Exxon Spent $19 Million On Olympic TV Ads To Show How Much They Care, Also TECHNOLOGY!
Exxon Mobil Corp is running television advertisements at the Rio Olympics to showcase its work on clean energy, a high-profile blitz as the company faces pressure over global warming in an intense year of climate politics. The suite of four ads tout oil major Exxon's work to capture carbon dioxide from power plants, turn algae into biofuel and develop fuel-efficient cars. Together, they offer a glimpse into the future of a lower carbon world.
Though oil companies typically advertise at big sporting events, the ads are being run as Exxon faces growing pressure on multiple fronts - from shareholders, green groups and state attorney generals - to respond to global warming.
Many other fossil fuel companies also face pressure from shareholders, specifically over whether the value of their oil and gas assets would be slashed as governments clamp down on carbon emissions.
From the opening ceremony of the Games on Aug. 5 to Aug. 17, Exxon spent $19.3 million to air ads 233 times in the U.S. market, reaching about 335 million TV screens, according to iSpot.tv, which tracks ad viewership in real time using advanced analytics. While small in relative terms for a global company, the TV spending is the most by an oil company during the Rio Olympics and the eighth out of corporates overall. Berkshire Hathaway's Geico was the largest at $33.5 million.
EDIT
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-rio-exxonmobil-idUSKCN10U23Z
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's a guaranteed market for fossil fuels whenever the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining.
We affluent people can feel good twice, cutting our fossil fuel use and showing off our solar and wind bling!
You, yourself, can quit fossil fuels any time you like, well, except for maybe what's used to grow your food. Unless you grow all your own food with all your own fertilizer.
So have you quit fossil fuels?
Why not?
I'm a hypocrite and I'll bet you are a hypocrite too.
But I score! It's Monday, it's sunny, my solar neighbors are mostly at work, so my little chromebook and router are solar powered!
I can also brag that my wife and I, by some planning and greater good fortune, abandoned the automobile commuter culture decades ago. When we met, we were both Los Angeles commuters on stop-and-go traffic freeways.
But natural gas power plants augmented by solar and wind are a damn fine energy system, cleaner than coal, and economical too. Plenty of giant industrial and energy companies are eagerly pursuing that. Call Siemens, write a big check, and they'll build it however you like, from megawatts to gigawatts. Call one of the energy companies and they'll sell you the gas.
There are several mega-gas projects being built by Exxon, Chevron, and Shell. These are astonishingly HUGE projects, among the largest projects ever attempted by human beings. They will produce plenty of gas for everyone for the rest of the 21st century; gas that will be used to generate electricity, gas that is easily turned into liquid fuels.
An example would be the Gorgon project in Australia. Another example would be the giant floating processing plant Samsung has built for Shell:
Climbing onto the largest vessel the world has ever seen brings you into a realm where everything is on a bewilderingly vast scale and ambition knows no bounds.
Prelude is a staggering 488m long and the best way to grasp what this means is by comparison with something more familiar.
Four football pitches placed end-to-end would not quite match this vessel's length - and if you could lay the 301m of the Eiffel Tower alongside it, or the 443m of the Empire State Building, they wouldn't do so either.
--more--
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30394137
Here's the big gas power plant in Humboldt Bay, California, next to the old nuclear plant:
http://www.pge.com/about/environment/pge/minimpact/humboldtbay/
Yep, it's basically a building full of natural gas fueled diesel engines of the sort you might find on a ship. The advantage of this setup is that diesel engines are fairly efficient, and they can nimbly balance out intermittent wind and solar inputs to the electric grid. Larger "combined cycle" plants use a clever arrangement of gas and steam turbines.
Many different manufacturers would be happy to set you up with such a plant, and many big energy companies would be happy to sell you the gas. With a fifty percent duty cycle for wind, and a fifteen to thirty percent duty cycle for solar, some days you'll achieve near 100% renewable, the diesels on standby. It's truly an awesome clean low carbon energy source.
Here's the point of my questions: What happens when most of the world's population is enjoying our standard of living; charging their electric cars, air conditioning their 2500 square foot homes, and so on? I'm sure you'd agree, nobody should be left behind in our glorious expanding economy!
The problem is I can't get the math to work for seven and a half billion people, or worse, a future ten billion people.
"Better than coal" isn't nearly good enough.
If it's any consolation, it's pretty much the same with nuclear power.
A world economy powered entirely by "renewable" energy, or by nuclear energy, would look nothing like the economy we affluent people, we "one-percenters," enjoy today.
The clean energy, non-nuclear, future we dreamed about in the 'seventies is here, with electric cars and everything!
Yet every day the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases at an accelerating rate.
The next future we dream about has to deal with that reality. We have to discover some fossil fuel free comfortable lifestyles that people will willingly choose, and we'll have to learn to cope with climate change refugees in some manner other than killing them or watching them kill one another.
Germany is a fraud, just like their cars.
German heavy industry is powered by cheap coal at less than five cents a kilowatt hour, same as many other industrial nations.
Residential and small business users are paying near thirty cents a kilowatt hour for the solar and wind bling and electrical interconnections that allow Germany to use surrounding nations for "storage" which isn't any kind of storage at all.
You can see a near-live picture of the German electric generating mix here:
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm
The solar and wind portion are pretty damned cool, but the coal power plants keep chugging along.
Sweden has examined the German experience and is seriously reconsidering their own intentions of abandoning nuclear power.
You haven't been paying attention to China if you think people are not buying large U.S. or Australian style homes. (The average home in
Australia is larger than the average U.S. home.) Newly affluent Chinese consumers like large suburban homes the same as anyone else.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/aug/20/why-havent-chinas-cities-learned-from-americas-mistakes
I'll try to make my point another way... how do we create some comfortable low energy lifestyles that are voluntary and non-coercive? (Economic "downturns" are repressive and coercive. The very wealthy don't suffer them at all, in fact they use them to increase their wealth.)
Educating and empowering women is important.
Someone who is heating and cooking with coal, and carrying water to their house in a ten liter jug, is going to think an electric rice cooker, a space heater, and a water tap are a big, big deal. Add employment opportunities and schools for all, then family planning will soon follow, even in cultures that traditionally oppose it. (Sadly, this is also why many misogynistic cultures oppose education for women or infrastructure improvements that would benefit women.)
If you do the math that's a two kilowatt connection per household, at least. Bottled gas is another empowering and much less polluting option than coal, charcoal, or firewood, and with bottled gas, maybe, you might use solar and wind for lighting, and cell phones and so on. But either way, if you are opposed to nuclear, you still use gas.
So far as "efficiency" goes, that's an economic abstraction, not always a desirable one. The more efficient an economic process is in one place, the more we can destroy the natural environment in another.
This thing we now call economic "productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.
If we want to quit fossil fuels, we have to quit fossil fuels. Why go to the trouble of elaborate tax schemes which are easily gamed by unscrupulous people when we can simply shut down, for example, coal fired power plants?
