Climate deniers in high places

SHELL Canada really is determined “to assure the public that it cares deeply about fixing the climate emergency,” as it was sardonically described in a recent post by the DeSmog Network, which provided the tips for today’s installment.

In a full-page advertising feature last November in Canada’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Globe & Mail, Shell Canada’s president Susannah Pierce proclaimed, “What I’m really pleased to say is as a company we’re building and executing a business strategy that not only cares about returns to shareholders but we’re recognizing we have to be a force for good for the community.”

She added, “The energy we produce needs to be the energy that will meet the world’s needs and protect the planet. We have to recognize that when we build infrastructure, or provide energy to consumers, part of the production, transmission and consumption has an impact on nature. And our nature is exhaustible. We need to respect our air, land and water.”

The advertorial goes on to explain that, “Shell is evolving from an oil-and-gas company to an all-round energy firm with a goal to become a net-zero emissions enterprise by 2050 or sooner. Replacing high-carbon intensity fuels with lower-carbon intensive energy such as biofuels, lowcarbon hydrogen and renewable power are part of the net-zero emissions pillar.”

Pierce, who became Shell Canada’s president in mid-2021, has been an energetic public cheerleader for her company’s climatefriendly initiatives. In an interview shortly after taking the job, she stressed that her mission was to “transition our company from one that had traditionally produced oil and gas into one which is a leader in new technologies and new energy systems that can achieve our net-zero ambitions.”

Well, that’s what Shell tells the public, anyway. What Shell discusses within its own offices is a different story, as internal communications subpoenaed as part of a US congressional investigation last year revealed. A Shell PR guidance memo from 2020 cautioned company executives to frame the net-zero goal as a “collective ambition for the world” rather than “a Shell goal or target.”

“Please do not give the impression that Shell is willing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to levels that do not make business sense,” the memo explained. “Shell has no immediate plans to move to a netzero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years.”

Of course, since that guidance was circulated before Susannah Pierce’s appointment, Shell’s policy may have undergone a change, right? Well, no. Pierce’s previous work prior to joining Shell was as a director of Canada’s Fraser Institute, where she represented LNG Canada, a Shell-led consortium that is building the Coastal GasLink pipeline and a $40-billion liquefied natural gas project in northwest British Columbia. These projects have gotten some heightened public attention in recent years due to the stiff opposition to them from the Wet’suwet’en First Nation people, in protests that have on a couple of occasions been forcefully suppressed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The Fraser Institute is described by DeSmog as “one of the most prominent climate crisis denial think tanks in Canada,” a characterization the institute or its members certainly seem to enthusiastically embrace. In a book celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2019, the Fraser Institute highlighted its work in “35 Big Ideas” that are “changing the world.” One of those is “challenging commonly held environmental beliefs.” The book explains, “In Global Warming: The Science and the Politics and other works, the institute brought to public attention the uncertainties of climate science. In Environmental Indicators, the institute publicized a wide variety of Canadian and US government data on the environment, demonstrating the exaggerations of environmental alarmists.”

In its annual report the same year, the Fraser Institute proudly highlighted the organization’s work in debunking “inaccurate and alarmist” fears about climate change. “All told, center staff and senior fellows wrote over 25 original newspaper commentaries on environmental issues in 2019,” it said. One recent example of this ongoing effort was an op-ed piece written for the Calgary Sun in August of last year by Fraser Institute senior fellow Kenneth P. Green titled, “Net-zero — the pathway to Canadian decline.” Describing net-zero goals as “[a] new (and profoundly bad) policy idea has gripped the world’s climate-obsessed leaders to address scenarios mostly generated by their own imaginative (and often wrong) predictive climate models,” Green proclaims. “We must say ‘net-no’ to ‘net-zero.’”

This is the talent pool from which Shell Canada drew its current president, so it is little wonder that Shell’s climate-friendly claims have been met with scorn. In an interview with DeSmog, Donald Gutstein, an adjunct professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and author of several books about corporate power and the media described Shell Canada’s claim to being a climate leader as “bullshit” and “total greenwashing.”

What is most frustrating about the oil and gas industry is that, if it really wanted to, it could actually make good on its hollow claims of “climate leadership,” and probably in a profoundly world-changing way. As has been

discovered in recent years, the industry’s own climate research and climate change models are better than those of most scientists, so the industry has a very keen understanding of the problem. It also has a vast amount of resources to apply to solving that problem, thanks to being in a highly profitable business.

And there are a vast number of opportunities to develop solutions, because the nature of the energyclimate dilemma — a topic I’ll delve into in the next column — is such that the only way it will be overcome is by applying a wide range of partial solutions that work together. Every form of energy production — save for truly stupid ideas, like burning trees for fuel — has some advantages, but every one also has one or more seriously problematic shortcomings. Whether it’s fossil fuel, or nuclear, or solar, or wind, or hydropower, or geothermal, or hydrogen, or the various forms of waste-to-energy, each has some major hang-up that prevents it from being the one-size-fits-all answer that will save the planet without destroying civilization. In order to find the mix that maximizes the advantages and minimizes the risks, the world needs to apply as much knowhow and material resources as can be mustered.

A great deal of those resources and knowhow can be found in the petroleum industry. But time and again we learn that, at every opportunity to make a choice and with the full understanding of the consequences, it chooses to profit from intentionally shortening humanity’s lifespan, and call it “being a force for good in the community.”