Aerial view of Shell Pernis in Rotterdam, Holland, taken 7 September 2023. Photo: Aerovista Luchtfotografie/Shutterstock.
A new report by the Senate Committee on the Budget details how fossil fuel companies have avoided tackling the climate crisis.
Last week, US Democrats released a report three years in the making detailing the ways that large fossil fuel producers including Shell, BP and Exxon have sought to avoid responsibility for the climate crisis.
The 65 page-long report, jointly authored by the Democrats House Committee On Oversight And Accountability and the Senate Committee on the Budget, contains files subpoenaed from big oil companies that “demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science”.
Previous documentation has shown that companies including Exxon knew about human-made climate change since at least 1981, and files released earlier this year suggest it may have been known since the 1950s. The importance of this report lies in proving that fossil fuel companies not only knew, but privately believed the science despite public rejection.
The files also show the tactics used by major fossil companies to discredit climate activism, the report says, among them “pivot[ing] from outright climate denial to a new strategy of deception. Instead of misrepresenting the science and the consequences of climate change, they pivoted to misrepresenting their business plans, their investments in low carbon technologies, the alleged safety of natural gas, and their support for various climate policies and emission reduction targets”.
Net zero?
Most major oil companies have made net zero pledges based on the Paris Agreement goal of net zero by 2050, but the report claims they are unlikely to be met. BP, for instance pledged to reach net zero on oil and gas by 2050, but is at the same time ramping up oil production.
The New York Timesreported earlier this year that BP’s interim CEO Murray Auchincloss was clear that it would pursue an increase in fossil fuel production to meet demand, and internal documents gathered by the committees show that it was unwilling to publicly state a commitment to net zero in 2019.
In an internal email thread discussing a press request for comment, an official said “it goes a bit too far to state or imply support for net zero by 2050, because that would require policy likely to put some existing assets at risk, and we haven’t discussed that internally”.
This lack of action is further highlighted in a report released by thinktank Carbon Tracker in March, which suggests that companies including Shell and BP are far from hitting Paris Agreement goals.
Southampton University slammed after openDemocracy uncovered its involvement in Exxon’s ‘greenwashing’ project
A senior professor has accused his own university of betraying its values by working with ExxonMobil on a project that has been condemned as greenwash.
Ian Williams, professor in applied environmental science at the University of Southampton, made the allegations after openDemocracy revealed that Exxon had made misleading claims about capturing carbon at the UK’s biggest oil refinery at Fawley in Hampshire.
We reported last month that Paul Greenwood, Exxon’s UK lead, had admitted that the oil giant would need a “magic wand” to deliver the project, which has no funding and no licence to store carbon.
Exxon refers prominently to its collaboration with the University of Southampton in publications about the scheme.
Williams suggested the university had been “fooled” into joining forces with the oil giant to launch the ‘Solent Cluster’, an industrial decarbonisation scheme focused on CCS.
Lindsay-Marie Armstrong, the academic cluster lead at the University of Southampton, has joined senior Exxon executives at several events to promote the scheme, including a reception at the House of Commons in February.
Williams hit out at the partnership during a lecture entitled “Working with the enemy: Why universities should not work with ‘Big Oil’” on 24 April, as part of the University of Southampton’s annual Green Week.
He said Exxon had a long history of undermining climate science and funding groups that promoted climate scepticism, asking: “Why does the University of Southampton work with companies that operate against our values and deny our research data?”
Williams pointed out the university’s collaboration with Exxon is at odds with two of its stated core values: its commitment to “embed environmental sustainability in everything we do” and its pledge to work with partners to “improve the environment”.
He added that his decision to speak out means he is “not very popular in some quarters of the university” and might be branded a “rogue academic”.
But Southampton University’s decision to partner with Exxon has also been criticised by many who study there. Heidi Wheatley, a second-year environmental science student, told openDemocracy that “the university’s relationship with the fossil fuel industry undermines my whole reasoning for studying this subject at this institution”.
