Not One Oil Major Pledging "Net Zero" By 2050 Plans To Cut Oil & Gas Production
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Looney's speech launched a rapid-fire game of one-upmanship among Europe's largest oil and gas companies. Within three months, Total and Royal Dutch Shell had announced their own plans to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, building on previous pledges to increase spending on low-carbon energy sources like wind, solar and biofuels. Two of their American counterparts, ExxonMobil and Chevron, have also announced goals to reduce climate-warming pollution, although much more modest ones.
But many of the pledges are misleading, and misrepresent how much the oil giants are changing. Most glaring is that none of the companies has committed to cut its oil and gas output over the next decade, the simplest and most reliable way—one might say the only way—to cut emissions, and a must if the world is to avoid dangerous warming. In fact, the stated net-zero "ambitions," as the companies generally call them, do not require that greenhouse gas emissions fall to zero at all. They rely instead either partly or largely on capturing or canceling out these emissions with unproven technologies and reforestation at a questionable scale.
Meanwhile, through industry associations the companies have continued to lobby against policies that would hasten a shift away from oil and gas: All the companies, for example, retain membership in the American Petroleum Institute (API), which has lobbied against incentives for electric vehicles, supported the Trump administration's rollback of methane regulations and backed expanded drilling in the Arctic.
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The vast majority of the emissions from oil come from fuel burned by cars, trucks or planes. But the net-zero pledges of most of the big oil companies do not cover these emissions. Instead, they apply to the direct emissions from producing, refining and processing oil and gas. For the much larger share of consumer-driven emissions—known as scope 3 emissions—the companies have said only that they'll reduce the "carbon intensity" of their products, or the pollution per unit of energy they sell. That means total emissions could stay level or even grow, as long as a company sells more low-carbon energy like solar or biofuels to compensate for its oil and gas. The French company Total, for example, has driven down its emissions intensity by nearly 6 percent in recent years by expanding its portfolios of natural gas, biofuels and electricity. At the same time, total emissions have increased by 8 percent, according to a report by the Transition Pathway Initiative, an investor-led effort to track corporate climate plans.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15072020/oil-gas-climate-pledges-bp-shell-exxon
