Sara Dramer: Associate Producer: Yahoo Finance: Jan 17, 2020
One oil industry watcher says big oil companies need to adopt better climate change policies or face repercussions from shareholders.
Posts Tagged ‘BP’
yahoo! finance:Shareholders expect oil companies to be ‘responsive’ to climate change
The Washington Post: We live in an age of climate disaster. Now what?
By Ishaan Tharoor with Ruby Mellen
This week, U.S. scientists confirmed what anyone who has been paying attention would probably already know. The 2010s were the hottest decade ever recorded on the planet. 2019 was the second-hottest year ever measured, and the evidence was brutally on show: We saw swaths of Greenland’s ice cap melt into the sea, heat waves blaze through northern Europe, extreme storms and floods batter vulnerable islands and coasts, and epic wildfires scorch vast drought-ridden stretches of the globe.
investors CHRONICLE: Shell’s LNG bet looks sound despite glut
When Royal Dutch Shell (RDSB) launched its £35.6bn bid for BG Group, it was easy to appreciate the strategic rationale. At a stroke, the Anglo-Dutch energy giant not only bolstered its reserves, but also shored-up its position in a global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market which had grown rapidly since the turn of the millennium.
Shell wasn’t alone in increasing its exposure to the sector, but investors may now be questioning whether long-term prospects in gas markets warrant the massive capital allocation. A supply glut, most noticeably in the US Permian basin, weighed on gas prices last year, and there are few signs of respite as new fields in Australia and Russia come online.
TIME MAGAZINE: The Reason Fossil Fuel Companies Are Finally Reckoning with Climate Change
Shell must grapple with its own existential crisis: How should a company that generates most of its profits by serving the world’s enormous appetite for oil navigate a long-term future in which shifting political and economic tides threaten to make fossil fuels obsolete?
A peculiar theme park in the Hague celebrates the history of the Netherlands through a series of miniature models. The Madurodam features little canals, old-fashioned windmills, tiny tulips and, amid it all, an homage to Royal Dutch Shell, the oil giant that is the biggest company in the country and, by revenue, the second largest publicly traded oil-and-gas company in the world. There’s a Shell drilling platform, a Shell gas station and a Shell natural-gas field, complete with a drilling rig. The display is at once odd–energy infrastructure in a children’s theme park–and entirely fitting: Shell has been, for decades, one of the most powerful players both in Dutch politics and on the global economic stage.
Chron: ‘A sector in disarray’: Oil majors live beyond their means on investor payouts, study finds
“Investors are gradually moving away from energy stocks. A look behind the dividend payments of the leading companies helps explain why. For the core business of these companies, there is more money going out than coming in.”
The largest oil and gas companies for years have lived beyond their means and paid more money to investors than they can reasonably afford, according to a new report.
The study from the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that the five largest Big Oil majors — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total — spent $536 billion on shareholder dividends and stock buybacks since 2010 while bringing in just $329 billion in free cash flow.
The Times: BP and Shell won’t be abandoning fossil fuels any time soon.
The oil majors, particularly in Europe, are ploughing billions into green energy projects. However, their efforts to reduce emissions often look like window dressing.
Royal Dutch Shell spends about $3 billion on its low carbon and electricity businesses, which is roughly a tenth of its research and development budget.
BP said this week it hoped to create five billion-dollar green energy businesses by 2025. But many of its green initiatives are designed to prolong the life of its oil and gasfields, by boosting productivity at wells and managing carbon more efficiently. BP and Shell won’t be abandoning fossil fuels any time soon.
The feeble arguments presented by Shell to Greta Thunberg
Extracts from a letter published by The Independent on 8 Jan 2020.
Donnachadh McCarthy highlights the feeble arguments presented by Shell to Greta Thunberg in defence of their policies (Oil companies like Shell could destroy humanity as we know it – but not if we make fossil-fuel investments illegal, Voices 8 January).
The blood of middle East wars is on the hands of major oil companies, but ours too, as we are lazily dependent on cheap dirty energy.
Our planet didn’t choose to self-harm. We are the ones who became addicted to oil, electricity and plastic…
THE INDEPENDENT: Oil companies like Shell could destroy humanity as we know it
The climate column: Compulsory and voluntary carbon exposure declarations are a joke. It is time for governments to unite and take the kind of action the planet desperately needs
In 1991, Shell produced an internal film outlining the dangers of climate change, predicting famines, floods and millions of climate refugees, if the world did not stop burning fossil fuels.
But instead of listening to its own scientists, it continued to invest billions in fossil fuels...
“It is now too late to leave”…
Imagine living in East Gippsland, Australia, with your family and hearing this message in the middle of an apocalyptic Australian fire-storm.
