Protestors call out bp and Shell during a demonstration in the City of London in 2021. Credit: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
Shell decreased spending on “renewables and energy solutions” last year, while bp’s spending on “low carbon energy” has flatlined, finds an Energy Monitor analysis of fourth-quarter results.
On Tuesday, UK oil major BP reported that in 2023 it raked in $13.8bn (£10.93bn) in profits. This represented its second-highest annual profit in a decade – despite it being nearly half the record-breaking $27.7bn bp amassed in 2022 after oil prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Days earlier, Shell also reported better-than-expected profits of more than $28bn, following a record-breaking $40bn in 2022. Yet both oil majors’ spending on renewables has flatlined, finds Energy Monitor‘s analysis of the companies’ filings.
Shell’s annual results show that investment in “renewables and energy solutions” fell from $3.5bn in 2022 to just $2.7bn last year. The company spent just 11.7% of its total capital expenditure (capex) on renewables in 2023 compared with 15.3% in 2022.
By contrast, bp slightly increased its spending on “low carbon energy” from $1.02bn in 2022 to $1.26bn in 2023, although as the chart below shows, spending on renewables by both companies has flatlined over the past five years.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
North Sea oil and gas production is expected to plummet in the coming years, as renewables become increasingly competitive. Now, a new report by the think tank Carbon Tracker argues that private equity companies invested in North Sea (UK and Norway) oil and gas assets are particularly vulnerable to losses as demand falls. Private equity’s presence in the North Sea has grown steadily since the 2014 oil price crash.
In 2010, just 8% of North Sea assets were held by private companies, with the remainder owned by publicly listed oil majors and state-owned utilities. Currently, 29.7% of North Sea equity licences are held by current or former private equity-backed ventures, according to recent analysis from the Common Wealth think tank.
Carbon Tracker argues that while all upstream investors risk being saddled with stranded assets as demand for hydrocarbons falls, private equity companies are particularly vulnerable. For starters, the private equity industry is already facing “serious headwinds” as the low interest rate environment that “buoyed private markets” for the last decade “has, at least temporarily, come to an end”.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
OIL giant BP raked in a profit of $13.8 billion (£11bn) last year as the company continued to prosper on the back of struggling households.
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Warm This Winter spokeswoman Fiona Waters said that while the figures were less than the record numbers reported in 2022, BP was “still making billions while people’s energy bills continue at unaffordable levels and more and more people are being pushed into poverty.
“Meanwhile, this government continues to hand massive subsidies to these international profiteers,” she added.
“We need real energy solutions, notably renewable energy and proper insulation, to stop this ongoing cycle of obscene profits and to keep ordinary people warm this winter.”
HAPPENING NOW: We're outside of the Norwegian embassy protesting @Equinor's £29 billion profits announced this morning.@Equinor is Norway's *state-owned* oil giant.
Norway portrays itself as a climate leader, but profit from @equinor's fossil fuel projects across the world. pic.twitter.com/6mTxL2wwFz
Palestinians gather for a demonstration in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on January 30, 2024. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)
“People in Gaza are starving, and because of spurious allegations made in a dodgy dossier, they will experience worse hunger.”
An Israeli dossier that more than a dozen countries have cited to justify cutting off funding to the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency “provides no evidence” that a small number of the key U.N. aid body’s employees were involved in the October 7 Hamas-led attack, according to an investigation released Monday by the British outlet Channel 4.
The dossier merely states that “from intelligence information, documents, and identity cards seized during the course of the fighting, it is now possible to flag around 190 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist operatives who serve as UNRWA employees.”
“More than 10 UNRWA staffers took part in the events of [October 7],” reads the six-page dossier, which Israel provided to UNRWA donor countries—including the agency’s top contributor, the United States—shortly after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) handed down an interim decision ordering Israel to take concrete steps to prevent genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The ICJ instructed the Israeli government to ensure that sufficient humanitarian assistance flows to desperate and starving Gazans, but Israel’s allegations against UNRWA employees led at least 16 countries to suspend funding for the agency, the most critical aid body operating in the Palestinian enclave. Around a million displaced Gazans are currently sheltering at facilities run by UNRWA, which has 13,000 employees across the strip.
The UNRWA is reportedly set to lose $65 million by the end of February as donors’ funding cuts take effect, imperiling the agency’s operations in Gaza and across the Middle East.
Channel 4 noted Monday that all 13,000 of UNRWA’s Gaza employees’ names “have been checked against the U.N. terrorism list and, as recently as last May, were vetted and approved by Israel.”
The UNRWA quickly fired nine of the employees named by Israel. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres established “an independent review group to assess whether the agency is doing everything within its power to ensure neutrality and to respond to allegations of serious breaches when they are made.”
The Daily Beast also obtained a copy of the Israeli dossier and—similar to Channel 4—reported Tuesday that it “includes little evidence to back up” Israel’s allegations against UNRWA employees.
Ashish Prashar, a spokesperson for Gaza Voices, said in response to the new reporting that “we now know that the document used to suspend funding to UNRWA ‘provides no evidence.'”
“This is the latest campaign in a decades-long attack on UNRWA by Israel and a subset of the broader campaign to eliminate the Palestinian refugee issue,” said Prashar. “People in Gaza are starving, and because of spurious allegations made in a dodgy dossier, they will experience worse hunger. This scandal should lead to resignations from officials in the U.S., UK, Germany, and elsewhere who all suspended funding to a besieged people experiencing a genocide as a result of a baseless accusation by the génocidaires themselves.”
“The fact that the U.S., U.K., and several other Western governments instantly attacked UNRWA on the orders of a genocidal foreign government (based on bogus claims) should make you very worried about your own democracy.”
Jeremy Scahill, a senior correspondent at The Intercept‘s criticized the Biden administration and The Wall Street Journal for characterizing the dossier as “some smoking gun.”
During a press conference last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the allegations in the dossier “highly, highly credible.”
The same day as Blinken’s remarks, the Journal ran a story stating that “around 10%” of UNRWA’s Gaza employees have ties to Islamist militant groups,” pointing to an “intelligence dossier.”
But questions about the reliability of the purported intelligence cited in the Israeli dossier have been swirling since the details of its contents began to trickle out in the press late last month. Citing one unnamed senior Israeli official, Axios reported that “the intelligence is a result of interrogations of militants who were arrested during the Oct. 7 attack.”
Israeli forces have repeatedly been accused by U.N. experts and human rights groups of using torture to extract forced confessions from Palestinian detainees.
“The fact that the U.S., U.K., and several other Western governments instantly attacked UNRWA on the orders of a genocidal foreign government (based on bogus claims) should make you very worried about your own democracy,” Craig Mokhiber, a former U.N. official who resigned over the global institution’s failure to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza, wrote Tuesday.