Wheatley added: “Students are already calling for the university to re-evaluate its relationship with the industry through its research activities and are petitioning the university to withdraw its multimillion-pound investments in fossil fuel companies. I implore the university to listen to its students and live up to its own strategic commitments to sustainability.”
Williams quoted from openDemocracy’s investigation during his Green Week lecture, including our revelation that Exxon had so far refused to commit its own money to build the CCS plant and had instead focused investment on increasing diesel production at the refinery, spending £800m to produce an extra six million litres a day.
He also quoted Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, who told openDemocracy that Exxon’s CCS scheme “stands out as greenwashing”.
openDemocracy revealed in November that fossil companies had ploughed more than £147m into British universities in seven years.
Williams said: “Universities must be robust and healthy enough to resist commercial lobbying and greenwash. We must not be fooled again.”
Urging Southampton University to extend its ban on working with tobacco companies to fossil fuel firms, he added: “Universities should say no to collaboration with fossil fuel companies, no to funding from or with fossil fuel companies, no to green washing, no to climate washing.”
He also recommended the university commit to “not work[ing] on any form of greenwash project”, including “CCS” and “blue hydrogen” – a product made from natural gas, where most of the carbon dioxide from the gas is captured and stored. Blue hydrogen has come under fire from scientists, who have branded it a distraction from proven low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels based on renewable energy.
Williams also called on Southampton University to sign up to the People and Planet Fossil Free Campaign, which demands universities stop investing in and accepting funds from fossil fuel companies.
A University of Southampton spokesperson did not respond to any of Williams’ recommendations when contacted by openDemocracy.
Instead, they said: “Decarbonisation necessitates engagement with the sector that produces carbon and universities have a vital role to play in applying knowledge and expertise to address real areas of environmental concern.
“This is what the Solent Cluster was set up and receives government funding for, with our role here to work alongside 120 organisations and businesses, including nine local governments and three other universities.
“We uphold our value to embed environmental sustainability in everything that we do and require that all outputs from research undertaken with energy companies – and industry more widely – can be published, following our stated policies for responsible and open research.”
An Exxon spokesperson said the company would give further detail on the CCS project “in due course”.
Another recent openDemocracy investigation found that more than £281m of anonymous donations had poured into so-called Russell Group universities, including Southampton, since 2017. This prompted more than 120 academics, politicians and campaigners to sign an open letter calling for transparency over university funding in the UK.
The universities’ secrecy over donations means any potential conflicts of interest and commercial influences, including those related to fossil fuel production, remain hidden.
Some universities routinely invite fossil fuel companies to attend private meetings after donating millions of pounds.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and fellow activists arrive to block the main entrances of the Swedish Parliament during a protest due to the lack of action from the Swedish authorities, on March 11, 2024, in Stockholm, Sweden. (Photo: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images)
“Sweden is unfortunately not unique in completely ignoring the climate crisis,” Thunberg said.
Greta Thunberg and over 40 other activists blocked the entrance to the Swedish parliament on Monday, demanding action on the climate crisis.
The activists held signs that said “Climate Justice Now,” and Thunberg expressed her dissatisfaction with how the Swedish government is handling the global emergency.
“Sweden is unfortunately not unique in completely ignoring the climate crisis, not treating it as an emergency at all. But actively trying to greenwash, deceive, and lie in order to make it seem like they are doing enough and that they are moving in the right direction, when in fact the exact opposite is happening,” Thunberg said.
Right now young people are blocking the Swedish parliament to draw attention to that the climate crisis and underlying social injustices are killing people, and the situation is only getting worse. We've had enough of those in power not listening to the science and our voices 1/6
Thunberg went on to say that Sweden is “very good at greenwashing,” even though the country has “very high emissions per capita.” She said the country cannot claim to be a climate leader.
