Everyone’s excited about the Washington Post piece "Energy Firms Come to Terms With Climate Change," but I can’t figure out what’s new in it.
In the White Hat column, you’ve got Duke Energy and Shell Oil. Duke Energy’s CEO has been on board with regard to climate change since at least April of last year, Shell’s since June 2004.
In the Black Hat column, you’ve got ExxonMobil, which has been intransigent on climate change since the Mesozoic, and TXU Corp., which is racing to build almost a dozen coal-fired power plants in Texas.
That’s been the basic state of play for over a year now.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s a nice piece. It’s just a peculiarity of modern journalism that they’re not allowed to say: "here’s the state of affairs, and here’s where things are probably heading." They have to have a news hook, so we hear that discussions of climate-change regs in corporate America — discussions that have likely been going on since the turn of the century, at least — are "intensifying."
Anyway, I’d like to know how some of the other energy companies are coming down on the question. Anybody read anything?
