Promises do not change the planet: on Shell’s net zero plan
This post was written on behalf of the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, and is part of its LobbyWatch series
Things have changed over the past decade. Outright attacks on climate science aren’t mainstream, anymore. These days, denial has lost most of its social licence and delay is the preferred approach — taking the reins of the climate transition and yanking backwards on them as hard as possible, with the aim of slowing down the change as much as possible.
Royal Dutch Shell is a big oil and gas company — the third largest company in the world of any kind — and a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions due to its activities digging carbon from the ground and selling it to those who burn it.
Like so many large oil and gas companies, it has pockets of deep ugliness in its history, such as its monetary contributions to a Dutch climate change denier, or its complicated relationships with dictators. There was a time when the company had a more callous disregard for climate concerns.
These days, companies like Shell are thinking less about denial and more about the future. They dislike the prospect of their eradication, but they dislike the idea of not controlling it even more. They would prefer to become the architects of their future, avoiding their own extinction and choosing to transform instead.
But it is both the nature of this transformation and the speed they have chosen to enact it that delivers the most insight about the moral core of their plan.
These plans tend to be soaked in promise, and weighted towards the minimisation of change. They are there to provide friction, rather than acceleration. They are hard to understand through the old lens of climate discourse, when we could compartmentalise neatly into deniers and activists. But these declarations are important to understand, because far from being the help we need, they could serve to worsen existing climate trends, in which every dial is pointing in the wrong direction.
What Shell promises to shape its future into
Shell’s new plan is, simply, to reach a state where there are net zero additions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere due to its activities and the use of its products, by the year 2050. Shell ties its 30-year plan to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which aims to limit the planet’s warming to 1.5 degrees.
It hopes to get there through a triplet of changes. First, it will attempt to decarbonise its own operations, which involve extracting, refining and transporting fossil fuels. Second, it will attempt to offer a less carbon-intensive range of products, moving away from oil and leaning more heavily on gas, renewable energy, hydrogen and biofuels. And finally, it will attempt to use carbon capture and storage (CCS), and tree planting, to suck carbon out of the air:
Promises about capturing carbon, removing it from the sky and decreasing the emissions created when fossil fuels are dug from the ground are not new. But Shell is now also grappling, somewhat awkwardly, with a question faced by every single extractive company and country in the world: if you sell something harmful, who bears the responsibility — the person who sold it or the person who used it?
Obviously, the answer is ‘both’, but for a long time, it was easy for those pulling fossil fuels from the ground to point their fingers at those burning it and, at least for their own collective conscience, shed themselves of any responsibility. That has changed. Now Shell says its plan “means working with our customers to address the emissions which are produced when they use the fuels they buy from Shell”, but there is little detail on what this will entail. It has plenty of potential, but could well become a new way of simply transferring the moral burden for emissions reductions onto its customers.
Its other promises are peppered with problems, too. Its emphasis on the sale of fossil gas as a tool for reducing emissions is problematic, as discussed in my previous post. Today, oil and gas are the key drivers of the planet’s atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. They are no saviour, no matter how generous the math. There are open questions on whether fossil gas is truly less emissions intensive than coal, but aside from that, options to fully decarbonise are now readily available and incredibly cheap, such as wind and solar. There is no longer any justification for going halfway. And biofuels come with their own collection of complications.
The biggest tell in its plan is its reliance on ‘negative emissions’. Technologies to capture carbon or remove it are unproven. Vast planting of trees to remove carbon can impact Indigenous communities and violently displace humans from their homes. Why are Shell promising to pull carbon from the ground, and stuff it back into trees and caves, when they have the option of simply leaving it in the ground?
The answer is clear: this plan is the tracing of a pathway that maximises the extraction and sale of fossil fuels. The priority is pacing — specifically, reducing the speed of decarbonisation so that the space available for its core business is maximally inflated.
What they do, not what they say
Given the sheer magnitude of the future technological gambles in its plan like CCS and negative emissions, we should expect a simple sentence to be prominent in the plan: “We are going to be winding down the extraction of fossil fuels, because that is the simplest, cheapest and most effective tool for emissions reductions in the short term”.
Not only was that sentence or sentiment nowhere to be seen, the very day of the announcement saw Shell announcing its plans to continue with developing literally the largest coal seam gas extraction project in all of Australia — the Surat Gas Project, in partnership with Arrow Energy:
The development will, according to Shell, bring 90 billion cubic feet of new gas to the market during the peak of its production. It is a very, very big fossil fuel project. The ‘Environmental impact statement’ published by Arrow Energy back in 2011 (the dates for the ‘phases’ are correspondingly older) comes up with the following estimates for the total emissions that will be added to the planet’s atmospheres and oceans thanks to this project’s existence:
The company’s environmental impact statement does not provide an estimate of the total greenhouse gas emissions over the lifetime of the project, but even the three example years alone feature a sum total of greenhouse gases greater than a single year of all emissions from all of Australian agriculture.
Alongside the announcement of its net zero ambition and the Surat Gas Project, Shell also declared it had updated its industry memberships and decided to remain with the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA), the Business Council of Australia (BCA) and the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network (AIGN). As the ACCR pointed out last year, all three of these organisations have played key roles in obstructing climate policy in Australia over the past decades.
The BCA, for instance, opposed Australia’s world-leading renewable energy target, the carbon pricing mechanism and played a key role in demolishing the Western Australian government’s attempt to control emissions. More recently, the BCA claims to support a net zero by 2050 target, but also support delaying action by using a controversial loophole to cut Australia’s 2030 targets in half — requiring far more urgent action in 2050. These organisations are likely to continue playing a major role in blocking climate policy in Australia, and in 2020, ensuring economic recovery money is directed towards the fossil fuel industry — the BCA has already flagged its intention to use this crisis to “remove regulatory burdens” (perhaps including those designed to prevent crises like climate change?).
So why the pointed discrepancy between what they do, and what they say? Shell has quietly included a disclaimer in its latest announcement: its current plans, projects and ambitions remain all wholly unaffected by the 2050 target.
This brings a single question to mind: why announce a plan before it has any impact? The most cynical answer is that Shell would prefer to soak up the public relations hit without having to make any demonstrable sacrifices in its fossil fuel business. But the planet’s atmosphere does not care about promises. A promise to both release a molecule of greenhouse gas into the sky and suck it into a tree in thirty years is nothing like deciding, today, to keep that molecule stuck in the Earth’s crust.
It is tempting to celebrate when a big fossil fuel player — whether political or corporate — promises to eventually do some of what’s needed, at some indeterminate date in the future. But that would be admitting we are so badly used to getting nothing but raw denialism, and are consequently delighted by misleading morsels.
That is not a philosophy in line with the safe existence of human life on Earth, and far more immediate and physical reality action is needed if the planet is to be made safe.