“The climate justice movement has for decades tried to get our message across, and scientists and the most affected people have been sounding the alarm for even longer than that,” she said. “But the people in power have not been listening. They have been actively ignoring and silence those speaking out.”
Thunberg has faced the risk of going to jail over her climate protests repeatedly in recent years, and she has continued to sound the alarm that countries are not doing enough to fight the climate crisis.
The Swedish government has been facing intense criticism recently for enacting policies that will likely increase its carbon emissions. Thunberg vowed to continue her resistance to such policies.
“The climate crisis is only going to get worse and so it is all our responsibilities, all of those who have an opportunity to act must do so. We encourage everyone who can to join us and to join the climate justice movement,” Thunberg said.
Outside court in London, Greta Thunberg says “We must remember who the real enemy is … who our laws are meant to protect.” Quoted from https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68166341
The bank’s work for businesses expanding production of fossil fuels is a stark contrast to its climate change promises
Every year business and world leaders jet into Davos to discuss climate change and other global issues at the World Economic Forum. And every year they are met with vigorous accusations of hypocrisy. Those accusations may well be levelled at the executives from HSBC – one of the world’s top funders of fossil fuel expansion – as they mingled with their peers in the pretty Swiss ski town this week, discussing how to develop a long-term strategy for climate, nature and energy.
HSBC says delivering a net-zero global economy is “a pillar of our strategy as a business”. In December 2022, the bank made the shock announcement that it would stop financing new oil and gas fields. Environmental campaigners celebrated, with the responsible investment charity ShareAction saying the decision set “a new minimum ambition for all banks committed to net zero”.
But on the same day, HSBC bankers started selling shares in the refining business of Saudi Aramco, one of the most aggressive expanders of oil and gas. An investor in HSBC told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that the bank’s policy has been cleverly worded to allow it to fund some of the world’s biggest polluters while boasting about its green credentials.
An analysis of Refinitiv data by TBIJ has found that in the year since HSBC’s new policy was announced, the bank has helped raise more than $47bn (£37bn) for companies that are expanding the production of oil and gas, despite dire warnings from scientists that this will push the world beyond its survivable limits.
Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, told ITV News: “In the world, if we make large scale oil, gas and coal development, we cannot reach our 1.5 degrees target, full stop.” He said if a bank is serious about aligning its business with net zero, it cannot continue to fund companies developing new oil and gas fields.
Andrew Harper, chief responsibility officer at Epworth, an investment manager that holds HSBC shares, said: “[HSBC’s] policy, which is supposed to act as a safety net for the climate, is by design letting the bank circumvent its pledges by allowing them to adhere to the letter rather than the spirit of what they’re claiming.
“As investors, we’re not going to be fooled by the marketing, by the pledges, by these policies. We want to see real change and for them to seriously end new fossil fuel financing, no loopholes. Anything short of that is the bank trying to dupe its key stakeholders.”
HSBC said its policy allows the bank to continue providing finance “at a corporate level” and its approach “is based on the latest science for achieving net zero and follows the UN-backed approach for climate target setting and net zero alignment for banks”.
New projects, no problem
In its feted policy, HSBC notes that global demand for oil and gas to 2050 is “more than met by existing [oil and gas] fields”. It says the bank will therefore no longer provide finance for “new oil and gas fields and related infrastructure whose primary use is in conjunction with new fields”.
However, that has not stopped HSBC from funding companies that are exploiting new oil and gas fields, and providing the necessary infrastructure to do so.
In the first half of last year, HSBC, with other banks, helped the UAE’s state oil and gas company, Adnoc, raise $3.2bn from selling shares in its gas and logistics businesses. Adnoc will receive a further cash boost of $3bn in hefty dividends from Adnoc Gas.
Separately, HSBC helped arrange a $3.2bn loan for Borouge 4, a petrochemicals plant that will be a key customer for Adnoc’s gas, and was described by its project director as “an enabler of Adnoc’s growth strategy”.
