Robert Stone's Last Contribution to National Geographic's Great Energy Challenge – Sponsored by Shell Oil Company
Robert Stone is an independent film maker who is working on a production titled Pandora’s Promise that explores the history and potential future of nuclear energy through a series of interviews with some of the “world’s leading environmentalists, scientists and energy experts, many of whom have undergone a metamorphosis in their thinking about nuclear power”.
As part of his effort to raise awareness of the film project, Robert made arrangements to participate in a three year effort organized by National Geographic called The Great Energy Challenge. Robert’s contribution to the discussion that National Geographic wanted to encourage was planned as a regular blog entry discussing something he had learned about nuclear energy during his research for Pandora’s Promise.
A screenshot of his most recent post, titled Who’s Defining the Energy Debate?, graphically illustrates why Robert became frustrated. As you can see in that screen shot above and in the one that I found when visiting the main page of the site, Shell is the primary financial sponsor for the effort. According to its global home page, Royal Dutch Shell, PLC is “a global group of energy and petrochemicals companies with around 102,000 employees in more than 100 countries and territories.” Its annual revenue from that business in 2009 was $278 billion, down from $458 billion in 2008, when oil and gas prices were considerably higher. It is a company that has demonstrated by its actions that has little to no interest in finding a way to break our fossil fuel addiction.
Shell never expresses any interest in developing nuclear energy, the only source of power that has proven that it can capably replace oil and gas in large scale applications. Shell shut down its renewable energy division in 2009 and Peter Voss, Shell’s CEO, told a Financial Times interviewer just yesterday that the company spends more than $3 BILLION per year exploring remote and challenging areas of the Earth for oil and gas and bragged that their program is the largest in the industry.
Note: The link above to Shell’s Renewable Division leads to a page displaying the following message – “Either the page you requested could not be found, or an error has occurred.” That is the point; the URL I used for that link is the one I found by searching Google for “Shell Renewables”.
Robert was troubled by the dominance of Shell advertising messages and logos on nearly every page of National Geographic’s The Great Energy Challenge . He discovered that posting a link to his Great Energy Challenge blog entry on his Facebook page resulted in an illustrated link with Shell’s ad that features what are obviously designed to be children’s building blocks.
Robert could not understand how National Geographic could hope to encourage a reasoned, balanced discussion about our energy future when the actual pages hosting that discussion are prominently dominated by advertising messages from a company that likes our energy present and apparently thinks it would be fine to continue on our present path as long as possible. The first response to his blog was a defensive one from National Geographic, which included the following statement:
In National Geographic’s view, the involvement of the fossil fuel industry in a global dialogue on climate change and the future of energy consumption, and, in particular, Shell’s participation in The Great Energy Challenge, makes the discussion a more substantive one. We are convinced that transforming the world’s approach to energy will require citizen education and government action, as well as active engagement by the energy industry. The purpose of this three year, multi-tiered Great Energy Challenge initiative is to elevate the conversation on energy around both the kitchen and policy tables. It is our goal to explore the many facets of the energy equation without fear or favor, but with a balanced sense of urgency, importance and perspective this topic badly needs.
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And it is worth noting that, as with all our partners — corporations, foundations and other organizations — Shell exerts no influence on the editorial process at National Geographic.While we welcome the opportunity to exchange perspectives on this subject, we do hope we can get past questioning everyone’s underlying agendas to have the real hard but interesting conversations about the future of energy.
I am not sure if any off line discussions took place; other than the initial response by National Geographic, the rest of the commenters on Robert’s blog generally agreed that he was asking the right kinds of questions. Many of us are curious about the implications of tight relationships between a well-respected nonprofit with excellent environmental credentials and one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. The very nature of the business also makes Shell one of the world’s largest polluters when the life cyle of its product line is taken into account. For whatever reason, however, Robert has made a decision to no longer participate in National Geographic’s The Great Energy Challenge – brought to you by Shell Oil. Here is Robert’s final comment on the thread:
Robert Stone
New York
December 17, 10:35 pmFor whatever it’s worth, this is my last blog for The Great Energy Challenge. I quit because I don’t want to be a party to Shell’s propaganda campaign to endear itself to the environmental community. I have no gripe against corporate sponsorship. It’s a vital necessity that as a filmmaker I fully understand and appreciate. But the nature of this particular corporate relationship crosses a very important line that I feel I’m tacitly endorsing through my participation as a blogger. It’s a ridiculously small gesture to quit, but I hope that my doing so will cause others to look more closely at this critically important component of our “great energy challenge”: the influence of the corporate power in defining the terms of the debate.
I am sorry to see Robert quit this effort. If nothing else, I hope that his writing encourages some of the well intentioned people at Nati
onal Geographic to question their decision processes. I also want to highly recommend that you visit the blog and the discussion thread, paying close attention to contribution that includes a fictional account of a discussion between “Revered Environmental Institution” and “Shell Oil Company”.
