London Science museum has been forced to cut ties with oil giant: this must continue to all sponsors

Science museum hall CC by SA 4.0

The science museum is in a hard place to work. Just 62% of its funding comes from the government. This means that they are constantly looking for ways to bring in the rest.

Sponsorship is an important way to do this. However, when the sponsor contradicts the message you are sending, this becomes a problem. For instance, how would an oil company get their value from sponsoring an exhibit – perhaps by twisting what is shown, misleading people and suggesting that fossil fuels do long lead to climate change.

Continue reading “London Science museum has been forced to cut ties with oil giant: this must continue to all sponsors”

Students have protested at the Science museum in London over shell funding a climate crisis exhibition

It does seem to be rather self-serving, if you are putting together a exhibition on the threat that the climate crisis is producing, and you allow one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world to fund it.

Much of the exhibition talks about carbon capture and storage (something that has not been demonstrated at significant scale, and yet would have to be catching billions of tonnes of carbon per year if it is to have a chance of helping) as well as nature based solutions.

The police cleared the building at the end of the day, ending what had been intended to be an overnight occupation.

It certainly seems that shell is trying to whitewash their company (should that be greenwash) and this should not be allowed. Rather, shell should be spending thousands of times more money on actually solving the climate crisis. Furthermore, ideas like carbon capture should not be allowed to be touted, until it has been demonstrated at scale. Finally, there is another problem. As far as the climate crisis is concerned, any captured carbon should be locked away for millions of years, yet at the moment the majority is either used to help with oil and gas extraction, or is turned into synthetic fuels – neither of these help in any way with forestalling the continued move towards run-away climate change.

SHELL MUST DO BETTER.

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