Scientists agree that we cannot develop any new oil and gas fields if we are to limit global heating to 1.5C. Adnoc plans to increase oil production by 25% between 2023 and 2027, however, which would dramatically overshoot these limits.
Last year, Adnoc rubber stamped the exploitation of a vast new gas field off the UAE coast, which threatens a vital habitat for sea cows. Burning the gas Adnoc plans to extract from this field would produce 30m tonnes of carbon dioxide per year – more than Denmark’s annual emissions.
HSBC has similarly close ties with Saudi Arabia’s national oil company. The share sale for Saudi Aramco’s refining business, Luberef – which HSBC bankers were working on as it unveiled its new oil and gas policy – raised $1.3bn. After the share sale, Saudi Aramco remains a 70% shareholder of Luberef and has management control of the business.
A couple of months later HSBC bankers helped raise $3bn in bonds for Greensaif, a company set up for the sole purpose of taking a stake in Saudi Aramco’s gas pipelines business, alongside Saudi Aramco, which retained the controlling stake.
And in another wildly successful share offering, HSBC helped raise $1.2bn for Ades Holding, which provides oil drilling rigs primarily to Saudi Aramco, among other oil and gas expanders in the region. Adnoc and Saudi Aramco declined to comment.
Adnoc is investing heavily in offshore expansion in the United Arab Emirates Giuseppe Cacace/AFP via Getty Images
HSBC rejected the suggestion that its policies allow for financing that is at odds with a net zero transition. “Net zero-aligned scenarios require continued, though declining, financing of fossil fuel supplies to meet energy demand, security, and affordability during the transition.”
The bank said its policy makes clear that it will continue to provide finance for companies with transition plans that align with its climate commitments. “HSBC’s approach is to engage with our major oil and gas clients on their targets and transition plans, and to align our oil and gas financing portfolio to a 2030 net zero aligned financed emissions target.”
Transition plans
Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest polluter, does not appear to be preparing for a transition away from fossil fuels. The company expects to grow oil production by 8% by 2027, and increase gas production by up to 60% by 2030. Last year UN experts sent a letter of concern to Aramco – and its banks, including HSBC – saying its ongoing expansion of fossil fuel production threatens human rights by worsening climate change.
HSBC has chased business in the oil-rich Middle East and was last year named the region’s best bank for financing by Euromoney. Julian Wentzel, HSBC’s head of global banking in the region, told the magazine: “We have been at the nucleus of every major deal in the region, providing the full suite of banking services to our valued partners.”
Ed Matthew, campaigns director of think tank E3G, told TBIJ: “There’s a complete conflict between [HSBC’s] ambition to be at the heart of Middle Eastern oil and gas development and their commitment to start to pull out of fossil fuel financing globally.
“They can’t have their cake and eat it. Either they’re serious about delivering on the Paris Agreement or they’re not. At the moment, they’re putting short-term profits ahead of a habitable planet.”
Aggressive fossil fuel expansion
HSBC also funded oil and gas businesses far beyond the Middle East. In December, the bank helped arrange a $5bn loan for TransCanada Pipelines, which is among the top companies in the world expanding infrastructure for oil and gas, according to the Rainforest Action Network. (TC Energy, which owns TransCanada Pipelines, said: “Sustainability is foundational in everything we do.”) A few weeks later, the bank helped secure a $4.7bn loan for Occidental Petroleum, which is buying a Texas oil driller to expand its operations in the biggest shale field in the US.
In Europe, HSBC was among the banks that arranged a $3.3bn loan for Eni, the Italian oil and gas expander. Eni announced last year that it plans to increase its oil and gas extraction by 3-4% a year until 2027.
Experts have praised HSBC’s oil and gas policy for prohibiting funding for infrastructure linked to new oil and gas fields, in addition to the projects themselves. But the bank has continued to raise money for companies involved in the frantic building of export terminals for natural gas on the US southern coast.
