Photo by James Morrison
Back in a former life (the early 90s), I worked briefly at Mossmorran Ethylene Cracker Plant in Fife, when it was being expanded. My overriding memory of it is that it was a small plant, certainly compared to Grangemouth where I also worked. Oh, and the flare which burned day and night, which, if the atmospherics were right, you could follow all the way up the M90 from Edinburgh.
It emerged at the weekend that ExxonMobil, who run the plant, have been fined a whopping £2.7 million for misreporting greenhouse gas emissions. The worrying thing is, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency relied on ExxonMobil to report their own emissions...and relied on ExxonMobil to own up to the misreporting.
Obviously there are problems with that. If ExxonMobil hadn't owned up, would we have ever known? And now that they've had such a huge fine imposed, will they own up in the future?
When it comes to companies, and in particular large corporations like ExxonMobil, then I'm all in favour of using the stick as an incentive to reduce emissions. And quite frankly, I'm not going to cry over ExxonMobil losing what amounts to a small fraction of their daily profits. But there must be a better way than allowing companies to self-report emissions.
0 comments:
Post a Comment