By Andy Rowell
Something significant happened on Friday that warrants more than just a few column inches in a newspaper.
With the most divisive presidential election in U.S. history just days away from concluding, it is easy to understand why more is not being made of the news, but just to tell you something seismic happened on Friday last week.
The world's largest listed oil company, Exxon, announced that it was going to have to cut its reported proved reserves by just under a fifth—by 19 percent.
It would be the biggest reserve revision in the history of the oil industry. It is yet another sign that Big Oil is in big trouble.
For years people have been warning that Big Oil's business model was fundamentally flawed and was not only putting the climate at risk, but millions of dollars of shareholders' money.
For years the industry's critics warned the industry was ignoring the risks of climate change and was just caring on drilling regardless.
But the oilmen did what the oilmen do: find oil and gas, no matter the consequences.
And the worst oil company has been Exxon which for decades has denied climate change and the impact that climate change will have on its business.
For decades it could have invested wisely in renewables but it carried on looking for oil and gas—including unconventional oil which is even more carbon intensive than conventional oil. Its critics warned this was pure folly: but the oilmen carried on drilling anyway.
Big Oil is used to doing things its own way.
The warnings have kept coming, but the boys from Exxon didn't listen. Oil Change International, 350.org, Carbon Tracker and many others in the #keepintheground movement have been saying for years that large swathes of oil reserves must stay in the ground.
They warned that fossil fuel reserves will become "stranded assets."
Exxon often dismissed its critics as irrelevant lentil-eating, sandal wearing hippies, who wanted to take humanity back to the stone age.
#Exxon Alleges #Climate Investigations Are Conspiracy https://t.co/dLydsSqMkA @ClimateNexus @greenpeaceusa @350 @billmckibben @NaomiAKlein— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1476799394.0
And it carried on drilling. And it dismissed the fact that any of its assets could become stranded.
But then came the Paris agreement on climate change last December. "With the Paris agreement on climate ratified in December 2015 … no company has more to lose than Exxon," noted the Chicago Tribune in a great article written last Friday entitled, Exxon enters no man's land.
The Chicago Tribune continued:
"Big oil companies have been solid investments for years, with a deceptively simple business model: Find at least as much new oil as you sell, book those barrels as future sales and reinvest in the hunt for new reserves. That made sense as long as oil prices went up, but it locked companies into a vicious cycle of replenishment, leading them to search for ever more extreme, and expensive, sources of crude oil in the Arctic and beneath the oceans."
And it added:
"Cheap oil has stopped that business cold and the threat of climate action raises fundamental questions about whether it'll ever be viable again."
The issue of long term viability has been raised by numerous organizations over the last eighteen months too. Last year the energy watch-dog, the International Energy Agency, argued that two thirds of known reserves would have to stay unburnt, if we are to keep climate change to the limits agreed in Paris.
But Exxon carried on drilling.
Last year Citigroup issued a report warning policies to limit climate change could render vast swaths of oil companies' reserves worthless, leading to trillions in losses.
But Exxon ignored the warnings.
In May this year, the London-based Chatham House warned in a report, entitled The Death of the Old Business Model, that the world's largest oil companies "Faced with the choice of managing a gentle decline by downsizing or risking a rapid collapse by trying to carry on business as usual."
Importantly, most of Exxon's de-booked reserves, about 3.6bn barrels, will be at the company's dirty Kearl oil sands project in Canada. The reduction would account for over three quarters of the reserves. Not only are tar sands very energy intensive, but they are expensive to produce.
In a low oil price, carbon-constrained world, they are stranded assets.
"For the oil sands, this is a tipping point," argued Andrew Logan, director of the oil and gas program at the ethical investment organization, Ceres. "Why would any company invest billions of dollars in a new oil-sands project now, given the near certainty that the world will be transitioning away from fossil fuels during the decades it will take for that project to pay back?"
Indeed, two days before Friday's announcement an article on CNN Money noted just how much trouble the oil giant was in: "Exxon's stock is down 17% from its 2014 peak amid the crash in oil prices. The oil giant's profits have plunged to 17-year lows and its once-perfect AAA credit rating has evaporated."
It quoted Tom Sanzillo, former deputy comptroller of New York State and now head of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis saying the company was in the middle of an "irreversible decline."
Friday's announcement is further evidence that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the oil age.
And the great carbon dinosaur Exxon is slowly dying before our eyes.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Oil Change International.