The expansion of gas drilling and export in the region has been described as a “carbon bomb” – if all the planned projects are built, the associated annual emissions would outstrip those of Russia. Last year, HSBC, together with a slew of other banks, helped arrange loans worth $14.3bn for two of the companies building gas export hubs in the region.
HSBC was also among a group of banks to arrange loans worth $6bn for Baker Hughes, which provides oilfield services and equipment to oil and gas companies around the world. It helped raise a further $790m in share sales for oil drilling services companies Saipem and Nabors during the year.
At Davos there has been plenty of debate about how to limit global heating to 1.5C but campaigners fear it will remain just that. “Davos has always been a lot of talk and not much action,” said E3G’s Matthew. He would like to see stricter regulation of fossil fuel funding. “We can’t just leave it in the hands of banks, we need stronger action by governments and central banks to help prevent these investments. They need to introduce penalties for banks which are continuing to finance fossil fuel expansion.”
Header image: A liquified natural gas terminal on the Texas Louisiana border in the United States. Credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images.
Reporters: Josephine Moulds Environment editor: Robert Soutar Impact producer: Grace Murray Deputy editor: Chrissie Giles Editor: Franz Wild Production editor: Frankie Goodway Fact checker: Alice Milliken
This reporting is funded by the Sunrise Project. None of our funders have any influence over our editorial decisions or output.
“Climate Crisis” only identifies the symptoms of oil and gas dependence. As time runs out, we need a term that focuses on what — and who — is to blame.
This article by Capital & Main is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
There’s always a lag between a rupture of the status quo and settling on a word for it. The planet is heating at a life-threatening pace. And yet the two words we use to describe this rupture — “climate” and “change” — are beginning to seem too stiff and one-dimensional for conveying the violence to life-sustaining ecosystems that threaten the world as we have known it.
As delegates from 196 countries attempt, for the 28th time, to reach a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, it is time for a new language. The violence of the atmospheric shifts, their deeply uneven impacts and the implications of mass extinctions that are expected at current emission levels, add up to much more than “climate change.” The 28th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP28) in the United Arab Emirates is being held in a region much of which could, according to current climate modeling, be uninhabitable by mid-century. It is time to more sharply focus the attention on those responsible for the violence of the changes underway.
Linguistic theory holds that words enable us to imagine a thing; it’s the words that come first. First there was the “greenhouse effect” — a phenomenon identified as early as 1856 by a largely unheralded woman scientist, Eunice Foote, who reported at the time that glass jars filled with air laced with carbon dioxide heated up much quicker than air without it. More than a century later, at a 1988 congressional hearing, James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, would testify about the links between rising temperatures on Earth and rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and point the finger at those responsible: humans. The term “global warming” stuck. Over the 170 years since Foote’s discovery, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has leapt from 290 parts per million to more than 400 ppm today.
By the early 21st century, the effects of all that extra CO2 began to be widely felt. Scientists came to recognize that “warming” sets off a cascade of changes — from shifts in rainfall patterns to volatile swings between rain and drought, and heat and cold, as well as major disruptions to the flow of ocean currents. “Climate change” seemed to encompass more possibilities for derangements of the global ecosystem. And that term is rapidly being outrun by the speed of the changes.
“Climate emergency” was chosen as the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year’’ in 2019. That was two years after the Guardianled the world’s newspapers in adopting the term “climate crisis,” to be used interchangeably with “emergency.” The Guardian was far ahead of the curve in evoking the urgency of reporting on the scale of disruptions triggered by greenhouse gases. That tonal change drove home the point that this was not merely a phenomenon to be described, but a tectonic shift demanding ongoing reporting. Nothing, however, can stay ahead of the curve for long; soon enough the curve curves. It’s time for journalists, and everyone else, to consider some additional words and subordinate clauses that evoke the violence of the changes in the present, and identify those accountable for the upending of the status quo now underway in full throttle.
