind-scr…/

WWF vast pool of oil money:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/…/the-wwfs-vast-pool-of-oil…/

BP, Greenpeace, and the big oil jackpot:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.ca/…/bp-greenpeace-big-…

Gulf of Mexico spill BP is largely invested in Wind Energy:
http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do…

Solar Manufacturers Owned by Oil Companies
http://www.ehow.com/list_7358409_solar-manufacturers-owned-…

Chevron sinking $300 million a year into alternative energy:
http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/oil-companies-prom…/

Top ten big oil initiatives in clean tech:
http://www.globe-net.com/…/top-ten-big-oil-company-green-i…/
(alternate link)

Watts exposes Dana Nuccitelli as having a "big oil" vested interest:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/…/dana-nuccitellis-vested-inter…/

The BBC, Greenpeace, and BP http://bit.ly/1HBjl02

David F. Noble interviewed about his 2007 Corporate Climate Coup essay

Videos made by Nicholas Roberts, based on a Redeye Radio interview.

Historian David F. Noble describes carbon propaganda history in the making, its design and motives...

LINK TO THE 2007 ESSAY: The Corporate Climate Coup by David F. Noble

David F. Noble: In Memoriam

Corporate Climate Coup Confirmed

by David F. Noble

In the wake of the climate change meltdown, we might perhaps still have something like a predictive science here but it's not about global warming. Back in May, 2007 I published an article entitled "the Corporate Climate Coup" in which I offered a brief history of the corporate campaign begun in the late 1990's to promote the profit-prospecting idea that the planet is warming up due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions (AGW). I described in some detail the corporate political agenda to derail the anti-globalization movement and the concurrent corporate economic agenda to supplant the moribund dot.com bubble with a new bonanza based upon carbon trading. I identified the central corporate players, notable among them the powerhouse investment bank Goldman Sachs, Generation Investment Management (Al Gore's Goldman Sachs spin-off), and two of the world's four largest oil companies, BP and Shell, both Goldman Sachs clients. The article pointed out how their campaign was grounded upon the restoration of faith in two of the main targets of the anti-globalization movement: the imagined beneficence of the self-regulating market and, most stridently, the allegedly unimpeachable authority of science. That ideological restoration effort is now doubly in doubt. As popular dismay mounts over the scurrilous surreality of the market-based carbon-trading scam, the corporate campaign has been thrown into possibly fatal disarray with the inelegant demolition of the preposterous pretensions of pure, peer-reviewed, science. And as the veil is lifted from the habitat of the gaming wizards of global warming, the UK Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, we would expect, given this historical review of the political economy of AGW, to find familiar faces, and we do. There they are, in the fine print of the history of the outfit (www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history), among the funders of the Nobel-lauded independent minds that supposedly certified our sanity in this madness: BP and Shell. You guessed it.

LINKS:
Corporate Climate Coup
Global Warming: Truth or Dare?
Regression on the Left

David F. Noble is a historian of science and technology and a professor at York University, Toronto, Canada.

The Corporate Climate Coup

David F. Noble
May 2007

This article reports the hidden side of the present media frenzy surrounding global warming: How large financiers and corporations have promoted and appropriated the warming movement...

This article was first published on Activist Teacher HERE.

It is a companion article to DGR's Global Warming: Truth or Dare?