big oil would embrace renewables if ...

Why wouldn't they prefer any alternative to this?

Offshore oil drillers contracted out by Shell packed up their things and headed home before the Arctic winter set in.

After six long years and about $5 billion dollars, Shell's Arctic drilling program was once again temporarily thwarted.

That's not to say they won't be back next year...

They will. There's too much at stake at this point.

but it gets worse:


Day 5: All Hell Breaks Loose
Check out what was written regarding the fifth day of testing:

Day 5: The test has its worst accident. On that dead-calm Friday night, Mark Fesmire, the head of BSEE’s Alaska office, is on board the Challenger. He’s watching the underwater video feed from the remote-control submarine when, a little after midnight, the video screen suddenly fills with bubbles. The 20-foot-tall containment dome then shoots to the surface. The massive white dome “breached like a whale,” Fesmire e-mails a colleague at BSEE headquarters.

Then the dome sinks more than 120 feet. A safety buoy, basically a giant balloon, catches it before it hits bottom. About 12 hours later, the crew of the Challenger manages to get the dome back to the surface. “As bad as I thought,” Fesmire writes his BSEE colleague. “Basically the top half is crushed like a beer can.”

From an email by Capital and Energy

The greens MUST have a bogey-man, someone for all to hate, if they are to advance their "anti-everything" cause and Big Oil fits the bill admirably. But does the cap fit? They get into these tight jams because we want oil and there are no more "easy giant" oil fields to be discovered, not because they don't care what happens.

They have the capital and the know-how to develop new energy technologies and if they were a little short of either GE would join in. It is non-sensical to insist that they deliberately sabotage good ideas. Their shareholders would insist they embrace them if they look promising.