I cannot wait for Pandora’s Promise to be released.
P. S. If you are like Robert and decide that you can no longer participate in a discussion about our energy future that is sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell, you can always join the discussion at “Will You Join Us?” That one is sponsored by Chevron.
I posted this comment over aqt National Geographic.
“Corporate identify advertising is
Again we see that the fossil fuel industry is using their right to employ money-amplified free speech to persuade the world that man cannot possibly change the world’s climate and that continued use of their products is mankind’s wisest course of action. At least we are now at a point where accusing Big Carbon of being actively antinuclear is no longer dismissed as a left-wing conspiracy myth.
I don’t know if it’s possible – I’m certain it would be a challenge, but I still sometimes think that those who wish to see us more quickly convert to a nuclear energy future, should try by every means possible, to get the big oil/”energy” companies to be the ones to drive that change.
The situation currently is that A) “Big Oil”/”Big Coal” are very well funded and have very deep pockets from their fossil fuel operations, B) The Nuclear Industry is small (at least, compared to oil and coal), with needs for very high levels of capital to build nuclear plants, C) The Nuclear Industry is hobbled by an over-bearing regulatory regime, and lawsuits from ‘intervenor’ anti-nuclear groups, which are in large part being funded by the big fossil-fuel industries, D)The big fossil companies are, in addition to their indirect attacks through anti-nuclear groups, also directly lobbying congress and the executive branch, in order to try to both reduce their own regulatory burdens, but also to increase the burdens and/or reduce the help government might give to encourage nuclear.
But, if you can get one or two of the big oil and/or coal companies to really jump into nuclear, the whole dynamic could change. I mean, those big companies could probably build 8 or 10 Nuclear Plants each, just from their huge oil and coal profits. Get the three or 4 biggest ‘energy’ companies in the world to move into nuclear, and you could probably see them building a combined 30-40 Nuclear Plants in 10 or 15 years.
Why would they want to do that, when it has the potential to reduce demand (and thus price) for their ‘primary’ product? Because, first, their primary product, it appears will be likely, is going to get harder and harder to find and produce in the same quantities and at the same prices they can currently produce at, second, even if they start building nuclear plants, it’s going to take a LOT of nuclear plants being built before it even *starts* to hurt the price of oil and coal, and third, it can prepare them to continue to be leaders in the energy market in the future when they would start to become less profitable and powerful because their products were in decline. These companies need an ‘end game’ for the future, when they can’t get oil, gas, and coal at the rates of production they need to sustain their high profits. They need to start that transition now (or soon), while they are still flush with oil/gas/coal profits and still have a few decades of pretty high production levels left (so they can be using their ongoing fossil revenues to provide the capital for their investment in transitioning to nuclear energy – to pay for not only building the new plants, but hiring and training a new ‘corps’ of nuclear energy employees).
“Get the three or 4 biggest ‘energy’ companies in the world to move into nuclear, and you could probably see them building a combined 30-40 Nuclear Plants in 10 or 15 years.”
Our requirements will be for around 5-10 thousand nuclear plants mid-century, with another order of magnitude increase over that by century’s end.
5-10 thousand plants by 2050? Yeah, I don’t see that happening . . . Why would we need that many? Right now we have about 100 plants, which supply 20% of our electricity, don’t we? So it would seem like to get 150% of our current energy levels (100% to match current generation, plus an extra 50% for growth in demand), we’d need, say, 600-700 new plants (in the U.S.). Even taking the whole rest of the world into account, I can’t see the theoretical maximum need for nuclear plants being more than about 2000-3000. Where are you getting the 5-10 thousand figure?
Even if we theoretically need that many, would it really be *possible* to build that many? Seems to me we have a bit of a limit on the number of factories which can build reactors, the number of engineers and workers who are trained to do nuclear construciton, limit on the number of operators – I suppose that we could *someday* have enough properly trained people to construct and operate 5k-10k plants, but how could we *possibly* grow the industry that quickly? You’d need an awful lot of capacity which simply doesn’t exist right now, I think(?), to build that many plants?
If you do a joule per joule replacement of fossil fuels with nuclear, than yes the numbers to get into the tens to even hundreds of thousands, but keep in mind how much energy is used just moving fuel around. A lot of that won’t be necessary as more nuclear plants come online. Think of all those oil tanker, coal trains, and gas pipelines that will no longer be needed.
I’m talking worldwide, not just in the US.
I’m getting the 5-10 thousand figure from the considerations I put into this essay:
http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-nuclear-power-sustainable.html
I agree that reaching that target will be difficult, and we likely will not make it, but the resources to do it can be deployed if we organise things properly. I se no reason why we shouldn’t be able, after about 10-15 years training and tooling up, be able to install 300GW capacity per annum worldwide.