If you’re wondering where all the posts for this week went, they went out the window in my unscheduled visit to hospital. I’m fine, thanks for asking, and I never wanted an appendix anyway. If next week is a little quiet too, it’s because I’m catching up on work I didn’t finish. Or possibly because I’m reading the books people have dropped round while I’m supposed to be taking it easy.
So no post highlights for this week, but some links:
Did you catch that the cost of living crisis has gifted Shell a record profit of almost $40 billion? You probably did, but the Financial Times was particularly good on the fact that they don’t even know what to with that kind of money: “Shell and its peers face an almost impossible task in terms of continuing to provide an increasingly detested product that the world still desperately needs, investing in new technologies that give the business a future, and promising enough to sceptical investors to keep them on board for the ride.”
Meanwhile 14,000 Nigerians have taken that same Shell, in the same week, to court for the devastation of their land and water in the Niger Delta. So I have a few ideas for what they could do with their excess funds, other than buy their own shares.
You know who else had a record year in 2022? Orsted – the energy company formerly known as Danish Oil and Natural Gas. They no longer dabble in either, and they are proving how profitable the energy transition can be.
From a couple of years ago, but one I read this week: Why libraries are essential to climate justice
If you’ve got time for a thought-provoking take on race and conservation, consider this article from the Green European Journal: “A ‘White Saviour’ Deal for Nature responds to ecological breakdown by prioritising a pristine and historically flawed imaginary of wilderness over the real struggles of people for basic needs, dignity, and justice. It comes to rescue modern globalised society from its own destructive ecological effects, without recognising that the logic of endless economic growth is an inherently destructive ecology, one which bears the everyday violent and ongoing histories of white supremacy.”
The Earthbound Report 