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Anger at oil chief’s $400m retirement package
Stephen Foley, The Independent
Lee Raymond, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, has bowed out from the oil giant with a $400m pay and retirement deal that has caused outrage among environmentalists. In his 12 years at the top of the company, Exxon has pumped an estimated six billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and has led the opposition to action on climate change
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Investors and environmental campaigners condemned a $400m (£214m) retirement package for the boss of Exxon Mobil, the man known as the “Darth Vader of global warming” for his denial that carbon emissions cause climate change.
Protesters descended on the annual shareholder meeting of the world’s largest oil company’s in Dallas, Texas, amid fury over the lavish lifestyle that it plans to fund for Lee Raymond, who retired after 12 years as chairman and chief executive.
Exxon has been condemned by green groups for fuelling the world’s addiction to oil by opposing the Kyoto treaty on reducing emissions and refusing to invest a penny in alternative energy sources. The total amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by the production and use of Exxon’s oil and gas output is calculated at 500 million tons a year, or six billion tons during Mr Raymond’s tenure.
(1 June 2006)
Related: Exxon Mobil Shareholders Defy Board (Washington Post):
The performance Wednesday of Exxon Mobil Corp. chief executive Rex W. Tillerson at the company’s annual meeting might have been downright warm and fuzzy compared with his predecessor’s, but that didn’t stop shareholders from adopting a resolution over the objections of the company’s board of directors.
Exxon officials said they believed it was the first time in the company’s history that a resolution had been adopted over the objections of the company, and it was seen as a sign of anger over the board’s decision to award outgoing chief executive Lee Raymond a final-year pay package of $69.4 million and a retirement lump sum of $98.4 million.
Pelamis: A Shot in the Dark? (wave energy)
lads, The Oil Drum
Pelamis is a greek word that means sea serpent. I guess it is the best definition for what I was shown today, a metal serpent riding the waves, harvesting its energy.
A presentation of the pilot project was held here at school, directed to the Hydraulic Engineering students, but open to the general public. The speakers were from Enersis, the company promoting this first full materialization of such technology. I couldn’t miss it.
What you see in this picture is a cylindrical metal structure with 150 meters long by 3 meters wide; sitting still onshore it resembles a 5 carriege high-speed train. It weights 400 tons, and uses another 300 tons of ballast on the sea floor to keep it in place. It is supposedly the best present technology for harnessing the waves’ energy.
(1 June 2006)
Good report from The Oil Drum on the potential of wave energy.
Special Report on Energy and Fuels
New Scientist
Many readable articles about energy are free online in this special report from the British publication New Scientist. Other articles are subscription-only.
(June 2006)
Squandering energy in the East
Judy Dempsey, International Herald Tribune
BERLIN – In the days when Eastern Europe was controlled by the Soviet Union, the cities and large provincial towns throughout this part of the divided Europe had a distinctive odor.
During the long winters you could smell the sulfur and feel the grit from the brown coal emissions that hung over East Berlin, Prague, or the Polish industrial centers of Katowice and Wroclaw.
In the ministries and public buildings, heating levels were controlled by opening the windows. There were no thermostats, no appliances on radiators to check the temperature, no means of switching off the heating system. The waste took place regardless of whether the energy came from domestic coal production or from natural gas and oil imported from Russia.
“There was no need to care about energy savings or efficiency,” said Peter Kaderjak, director of the energy department at the Corvinus University in Budapest. “The cost of energy was highly subsidized by the Soviet Union. In Eastern Europe, energy supplies were safe, secure, guaranteed and cheap.”
Nearly 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the smell is gone, but not much else has changed – or, experts say, not nearly enough. Even as countries complain about their dependence on Russia for energy, attempts to diversify their energy sources or tackle energy efficiency have been slow, if not haphazard.
The highly publicized price increases in Ukraine and Belarus notwithstanding, subsidies persist in many East European countries, keeping energy costs low and removing the short-term economic incentive to conserve.
And even as accession to the European Union has made billions available to promote energy efficiency, many countries have failed to take advantage, focusing instead on finding new sources of nonrenewable energy.
(2 June 2006)
Mexicans cling tightly to `their’ oil
Hugh Dellios, Chicago Tribune
… Analysts predict that Mexico’s oil reserves, second only to Canada’s in filling up U.S. gasoline tanks, could dry up within a dozen years. Meanwhile, Pemex lacks sufficient money to repair antiquated pipelines and search for more deep-sea deposits.
One solution would be outside investment. But almost all Mexicans oppose loosening their constitution to allow private or foreign interests to break the government monopoly and hold a stake in the nation’s oil.
Mexicans lionize the man who nationalized petroleum in 1938, former President Lazaro Cardenas, even as they suffer through frequent electricity blackouts.
(2 June 2006)
