The third largest oil and fossil gas producer behind ExxonMobil and Chevron, as late as 2021 Shell and its customers released almost 1.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—more than the emissions of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy. Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine proved a boon to Shell: on the back of record energy prices, the company reported profits of $39.9bn for 2022, the highest in its 115-year history. But despite heat-trapping emissions skyrocketing along with global thermostats, during their annual earnings call, CEO Wael Sawan announced plans to cut spending on its renewables unit given their thinner profit margins. This comes after a cache of documents published earlier this year prove Shell knew far more about the “greenhouse effect” and the existential threats posed by the burning of fossil fuels than previously revealed — potentially bolstering legal efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for the worsening global climate emergency. In the first of a multi-part series (read part 2 and part 3), lead blogger and podcaster Michael Buchsbaum reviews new revelations around what Shell knew, when it knew it and how it publicly denied its own terrifying data.
All posts tagged: fossil fuels
A tiny margin of error – It takes even less leaking than previously thought to make gas as bad as coal
A new study found that as little of a leakage rate as 0.2 percent of methane gas can make this fuel as dangerous for the climate as coal. Lisa Tostado takes a closer look at these findings.
Germany and LNG | The Global Energy Transition Podcast
In response to Russia’s invasion and brutal war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, many European nations, particularly Germany, have banned Russian fossil fuels imports. For Germany this has meant not only finding new sources of liquified natural gas (LNG), but also spurred the government to establish several new LNG terminals. However, LNG, which is mainly cooled and compressed methane, represents a major source of climate-harming emissions. Read More
No interest in change: record profits lead oil and gas majors to reduce their climate goals
Despite professing their firm commitment to fighting climate change and expanding into renewable energy, following record profits from war-spiked high energy prices, global oil and gas majors like BP, Shell and ExxonMobil are now walking back their rhetoric and reducing whatever modest plans they had to invest in clean energy. And investors have cheered these decisions. Though renewable energy generation is expanding faster than ever, Michael Buchsbaum reviews how this is an object lesson in why relying on market forces alone to push companies into doing the right thing has never been more foolish.
Losing Lützerath: To save Germany, the occupied village must be destroyed
By the time you read this, the village of Lützerath may already be gone – part of the price paid for getting RWE, Germany’s largest energy producer, to stop mining and burning brown coal by 2030. Yet short term, RWE is ramping generation at their lignite-burning plants, among the most polluting in Europe, to make up for sanctioned Russian gas and help Germany get through the next two winters. But climate scientists warn, burning all the coal underneath the activist-occupied town could risk breaking the emissions limits set under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Worse, as lead blogger and podcaster Michael Buchsbaum relates, the steep terms of the deal are splintering the Greens, potentially setting party leadership against its most ardent climate activists.
Winter is coming – plastic must go
Scientists and climate activists have highlighed and warned against the significant global warming impact of fossil gas and an expansion of related infrastructure. Furthermore, analysts have also repeatedly criticized Europe’s deep dependency from Russia – created particular by Germany with the help of petrochemical giant BASF and it’s daughter Wintershall Dea. Putin’s war in Ukraine is forcing the EU now to profoundly restructure it’s energy landscape and to save gas for the coming winter. But while the public is being told to shower cold and heat less Europe is still feeding a fossil fuels hungry petrochemicals and plastics industry. Andy Gheorghiu outlines the major findings of a new report that reveals the significant dimension of this gluttony and that calls for a profound new diet for this sector.
East Asia’s top economies to rise as top importers of Russian fossil fuels by end of year
While media coverage has mainly focused on China and India’s record-level imports, other countries in Asia – particularly East Asia – have also been among the top global importers of Russian energy – and are therefore also implicit contributors to the war effort. A new data visualization website shows that countries in the region are likely to become top importers of Russian fossil fuels once Europe finalizes its plans to phase them out, and that moving towards renewables makes more sense considering the global security risks of fossil fuels, the climate crisis and the falling costs of renewables.
A Total mess
TOTAL is creating a social and economic disaster in Mozambique, consulting the same playbook it uses in Myanmar and Yemen where it extracts resources and silences communities. Ilham Rawoot and Daniel Ribeiro report. This article was originally published in Africa Is a Country.
The New Energy Charter Treaty in Light of The Climate Emergency
After 2 years and 15 negotiation rounds, on June 24, 2022, the Contracting Parties of the Energy Charter Treaty (“ECT”) finaly reached an agreement in principle on a reform of the Treaty. The deal, the detailed text of which remains confidential, contains a package of amendments and changes meant to modernise the Treaty’s investment provisions and bring it in line with the Paris Agreement (the “new ECT”). Crucially, this new ECT will grant existing fossil fuel investments in the European Union and the United Kingdom an additional 10 years of investment protection and even maintain, for now, indefinite protection in other Contracting Parties. It is therefore clearly not aligned with the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels that science shows is required to avoid climate catastrophe, or consistent with the International Energy Agency’s (“IEA”) widely recognised scenario to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Amandine Van den Berghe, Lukas Schaugg and Helionor de Anzizu have the details. This blog was originally published on Jus Mundi.
The most dangerous radicals are those ignoring the IPCC
Russia’s invasion into Ukraine coincided with the release of two sweeping assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the perilous state of our planet’s health. Desperately warning of the need to get off fossil fuels, as the body starts hammering out a synthesis report, lead blogger and podcaster Michael Buchsbaum reflects on how Europe’s desperate attempts to find alternative fossil fuel sources may end up turbo-charging climate chaos.