Because the fossil fuel companies are desperate, they are squirming as they go down. Here is one of the latest deceptive greenwash slogans: “Clean energy from hydrogen.”
The likewise-deceptive Sustainable Energy Council appears to have no environmentalists on their board, but plenty of fossil fuel people.
Read the original article here at DeSmog.
Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
Message From the Editor
You might have noticed that alongside carbon capture, one of Big Oil’s next favorite supposed solutions to climate change is the “H” word: Hydrogen. It’s starting to creep more and more into the fossil fuel hype machine, which means you should watch out for some important nuances of language.
“The world needs ways to reduce carbon emissions. We’re working on solutions in our own operations,” an ExxonMobil ad recently claimed on The New York Times podcast The Daily, “like carbon capture and clean energy from hydrogen.”
“Clean energy from hydrogen”? What does that mean coming from a multinational oil and gas firm?
As reporter Adam Lowenstein reports from the Hydrogen Americas Summit this week, so-called “clean hydrogen” for Exxon, BP, and other major oil companies means hydrogen derived from natural gas and reliant on capturing carbon emissions using unproven and unreliable technology.
The Biden administration is finalizing a potentially lucrative hydrogen tax credit that favors projects generating hydrogen from renewables, but as Lowenstein reports: “oil and gas companies are pushing for a ‘technology neutral’ approach that would allow them to cash in on the hydrogen tax incentives while continuing to produce hydrogen using natural gas – rather than shifting toward genuinely zero-emissions sources of energy like wind or solar.”
“When they talk about [being] ‘agnostic to the technology,’ it’s because … they want to use natural gas to produce the hydrogen,” Cornell University professor Robert W. Howarth told DeSmog.
At the same time, Dan Holton, an executive at ExxonMobil’s Low Carbon Solutions division, warned at the summit that his company might not move forward with its “world-scale hydrogen facility” at a refinery near Houston, Texas, without a hydrogen tax credit that caters to the oil and gas industry’s interests.
Read the full story to hear how oil majors are cloaking demands for subsidies in the U.S. and European Union using “clean” but not “clear” language.
And speaking of problematic climate “solutions,” reporter Sara Sneath reports this week on flimsy climate pledges from European and Asian banks, including some that claimed to stop financing new oil and gas production. Yet many of these banks are financing what could become Europe’s largest liquefied natural gas import terminal, which is slated to receive fracked gas from Texas and north Louisiana, by way of two massive new LNG export facilities on the Gulf coast. Get the full story.
Since 2006, DeSmog has been uncovering the fossil fuel industry’s deceptions in advertising. If you want to see more investigations, help us help you: Send us your story tip or feedback: editor@desmog.com. Want to know what our UK team is up to? Sign up for our UK newsletter.
Thanks,
Brendan DeMelle
Executive Director
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