A lot has happened in recent weeks:
The pressure on Shell has grown: new research shows that Shell wants to increase emissions this decade, pension fund ABP has dropped Shell, and an activist shareholder wants to split up the company.
At the climate summit in Glasgow, for the first time there was no official role for fossil fuel companies. Partly because of this, the Glasgow Pact is the first climate pact in which fossil fuels are explicitly mentioned. The final agreement calls for a ‘phasedown’ of coal and a ‘phase-out’ of ‘inefficient’ subsidies for fossil fuels.
As far as we are concerned, the most important agreement in Glasgow is that by the next climate summit in Egypt in 2022, all countries must have tightened their emissions reduction targets to the point where global emissions fall by 45% by 2030. In that case, global climate change will be limited to 1.5°C.
In spite of all this pressure, not a single major oil and gas company is willing to make the necessary (absolute) emission cuts before the end of this decade (graph above). Voting for our climate resolutions continues to be crucial.
