Big Oil May At Last Be Facing a Tipping Point

To anyone outside the ignorance embracing Republican party base and leaders of oil and coal companies more concerned about making a short term bank than whether coastal cities flood parts of the world run out of water (e.g., the American Southwest where reservoirs are under 40% capacity), climate change is real and needs to be addressed now.  Even auto makers are increasingly all in on electric vehicles, including Ford with its new electric version of the F-150 pickup truck.  And this past week, fossil fuel giants -including Exxon which like "big tobacco" of old funded deliberately false climate "research" - found themselves faced with shareholder uprisings and court rulings that could begin to force them to diversify away from oil, gas and coal.  Will it be enough to cause a desperately needed shift to avoid catastrophe?   Only time will tell.  A piece in the New York Times looks at some of the strikes against big oil in particular.  Here are highlights:

A nun, an environmental lawyer, pension fund executives, and the world’s largest asset manager. These were among the unusual collection of rebels who claimed a series of startling victories this week against some of the world’s biggest and most influential fossil fuel companies.

From Houston to The Hague, they fought their battles in shareholder meetings and courtrooms, opening surprising fronts in an accelerating effort to force the world’s coal, oil and gas companies to address their central role in the climate crisis. And . . . . they delivered a common underlying message: The time to start retreating from the fossil fuel business is no longer in the future, but now.

“These companies are facing pressure from regulators, investors, and now the courts to up their game,” said Will Nichols, head of environmental research at Maplecroft, a risk analysis firm.

The most dramatic turning point came in the Netherlands, where a court instructed Royal Dutch Shell, the largest private oil trader in the world and by far the largest company in the Netherlands itself, that it must sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions from all its global operations this decade. It was the first time a court ordered a private company to, in effect, change its business practice on climate grounds.

The symbolism was inescapable: The Netherlands, famously built on land reclaimed from the sea, faces the immediate threat from a warming climate caused by the burning of Shell’s own products — oil and gas.

In another example this week, at the annual shareholder meeting of Exxon Mobil, the biggest American oil company, the message was framed sharply in terms of profits: A tiny new hedge fund led an investor rebellion to diversify away from oil and gas — or risk hurting investors and the bottom line.

Chevron’s shareholders voted to tell the company to reduce not only its own emissions, but also, remarkably, the emissions produced by customers who burn its oil and gasoline. And in Australia, a judge warned the government that a proposed coal mine expansion, a project challenged by eight teenagers and an 86-year-old nun, would need to ensure that it wouldn’t harm the health of the country’s children.

The timing was significant. This week scientists also concluded that, in the next five years, the average global temperature will at least temporarily spike beyond a dangerous threshold, climbing more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than in pre-industrial times. Avoiding that threshold is the main objective of the Paris Accord, the landmark global climate agreement among the nations of the world to fight climate change.

[N]one of these actions represents an immediate threat to the fossil fuel industry. For a century and a half, the global economy has been fueled by oil and coal, and that won’t change immediately.

Nevertheless, rulings like the one in the Netherlands could be a harbinger for similar legal attacks against other fossil fuel companies and their investors, experts said. Kate Raworth, an economist at Oxford University, called Shell’s loss in court “a social tipping point for a fossil-fuel-free future.”

If the ruling of the lower court stands, though, analysts said, Shell would most certainly have to reorient its business to reduce oil in its portfolio and halt its growth in liquefied natural gas, in which Shell is an industry leader. That is a matter of concern for the investors who have their money in the oil and gas reserves of companies like Shell, . . . .

Dangerously for Shell, the national judiciary of the Netherlands in the past has shown itself to be among the most out-front on climate litigation. In 2019, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions because of a lawsuit filed by Urgenda, an environmental group. It was the first case in the world to force a national government to address climate change in order to uphold its human rights commitments.