Posts under ‘Shell Greenwash’

Posting by former Shell Executive Paddy Briggs on the article “Shell defends continued focus on fossil fuel-paper“: Mar 2nd, 2010 at 11:20 am

…in mid-December, the Gazette reported that the California Air Resources Board (ARB) recently released data indicating the Martinez Shell petroleum refinery was the state’s second worst polluter of greenhouse gases — particularly carbon dioxide — in 2008. According to the agency, a subdivision of California Environmental Protection Agency, last year the facility discharged 4.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and other gases into the atmosphere, contributing to the entrapment of solar radiation and warming of the planet’s surface.

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 December 2009 07.00 GMT

Shell drip-feeds its environmental ‘credentials’ to the public. Photograph: James Boardman

Editors must love Shell. Almost whatever I have read about climate change and the UN talks in Copenhagen in recent weeks, it has been flanked by the familiar Shell logo somewhere in the background.

From geeky titles like New Scientist to politico mags such as Prospect and New Statesman; and newspapers like the Guardian, the world’s second largest corporation has been splashing out – filling screens and newsprint with adverts and underwriting special supplements. Shell also sponsored a major research project by the Economist Intelligence Unit, called Countdown to Copenhagen, launched early this year at a Shell-sponsored “sustainability summit”.

Nobody is suggesting that Shell is writing the copy. And surely only the most craven editor would leave out criticism of oil companies like Shell. But the unmistakeable message is that Shell is going green.

It’s not just a subliminal message, either. The ads are all about Shell developing new low-carbon technologies, like carbon-capture, biofuels and “helping our customers use energy more efficiently”. They have pretty images, like a butterfly net catching CO2, and a pocket calculator with a button marked “less CO2″.

It won’t be easy, says the message: “We’ll need to think the impossible is possible.” Trouble is, in reality, Shell wants to think the possible is impossible. As its recently retired chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, said earlier this year of wind, solar and hydrogen power: “I don’t expect them to grow much at Shell from here.”

Back then I wrote that “Shell is the new Exxon“. But the latest evidence suggests it is worse than that. A new study of the environmental performance of the world’s top 10 oil and gas companies by the Madrid-based environmental auditing company Management & Excellence puts Shell last of all the western majors. That’s behind BP, Total, Chevron and even ExxonMobil.

Shell has fallen from fourth place to seventh in the past year, and is now propping up the bottom of the table with two Chinese oil giants, Sinopec and Petrochina, and the Russian monolith Gazprom. None are known for their environmental credentials.

The audit analyses the 10 companies according to 198 different criteria. Shell gets a rating of 51%, compared with top-ranking BP’s 77% and Exxon’s 62%.

Shell’s new chief executive Peter Voser last week made one statistical claim for his company’s progress to date. Its chemical plants were, he said, 8% more energy efficient that in 2001.

Good for them. But most other companies are doing better. The M&E study found Shell next to bottom on energy savings.

Shell failed to make the grade in other areas, too. It may spend millions promoting its expertise in alternative energy technologies, but Shell came in the bottom half here, too, with only half the scores of BP, Chevron and the Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras. Once, BP and Shell were bracketed together as companies taking the lead in expanding into renewables. But the report says that among the top 10 today “only BP seems to have a real business in alternative energies”.

Shell spokesman Shaun Wiggins said: “While Shell is aware of Management & Excellence, we have made a conscious choice to not participate in its rankings survey process.” The company says it prefers other environmental audits.

The findings will come as no surprise to those who read Friends of the Earth’s June report on Shell’s Big Dirty Secret, which charged the it with being “the world’s most carbon intensive oil company”.

Shell claims on its websites: “We were one of the first energy companies to acknowledge the threat of climate change.” The tragedy is that this is true, but that so little has come of it.

I have lost count of the number of false dawns at Shell. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, I reported Shell scientists promising that the company was going to plant tree across the tropics to soak up carbon dioxide. Whatever happened to that idea? Just before the Kyoto climate conference in 1997, Shell announced it was making a $500m investment in solar power. By the World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 it claimed to be installing solar panels across the developing world. Today it is absent from that business too.

Wiggins said Shell has spent $1.7bn on renewable in the past five years, but now concentrates on biofuels because they are “closest to our core business”. But he agreed that oil and gas still make up 95% of its business, and the truth is that the company has flattered to deceive for almost two decades now.

Readers of its current adverts are directed towards a zappy and visionary website devoted entirely to what might happen in the future. But the future has been a long time coming for Shell. And it seems ever further away.

SOURCE ARTICLE

In June, the company agreed to pay $15.5 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged complicity in murder, torture and other human rights abuses by Nigeria’s former military government. In 1995, the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwawas was hanged by Nigeria’s military regime after protesting Shell’s environmental practices, including gas flaring and the destruction of mangroves to make way for pipelines.

By John Donovan

The Financial Times reports today that the US oil industry is split on the question of climate change.

The split has been revealed from a leaked memo issued to its members by the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the US oil industry, including core members ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell.

According to the FT article, the memo leaked to Greenpeace outlined a plan to “deploy thousands of workers in so-called “Energy Citizen” rallies protesting against imminent climate change legislation” with members asked to “move aggressively to stage up to 22 public meetings, similar to the recent protests against President Barack Obama’s healthcare plans.”

However, some API members, including Shell, which has multiple greenwash convictions, have hedged their bets by cynically also becoming members of the US Climate Change Partnership “which supports many of Mr Obama’s environmental policies.”

Simultaneous membership of both lobbying groups, with such totally incompatible objectives on a fundamentally important subject, is a PR balancing trick which Shell and other oil giants, with a duplicitous foot in each camp, may find it difficult to sustain.

