Letter: Oil Companies and Climate Change

Letters Page Article to Sheffield Star (February 2004)

Oil Companies and Climate Change

At a time when the world’s leading scientists are warning of irreversible climate change, the oil industry is paying professional lobby groups to damage the reputation of respectable scientists and down play climate change. These actions may have something to do with Shell and ExxonMobil making a combined annual profit of over 22 billion pounds.

Forward thinking oil companies should stop distorting the science of climate change and instead start investing significant amounts of their profits in to clean and renewable technologies as some companies and countries have started to do.

Norway, having realised that its own oil reserves will run out in the near future, is looking to use wind power to generate hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be stored and converted back to electricity when there’s no wind. Alternatively, the hydrogen could be used to fuel the transport sector. At the moment, London has three experimental hydrogen buses emitting water as the only emission.

Solar power offers another solution to reducing our dependency on polluting fossil fuels.
In California, there are plans to have one million homes producing solar power within the next ten years and researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a new technology to make solar power more efficient.

If the oil industry were to invest billions every year in alternative technologies rather than attacking scientists, maybe we would have a better and cleaner world to live in.