Consumers may be happy, but climate change is making coffee farmers bitter. Diseases and pests are becoming more common and severe as temperatures rise. The fungal infection known as coffee leaf rust has devastated plantations in Central and South America. And while robusta crops tend to be more resistant, they need plenty of rain – a tall order as droughts proliferate.
The future for coffee farming looks difficult, if not bleak. But one of the more promising solutions involves developing new, more resilient coffee crops. Not only will these new coffees have to tolerate higher temperatures and less predictable rainfall, they'll also have to continue satisfying consumer expectations for taste and smell.
Finding this perfect combination of traits in a new species seemed remote. But in newly published research, my colleagues and I have revealed a little-known wild coffee species that could be the best candidate yet.
Coffee Farming in a Warming World
Coffea stenophylla was first described as a new species from Sierra Leone in 1834. It was farmed across the wetter parts of upper west Africa until the early 20th century, when it was replaced by the newly discovered and more productive robusta, and largely forgotten by the coffee industry. It continued to grow wild in the humid forests of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, where it became threatened by deforestation.
At the end of 2018, we found stenophylla in Sierra Leone after searching for several years, but failed to find any trees in fruit until mid-2020, when a 10g sample was recovered for tasting.
Field botanists of the 19th century had long proclaimed the superior taste of stenophylla coffee, and also recorded its resistance to coffee leaf rust and drought. Those early tasters were often inexperienced though, and our expectations were low before the first tasting in the summer of 2020. That all changed once I'd sampled the first cup on a panel with five other coffee experts. Those first sips were revelatory: it was like expecting vinegar and getting champagne.
This initial tasting in London was followed by a thorough evaluation of the coffee's flavour in southern France, led by my research colleague Delpine Mieulet. Mieulet assembled 18 coffee connoisseurs for a blind taste test and they reported a complex profile for stenophylla coffee, with natural sweetness, medium-high acidity, fruitiness, and good body, as one would expect from high-quality arabica.
C. stenophylla growing in the wild, Ivory Coast. E. Couturon / IRD, Author provided
In fact, the coffee seemed very similar to arabica. At the London tasting, the Sierra Leone sample was compared to arabica from Rwanda. In the blind French tasting, most of the judges (81%) said stenophylla tasted like arabica, compared to 98% and 44% for the two arabica control samples, and 7% for a robusta sample.
The coffee tasting experts picked up on notes of peach, blackcurrant, mandarin, honey, light black tea, jasmine, chocolate, caramel and elderflower syrup. In essence, stenophylla coffee is delicious. And despite scoring highly for its similarity to arabica, the stenophylla coffee sample was identified as something entirely unique by 47% of the judges. That means there may be a new market niche for this rediscovered coffee to fill.
The taste testers approved of stenophylla's sweet and fruity flavour. CIRAD, Author provided
Breaking New Grounds
Until now, no other wild coffee species has come close to arabica for its superior taste. Scientifically, the results are compelling because we would simply not expect stenophylla to taste like arabica. These two species are not closely related, they originated on opposite sides of the African continent and the climates in which they grow are very different. They also look nothing alike: stenophylla has black fruit and more complex flowers while arabica cherries are red.
It was always assumed that high-quality coffee was the preserve of arabica – originally from the forests of Ethiopia and South Sudan – and particularly when grown at elevations above 1,500 metres, where the climate is cooler and the light is better.
Stenophylla coffee breaks these rules. Endemic to Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, stenophylla grows in hot conditions at low elevations. Specifically it grows at a mean annual temperature of 24.9°C – 1.9°C higher than robusta, and up to 6.8°C higher than arabica. Stenophylla also appears more tolerant of droughts, potentially capable of growing with less rainfall than arabica.
Robusta coffee can grow in similar conditions to stenophylla, but the price paid to farmers is roughly half that of arabica. Stenophylla coffee makes it possible to grow a superior tasting coffee in much warmer climates. And while stenophylla trees tend to produce less fruit than arabica, they still yield enough to be commercially viable.
The stenophylla harvest on Reunion Island. IRD / CIRAD, Author provided
To breed the coffee crop plants of the future, we need species with great flavour and high heat tolerance. Crossbreeding stenophylla with arabica or robusta could make both more resilient to climate change, and even improve their taste, particularly in the latter.
With stenophylla's rediscovery, the future of coffee just got a little brighter.
Aaron P Davis: Senior Research Leader, Plant Resources, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Disclosure statement: Aaron P Davis receives funding from Darwin Initiative (UK).
Reposted with permission from The Conversation.