The American public is unlikely to be fooled by the two-faced approach from a company notorious for deceptive PR and misleading advertising, e.g. the spectacular example above of colorful flower petals emerging from smokestacks at a Shell refinery. So much more attractive than the deadly cocktail of toxic chemicals normally associated with such emissions.

This self-explanatory email correspondence is published simultaneously with the article: “Former Shell Group Auditor says Shell is a hoodlum organisation”

File of outspoken articles about Royal Dutch Shell published by this website since 2004.

Shell’s CEO designate Peter Voser would have to have been terminally naïve to assume that his extraordinary internal Email to staff would not immediately be placed in the public domain – as indeed it was within minutes of its transmission. Assuming that Voser knew exactly what he is doing let’s analyse what this message means for Shell’s battered stakeholders.

The fact that Voser chose to send out the Email when there is a still a month to go before he takes over as CEO is remarkable – and crassly insensitive to the feelings of the current man in charge Jeroen van der Veer. Van der Veer will no doubt also be aggrieved that the tone of the Email is so fiercely critical of the Shell of today – a Shell that has been moulded over the past six years by his efforts. Outside stakeholders will also want to ask why, if things at Shell are quite so bad as Voser says, van der Veer has been remunerated to the extent of around 10million Euros a year, why he is to receive a pension of well over one million Euros a year and why his contract with Shell was extended well beyond the normal Shell retirement age of 60.

Voser’s criticisms of the Shell that he inherits (and the Shell, let us not forget, of which he has been a senior executive director for many years) are scathing. Shell is no longer “… a company of firsts”. Shell is “organisationally too complex”. Shell’s culture is “too consensus-oriented”.  Shell needs to “regain our leadership position”. Shell needs a “greater focus on how we interact with resource holders and how we run our projects”. Shell needs to “increase accountability”, “speed up getting upstream projects on-stream, and improve project execution”, “change our approach from internal to external, raise our game in stakeholder management and better address non-technical risks”, “reduce corporate weight”, … and so on (and on!).

The goal of the organisational and cultural changes that Voser’s “transformation” predicates is hard to elicit from the Email  – quite what “a company that accelerates its ongoing top quartile plans” means I’ll have to leave it to a Shell insider to explain. Indeed all the objectives in Voser’s Email are eerily reminiscent of previous “transformations” – weasel words that mean little in concrete terms – other than the inevitability of staff reductions. “Here we go again” Shell veterans and survivors will no doubt cry. Underlying Voser’s decision to wash what he seems to see as Shell’s very grimy linen in public is his clear determination further to centralise decision-making. He wants less not more consensus and simplicity not complexity – this is barely disguised code for pulling all key decision-making back to the centre. 

Voser’s Email is an internal document and it will no doubt be the first of many such communications that are designed to stamp his personal authority on a corporation which he clearly believes is grossly dysfunctional and under-performing. Many of us would agree about the dysfunctionality – but not for the reasons that Mr Voser describes. Over the past years – in the era of Watts and van der Veer – it is Shell’s impact upon its external stakeholders which has been most open to criticism not so much its internal machinations. The health, safety and environmental record of the corporation has been abysmal – but HSE doesn’t get a mention in Voser’s 924 word message.   Shell’s brand has been damaged perhaps almost beyond repair – but the brand doesn’t get a mention either. Shell’s reputation in the outside world has been undermined by its cataclysmic errors of judgement in such projects as Sakhalin and Corrib, and in Canada and in Nigeria but Voser’s references to the need to restore this reputation are passing at best. Shell’s external communications have been the most disingenuous of any of the greenwashing oil majors – but there is no apology for these lies and obfuscations of the recent past and no plan as to how the recognised need for “improved relationships” with key stakeholders will be achieved. Shell’s directors have recently been revealed to be the fattest of fat cats but Voser seems oblivious of the paradox that over years when he clearly believes that the corporation has been grossly mismanaged Shell’s directors have paid themselves more and more!

From shareholders to employees and from suppliers to pensioners – and in local communities from Ogoni-land to County Mayo Shell has almost contemptuously damaged its standing in recent times sometimes by neglect but more often by the errors of its decision-making. Many will feel that this damage has been done because of ever more centralised management and ever more cost control obsessiveness. The failure to stop flaring in Nigeria was not because it could not technically be done – it was because the money was not made available – just one example amongst many. But the causes of this damaged reputation  – centralisation and cost minimisation obsessions – are the very tools that Peter Voser now wants to use to “transform” the business under his hegemony.  The future looks very bleak for us all.

SOURCE ARTICLE

Jeroen van der Veer’s tenure as chief executive ends amid outcry over bonuses, environmental record and human rights abuses

SHELL BLOG POSTING

MUSAINT: Greenpeace & Friends of the Earth describe Shell “as the most polluting oil company”. Does this : (i) take into account that Shell is a larger worldwide operator than most? and (ii) take account that Shell has partners in most ventures? (i.e. is their partners % deducted from Shell’s numbers?). I bet as usual (aka Brent Spar) that Greenpeace have “expanded” their numbers to try and make a point! At the end of the day the biggest polluters by a long long way are China, India and America. What about attacking their policies rather than the usual onslaught at oil companies? – the usual reason perhaps? …… they are easier to get at (e.g. Shell Nigeria vs Nigerian Government). The likes of a left wing dross newspaper such as the Guardian really does write such nonsense. It’s a shame that again you have “expanded” your title to infer that the summit was hijacked by Shell. The Guardian states “polluters” in their title – I think you have again added more spice!! As I’ve said before our recent summers have been cold, wet and generally awful – a little warming up of the weather will be a nice thing. Hope this stirs up some response on this blog which has been rather quiet of late!!!

Headline by John Donovan.