But this emergency warning delivered to terrified Australians trapped by fires on beaches in pitch blackness, with ash and fiery embers raining down on them, is also a message to humanity.
We are teetering on the edge of the climate precipice; it may already be too late to pull us back.
The rate that we are increasing fossil fuel usage rather than slashing it, means that our remaining carbon budget to avoid breaching a 1.5C rise in global temperatures will be bust in just eight years.
REUTERS: Barclays pressured by shareholders to cut fossil fuel financing
The move comes just days after outgoing Bank of England governor Mark Carney said the financial services industry had been too slow to cut investment in fossil fuels.
Reporting by Lawrence White and Simon Jessop: JAN 8, 2020
LONDON (Reuters) – A group of Barclays (BARC.L) shareholders coordinated by responsible investment lobby group ShareAction want the bank to phase out financing fossil fuels, stepping up pressure on one of Europe’s biggest funders of the sector.
Eleven institutional investors have filed a resolution to be voted on at Barclays’ annual meeting in May, requiring the bank to set out plans to stop providing all financial services to firms not aligned with the Paris climate agreement.
THE SUNDAY TIMES: British Museum freezes out BP as sponsor of show
Dipesh
BP and Shell employees in Iraq could be targeted By Tehran’s sympathisers
The Sunday Times: 5 Jan 2020
British nationals have been warned against travelling to Iran or Iraq, and urged to be extra vigilant in other Middle Eastern nations.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office hardened its guidance yesterday, warning that the situation could “deteriorate quickly”.
Several big British companies have a presence in Irak, including the oil giants BP and Shell and the security group G4S, and could be targeted by Tehran’s sympathisers who have publicly declared their intention to avenge America’s killing of Qassem Soleimani.
Lawsuit to Hold Big Oil Accountable for Costs of Climate Change
January 6, 2020 – SACRAMENTO – California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, co-leading a coalition of 13 states, filed an amicus brief supporting the State of Rhode Island in its lawsuit State of Rhode Island v. Shell Oil Products Company LLC et al. In the lawsuit, the state seeks to hold oil companies accountable for their actions contributing to climate change and the resulting harms from sea-level rise, changes to the hydrologic cycle, and increased air and ocean temperatures.
OilPrice.com: Are Oil Stocks ‘Too Toxic To Trade’
Now the next great ‘sin stock’ sector—Big Oil—faces challenges in convincing investors and society that it could still be part of the solution, not the problem, in a world which is increasingly sensitive to the impact of climate change on the planet and people.
By Tsvetana Paraskova – Jan 02, 2020, 4:00 PM CST
Amid growing concerns about climate change, activists, shareholders, and many investors have started to see oil companies as the next ‘Big Tobacco’ set of toxic stocks because of Big Oil’s continued investment into fossil fuel-derived energy.
Despite climate activists’ demands that oil firms ‘leave it in the ground’, Big Oil are not getting out of their core oil and gas business, nor they are planning to do so, because the world will continue to need oil and gas in the foreseeable future, Shell’s chief executive Ben van Beurden says.
THE GUARDIAN: Royal Dutch Shell may fail to reach green energy targets
Royal Dutch Shell is at risk of falling short on plans to invest up to $6bn (£4.6bn) in green energy projects between 2016 and the end of 2020, with its slow progress likely to raise concern that oil companies are not moving fast enough to help tackle the climate crisis.
CHURCH TIMES: Oil company shares? Time to move our investments elsewhere?
HERE we are, in 2020, at the start of not just a new year but a new decade. It is one that could prove make-or-break for the dominant challenge of the 21st century: climate change. Will it be a decade of delivery or a decade of disaster?
So, what is the way forward? The director of new energies at Shell, Maarten Wetselaar, outlined its $2-billion plan to transition from fossil-fuels to low-carbon energy. Yet it is still spending $25 billion on oil prospecting.
The world of finance, which holds large amounts of oil-company shares, must exert pressure for that to change. The trouble, says the outgoing governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, is that financial firms are “not moving fast enough” away from fossil-fuel investments. Many of those investments, which could rapidly become worthless, are lodged in the pension funds of ordinary people. Perhaps it is time for us to demand that our pension funds move our investments elsewhere.
Greta leads the way
Climate change
Greta leads the way
Climate change captured the public’s attention in 2019. This was the year when global emissions were set to reach their highest point ever at 43bn tonnes of carbon dioxide and 16-year-old Greta Thunberg gave world leaders both barrels at the UN. But it will take more than that to shift the priorities of the world’s major emitters. Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA) and BP (BP.) and others are still green-lighting new projects that will reportedly hinder the planet from hitting the Paris climate goals of keeping warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees.
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