We are living in the climate warp. Yet it is admittedly difficult to clarify in a word or a phrase the vast scope of impacts, which range from the epic to the highly specific. Climate-induced drought was one of the triggers to the Syrian civil war and also fuels the current battle between California and its neighbors over access to the Colorado River. It is helping drive the decimation of farmer livelihoods that is leading to the crush of new immigrants on America’s and Europe’s borders. It contributed to the record-breaking heat that caused the untimely death of a Taylor Swift fan in Rio de Janeiro. Such conflicts and record-breakers are happening hourly somewhere in the world.
“Climate change” describes only the result of fossil fuel-based greenhouse gases. A term like “fossil fueled-destruction” would name the cause as well as the effect.
There are two tools now available to journalists to more clearly show who can be held accountable for the devastating impacts of the changing climate. Major advances in the attribution sciences provide ever-more sensitive understanding of how the overheated atmosphere is disrupting conditions here on Earth. And, critically, ever more precise research into the history of greenhouse gas emissions establishes who can be held accountable.
During this last season of record-breaking summer and fall temperatures, one meteorologist suggested naming the heat waves after those responsible, as in, the “Amoco heatwave,” or the “Exxon hurricane” or the “Chevron drought.” While droughts have been in California’s backbeat for as long as there are historical records, Chevron’s global emissions of some 725 million tons of greenhouse gases including CO2 in 2022 directly contribute to their increasing breadth and duration, as they do to increasing water scarcity pressures in other parts of the world. (The company’s “offsets” of those emissions were found recently to be “mostly junk.”)
We know who is responsible for the overwhelming share of greenhouse gas emissions, and thus for the massive chaos being wrought. They are not hidden behind tax shelters or front companies. They are polluting in plain sight. A new language might incorporate that knowledge: At least one of the 90 companies responsible for practically all greenhouse gas emissions since 1850 is operating a refinery near you, or distributing its greenhouse gas emitting products at a gas station, seaport or airport in the neighborhood.
Cognitive Dissonance Ahead
We consumers also bear some responsibility; we’ve been driving around in those gas-powered cars since James Hansen delivered the news 25 years ago. But we’ve also been driving through a fog of disinformation. The fossil fuel industry hid for decades what it knew about the impacts of its products. Those “deceptions,” California alleges in a historic lawsuit against the top five oil companies in the state, “caused a delayed societal response to global warming. And their misconduct has resulted in tremendous costs to people, property, and natural resources, which continue to unfold each day.”
A recent study of the four largest U.S. and European oil companies (ExxonMobil and Chevron, BP and Shell) in the science journal PLOS One found a widening gap between what they say they are doing in response to the climate crisis and what they continue to do to cause it. The study concludes with a classic of scientific understatement: “[T]he magnitude of investments and actions does not match the discourse.” In the climate lexicon, it is hard to beat the term “greenwashing,” which is no doubt on abundant display in Dubai. But that study and countless others like it are a warning shot for journalists and the public to cast a wary eye on fossil fuel companies’ claim that they are working towards the “energy transition” away from the old dinosaur bones they’ve been mining that are polluting the world.
While COP28 in Dubai is awash in fossil fuel lobbyists, it has also established the world’s first “loss and damage” fund, and will likely be coming up with some actual money to assist the 90% of the world’s population that did not produce the greenhouse gas emissions but are suffering their consequences. A new word may also soon enter the popular lexicon, if it’s not there already: “incremental.” Which may not be revolutionary, but also has real impacts. Every incremental reduction in greenhouse gases, or incremental increase in funding, could mean the difference between a coastal community being inundated or not, of another year saved from a 10th of a degree Celsius increase, of another year spent on a sub-Saharan grassland before it turns to desert. Such increments are the new climate currency.
And for those of us in the fortunate climes, it means more fall seasons that feel like spring, more 65 Fahrenheit winters that should no longer be termed “unseasonably warm.” The writer Stevie Chedid calls it “warning weather.” A disquieting warning in the humid warming air.
