Oil companies like Shell could destroy humanity as we know it – but not if we make fossil-fuel investments illegal

The climate column: Compulsory and voluntary carbon-exposure declarations are a joke. It is time for governments to unite and take the kind of action the planet desperately needs

The remains of a burnt-out property in Bruthen, south Victoria, Australia (Reuters)

“It is now too late to leave...”

Imagine living in East Gippsland, Australia, with your family and hearing this message in the middle of an apocalyptic Australian firestorm.

But this emergency warning delivered to terrified Australians trapped by fires on beaches in pitch blackness, with ash and fiery embers raining down on them, is also a message to humanity.

We are teetering on the edge of the climate precipice, and it may already be too late to pull us back.

The rate at which we are increasing fossil-fuel usage, rather than slashing it, means that our remaining carbon budget to avoid breaching a 1.5C rise in global temperatures will be gone in just eight years.

While Australia burned, the BBC invited teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg to edit the Radio 4 Today programme. Fascinatingly, the programme encapsulated the problem that humanity faces in this existential emergency.

Guests included Thunberg herself, Maarten Wetselaar, Shell’s director of integrated gas and new energies, and Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England.

In her factual, calm manner, Thunberg outlined the depth of the emergency and the failure to take the necessary steps to protect humanity and what is left of nature.

Wetselaar insisted bizarrely that Shell is part of the solution, while declaring that “we need to produce products that our customers want to buy”, ie oil and gas, for at least another 50 years.

Carney declared that the banking and finance industry is being “far too slow to stop investing in fossil fuels”. Carney’s irresponsibly weak solution is to press global fossil-fuel corporations to declare their exposure to stranded fossil-fuel assets if global governments finally decide to act on the emergency and crack down on fossil fuels.

Shell already supports the global Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. But this has not prevented it from planning up to $300bn worth of fossil-fuel projects over the coming decade, while investing a puny 8 per cent of their capital budget on renewables.

Thunberg rightly called Shell an “engine of fossil-fuel destruction”. It knew as early as 1981 that the continued sale of fossil fuels would harm the planet.

In 1991, Shell produced an internal film outlining the dangers of climate change, predicting famines, floods and millions of climate refugees, if the world did not stop burning fossil fuels.

Instead of listening to its own scientists, however, it continued to invest billions in fossil fuels, including tar sands and Arctic drilling, and millions more on anti-climate action groups including the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Extinction Rebellion Scotland was absolutely right to occupy a Shell oil rig on Monday in order to highlight the energy giant’s destructive investments in North Sea oil.

Just imagine if those billions had instead been invested in renewable energy? We don’t have to envision an imaginary oil corporation becoming a renewable energy company, because we already have the inspiring example of Danish Oil and Natural Gas (Dong Energy).

In 2002, Dong Energy installed the world’s first major offshore windfarm in Denmark; by 2017, it had sold off all its remaining oil and gas fields. It is now the largest offshore-windpower corporation in the world, with a 16 per cent market share, and is worth $31bn (£24bn), with annual sales of $11bn and profits of $4.5bn.

Having completed the move out of fossil-fuel production, it symbolically changed its name to Orsted Energy in 2017. It now invests about $4.5bn per year in renewables.

Shell has repeatedly claimed to have been on a similar path for decades, with reiterated declarations about its transition to a low-carbon future and renewable energy. In the late 1990s, Shell announced its move into wind and solar, and had invested about $1bn by 2005. It then launched huge PR initiatives trumpeting these comparatively tiny investments.

Once the world’s attention was distracted from the climate crisis by the banking crash of 2007, however, it quietly closed down all its wind and solar investments over the next couple of years.

As public pressure recovered in the mid-2010s, Shell again announced new wind-turbine investments and started major PR initiatives to promote them. Their latest plans, extending to the middle of the 2020s, promise that a mere 10 per cent will be invested in renewables. In addition, the investments they announced in 2016 have so far delivered about a third of what was promised.

So, despite Carney rightly saying that burning even 80 per cent of existing coal and 50 per cent of existing reserves of oil and gas would guarantee an apocalyptic 4C rise in global temperatures, Shell plans to keep channelling the overwhelming majority of its £30bn-a-year capital investment into fossil fuels.

Shell publicly accepts the science behind climate change, but declares that its aim is to slash its net carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050. Note the “net”. This means that it is proposing to use as-yet-unproven carbon-capture technology to capture and store the CO2 released from the continued burning of its fossil fuels.

Thunberg is right. Shell is an engine of destruction.

For all of Carney’s words, the major oil corporations have collectively planned $5 trillion in new fossil-fuel assets in the 2020s. If that goes ahead, it almost guarantees massive human-population extinctions and the destruction of most of what is left of the natural world.

Compulsory or voluntary carbon-exposure declarations are a joke. It is time for governments to unite and make all investments in new fossil fuels illegal.

This should be a top priority for Carney in his new role as UN special envoy for climate action and finance.

Orsted has shown that it is perfectly possible to make the transition from oil to wind turbines and remain profitable. The Shells, BPs and Exxons of the world must now be immediately forced to follow suit, if they will not do it voluntarily.

Anything less, and the whole world will be hearing, like the terrified Australian families on the beach, that “it’s too late to leave”. And there is no planet B.

Donnachadh McCarthy is an environmental campaigner, writer and eco-auditor. He is the author of The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought