Shell Funded Lobbying For Trump’s Pro-Fossil Fuel Financing Looking To Block Banks’ Climate Action
Anglo-Dutch global oil and gas giant Shell funded an industry group lobbying to block efforts by U.S. banks to tackle climate change, an investigation has found. Even as the corporation made new sustainability pledges and made net-zero its goal publicly, documents reviewed by nonprofit journalism platform SourceMaterial and HuffPost showed that Shell backed the lobbyists in favour of the controversial federal rule on fossil fuel financing that the Trump administration implemented in its final days.
Shell funded an industry lobbying group that pushed for the rule, which was introduced during former president Trump’s final week in office, that would require banks to be “impartial” in choosing the companies they finance, a move widely seen to undermine climate policies that major banks have been putting in place to eradicate loans to oil drilling and coal mining operations.
This was revealed in a joint investigation undertaken by journalists at SourceMaterial and HuffPost, which calls into question Shell’s public-facing climate action statements, which include aiming to reduce its emissions to net-zero by 2050.