Shell Silently Abandoned Its $100 Million-a-Year Plan to Offset CO2 Emissions
A faltering offsets program points to new problems with the corporate world’s favorite “climate solution.”
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Is it even possible for a gas company to offset CO2 emissions? They would have to charge insane amounts
It's not possible for anyone to offset CO2 because that's just not how CO2 works. If its going into the air it doesn't matter how much money moves around in the background, it's still going into the air. Carbon offsets were never going to accomplish anything because physics don't work that way
You could create a chemical reaction that transform it to carbon and O2?
That's pretty much what a tree is. But then it dies and burns/decomposes and it goes back in the atmosphere. It's temporary storage.
I mean sure, but that's not what carbon offsets are doing
Not really, because there are different "scopes" of emissions when declaring offsets:
Scope 1: emissions done directly during normal operations
Scope 2: emissions from the suppliers, transport and resourcing of raw materials etc.
Scope 3: indirect emissions caused by the use of the product and other effects the company is responsible for.
Obviously fossil fuel companies like Shell mostly have Scope 3 emissions. Barely any company that declares offsets even considers Scope 3 emissions though.
So all companies out there that even say they 100% offset, often just mean Scope 1 emissions. That's basically systemic green washing.
Also a lot of the offsets are nearly useless, so even if Scope 1 and 2 are offset you gotta subtract 90% ineffectiveness from the amount.
Agreed, I feel like they probably abandoned the plan because they realized $100M wasn’t enough…
No, they probably abandoned it because they only said they would do it because they thought it would increase their public appearance. Once they got the boost from saying they'd do it, if they just silently back out, it's unlikely that people notice and/or care anymore.... That's just how advertising works.
They probably never had any intention of actually following through to begin with.
I mean, it’s probably a little bit of both. It’s not like people will just stop buying gas in the near and medium-term, and once they got the goodwill and looked at their bottom line they realized that they could just keep the goodwill AND the money. Classic mega corporation move
I'll eat my fucking hat if Shell's follow-up here is to invest more money instead of less, absent state consequences forcing them to behave.
They are in the business of selling virgin oil. Anything they spend towards decarbonization hurts the selling of virgin oil. They know it. The rest of this shit is just advertising and they will terminate the campaign as soon as it stops performing. They can just do more adbuys for advertorial content through the NYT if there's any backlash.