"Greenwashing, pure and simple" - fury as Shell UK sponsors British Cycling

They're not mutually exclusive, as a coach you won't pay for BC membership, put the money towards Cycling UK membership as well.

Well BC have just announced the AGM for next month, bound to be a more exciting event now than they anticipated, and in so doing have published the accounts as part of the document pack to go with it.

Which is a very interesting read, the headline is I guess they made roughly a half million pound loss on revenue of 28.7million, half of that revenue income comes from grants from SportEngland/UK sport.

But I'll let the journalists go to work on it and unpick the detail.

Velophaart_95 wrote:

I'm sure Cycling UK will see an increase in memberships.

And if you join today, you'll get a decent light free!  https://www.cyclinguk.org/billboard/join-cycling-uk-2?fbclid=IwAR23ZPnpk...

My renewal is coming up in a month or so.  So I've taken out a Cycling UK membership now, for pretty much the same reasons.  The Shell link up just looks awful, even if they think they're doing it for positive reasons (*cough cough money cough*)  their PR Dept seem to be hell bent on driving them into the ground.   I can only assume that they're actually owned by Rees-Mogg's Hedge Fund or something....

What role does Ineos play in British cycling?

Given the lower case 'c' on cycling, I am assuming it was a reference to cycling in Britain rather than the organisation called British Cycling. In which case, Britains most successful and famous UCI World Tour Team being owned and operated by Ineos would fit into that category. 

I am not aware of Ineos having direct involvement with British Cycling. 

Confused? You will be. 

Yep it's just ive been seeing alot of people cite Ineos as being involved in upper case C British Cycling and that Shell are just a continuation of BCs poor involvement in petro chemicals, and I'm thinking wow Skys/BC branding sure borrowed itself deep in peoples consciousness , that 6 years of HSBC hasnt broken.

In simple terms, yes. I myself have to have a UCI affiliated license to work in cycling as a DS and mechanic, because I hold a UK passport and am resident in the UK, my only option currently is British Cycling and there are no others who will get UCI status while BC are there.

Some of the bigger "stars" of the sport may have resident status elsewhere and benefit from that, but they are the few. If you want to race in the UK, you pretty much are forced to have a BC license.

Yes, and by the way will you be cycling to those races or using oil based products to get there?

Edison worked on light bulbs by oil lamp. It is reasonable and important to want to change the world you are forced to participate in. If there is no viable alternative to fossil fuels for journeys that is not the fault of the person making the journey but the infrastructure forcing that choice. 

If we want change we certainly need to make alternatives much easier / more salient at the same time as we make the choice we want to discourage harder, yes.

Isn't part of the issue here that making a journey is a choice governed by a whole series of "imperatives"?  Those range from "Tyrannosaurus / Tidal wave - run!" / "My child is bleeding - get us to the hospital" via "The nearest shop is 7 miles away" to "There isn't a decent school in this town" / "I had to get away somewhere sunny this autumn" / "It's raining, I'll take the car".

The apparent problem is that the power of even individual human to affect the world now vastly outstrips our circles of concern, attention spans or indeed design life.  We've moved outside many of our species' previous regulatory feedback loops. So we can quickly make our present (or our neighbours') very difficult - and more so with our more distant future.  And we have more humans than ever before.

I think the problem is both that we have innate biases towards "more, better, quicker" and cultural patterns around "the march of progess".  Given we mostly measure "better" in material terms (we've still to standardise our hedonometers) changes from "more consumption" are "bad" (cf. Liz Truss recently).  Also it's more difficult because it's not just us - we're also biased to keep up with the Joneses.  Maybe they've got a warmer house / are still driving on rainy days?  Add in the fact that our (Western) political cycles are very short and we have an issue.

Big companies like Shell have the resources to change the structures within which individuals live their lives. They should be held to account for pretending to do so but not doing so.

Individuals should do their best, but ultimately we have to live in the world as it is now.

Sriracha wrote:

I'm curious how it is even feasible to spend the petroleum profits to achieve "net zero". For every petrol-pound spent towards the target, you'd need to spend another green-pound just to carbon-offset the petrol-pound, plus one more to actually move forward.

If the petroleum profits were being spent on building renewable generation, that would be ideal. But even now, more profits are being didn't on expiration/ exploration of more oil. So there is no evidence of that.

Christ on a bike, what do these moaners want?  We need companies like Shell to keep the fires burning and the factories rolling and we shall need them for years as we wind down the production of nasties.  The alternative - a complete halt to fossil fuels - would lead to unimaginable hardship, millions of deaths and financial ruin for most countries.

Let's deal with the world we inherited, not the one we aspire to.

mike the bike wrote:

Christ on a bike, what do these moaners want?  We need companies like Shell to keep the fires burning and the factories rolling and we shall need them for years as we wind down the production of nasties.  The alternative - a complete halt to fossil fuels - would lead to unimaginable hardship, millions of deaths and financial ruin for most countries.

Let's deal with the world we inherited, not the one we aspire to.

And so we continue as we were despite knowing for decades the harm we're doing to ourselves

The UK's net zero plan involves the gradual reduction in the use of fossil fuels over the next 30+ years.

By 2050 we'll (hopefully) be using a fraction of the fossil fuels we are now but we'll still be using some.

Taking some of the profits from those fossil fuels and using them to support cycling doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

We can't simply stop using fossil fuels. Our society would entirely collapse.

Rich_cb wrote:

We can't simply stop using fossil fuels. Our society would entirely collapse.

You repeat this so often I'm beginning to think that you must have significant amounts of money investmented in oil and gas exploration.

Anybody with half a brain knows we can't just turn it all off today but you seem to be forever argueing against taking any steps to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Phrases like "We're hopelessly dependent" isn't going to help get anything done.

Citing 2050 as a target for so-called "net zero" (a disingenuous term itself) is not just too late, it's not simply kicking the can down the street, it's deliberately refusing to do anything and therefore inviting disasters far worse than are happening right now.

If I recall previous posts I suspect rich_cb is personally abstemious / virtuous - although maybe ideologically permissive?  Or rather - optimistic that new technology will fix the problems with the previous techology.  It is true we've managed to keep switching our way out of the current problems for some millenia.  Unfortunately each time we iterate we have more people using more resources - we just switch our primary resource.

So it's always been kicking the can down the road: apart from the occasional Malthus, Cobbet or Rachel Carson we haven't been too troubled by thinking further ahead before.

I've never once argued against reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

2050 is as early as it can possibly be done.

To get to net zero we need to decarbonise every car/lorry/train and plane.

We need to replace every single gas and oil central heating system.

We need to build multiple new nuclear reactors.

We need to build about 20x the renewable capacity we have now.

We need to devise and build from scratch a method of storing enough renewable energy to power the entire country for days at a time.

How long do you think that will realistically take?

I think 30 years is actually incredibly ambitious.

People who used to be deniers are now delayers.

Why don't you explain to the 33 million people affected by floods in Pakistan that it's just not reasonable to act any faster?