EU countries want oil exploration to be classed as a green investment(www.politico.eu)

23 pointsby aleda1458 hours ago3 comments

yoshuaw8 hours ago
This is just days after EU courts ruled private jet construction counts as a "green investment": https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-court-says-p...
coffeebeanHH8 hours ago
Isn't it green investment as well if I chop only green trees and evergreens? Also I use to store raw oil only in green containers. That's green living. Right?
cucumber37328427 hours ago
Nobody thinks oil is "green".
It's just that suddenly no energy source is below them and they've made so many stupid rules over the years that the only way to drill for oil without getting stopped by bureaucracy spaghetti is to use some doublespeak to redefine it as green.
Not that that isn't alarming and stupid on all sorts of levels, but it's a different problem than just waking up one day and thinking oil is green.
- JuniperMesos6 hours ago
  Yeah, oil exploration is clearly not what the people who originally set up the rules for "green transition" investment funds had in mind. But my own position is that ensuring that humanity as maximal access to energy, even if it's fossil fuel-based energy right now, is the most effective long-term way to ensure human flourishing and also achieve environmentalist goals. So I've never cared about investing my own money in investment funds that have inclusion rules based on the "green transition", and I don't really care if the formal rules for those funds are getting severely bent, because I never supported any investment philosophy that limited itself to investment in funds formally-classified as "green transition" funds to begin with.
  - meristohman hour ago
    What does "human flourishing" mean? And why do you want humans to have maximal access to energy? (what I'm getting at is, what story of humanity matters to you?)
- adammarples7 hours ago
  Well oil is "green". Burning oil releases carbon dioxide which is plant food and contributes to global greening. This isn't good, because it also contributes to global warming, but I don't really understand why people conflate "green" with renewables. The greenest the planet has ever been was during the carboniferous period, where plants had feasted on unusually high levels of atmospheric co2.
  - JuniperMesos6 hours ago
    The color green has long been symbolically associated with environmentalist political causes, because the earliest environmentalist concerns were about literally-green plants being replaced by human-made machinery that is typically brown and grey. The fact that, today, the biggest environmentalist political concern is atmospheric CO2, and the fact that one effect of larger amounts of atmospheric CO2 is literally more green, photosynthesizing plant life, is a true enough fact; but not really relevant to the color symbolism.
  - paulddraper3 hours ago
    Oil is usually clear or light yellow.
    It can be darker colors too.
  - outside12346 hours ago
    Exactly! The best way we can make the world green again is to make Florida an underwater reef.