‘Energy is about more than turning on the light. It’s about having a safe place’, I read on the Shell Energy website. ‘The world around us is changing rapidly, but we are changing with it. With Shell, we have been working on the energy transition for some time now. We generate renewable energy in our wind and solar parks. Now we are taking the next step: with Shell Energy we bring energy to the home!’
There are people who see progress in this: isn’t it great that Shell is now also embracing the wind and the sun, isn’t it? I myself see a hypocritical advertisement that should compel naive individuals to buy green energy from one of the most devastating oil and gas companies in the world. The big winner here seems to me to be Shell’s image.
Am I too cynical? Earlier this week I saw how security consultant Caroline Dennett very publicly terminated its long-term partnership with Shell because she ‘just can’t be a part anymore’ of Shell’s ‘double talk’ about the climate. Shell’s security policy is about ‘doing no harm’, she says, and that sounds honorable, but they fail completely. They know very well how harmful the extraction of oil and gas is, she continues, but ‘whatever they say, Shell is not phasing out fossil fuels. They are expanding.’
That’s right. According to their own numbers Shell will increase investment in oil and gas this year from 6 to 8 billion dollars. With this they join in the pace of fossil peoples, according to an investigative journalism article that The Guardian published earlier this month† In the near term, the industry plans to build out their oil and gas production with projects that together will emit as much as China’s in a full decade. There are 195 ‘carbon bombs’ in the pipeline; gigantic new projects that will carry more than a billion tons of CO . until empty2 will emit.
It is good to keep in mind that scientists have calculated that if, as agreed, we have no net CO worldwide by 2050.2 want to emit more, no new oil and gas fields should be drilled. Even from the existing fields, a good part of the fossil waste will have to remain in the ground.
So those oil companies, The Guardian writes, will spend $100 million every day for the next ten years exploiting new fields full of oil and gas that we will never be able to burn if we want to limit global warming to 2 degrees. This seems like a form of madness, but of course it is not. It’s what’s called a ‘calculated guess’ in English; an educated guess, based on two pieces of information.
First, fossil fuels generate so much money that the financial boss of oil giant BP said last February that it is “certainly possible that we will earn so much that we no longer know what to do with it.” Second, governments are in no rush with laws and regulations that limit the production of oil and gas. The companies are betting on the failure of politics, Carbon Tracker’s Mike Coffin told The Guardian. “If governments don’t intervene, companies will walk in while the world burns,” the paper concludes.
And that applies not least to Shell, which appears in all kinds of extremely depressing lists in the article: the top four largest investors in discovering new oil and gas fields, the top ten companies that want to expand the fastest in the short term, the top three companies that spend the most per day on the most dangerous projects that could push the temperature rise of our planet over the edge of 2.7 degrees of warming.
So, dear Shell, tell us again how ‘energy is about having a safe place’ and how ‘the world is changing, but we are changing with it’.
Asha ten Broeke is a science journalist. She writes an alternate column with Elma Drayer every other week.