Shell's climate-friendly venture is just a facade: The Guardian

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: The Guardian
27 Feb 2024 09:18
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Drilled and The Guardian have analyzed Onward's website to find that despite its visual focus on a cleaner climate, Onward's main subject is to find better energy and oil consumption outcomes.

A view of the Shell oil company logo above a Shell fuel station in London, Thursday, May 5, 2022. (AP)

Earlier this month, a new venture owned by Shell was launched to "advance the energy transition" and connect innovators worldwide to address more challenging energy and climate issues.

The Shell-diversified startup, Onward, was allegedly created to boost efficiency in materializing energy innovation by promoting entrepreneurship, novelty of invention, and collaboration. Its mission is to relay a convincing image of a net-zero future, using advertisements of a clean future of appealing climate-based and clean environment activities such as snorkeling, hiking, and kitesurfing.

Drilled and The Guardian analyzed the website to find that despite its visual focus on a cleaner climate, Onward's main goal is to find better energy and oil consumption outcomes. Its job and projects section consists of mostly oil and gas exploration and research and stresses the ability to understand, analyze, and create systems for energy resource mapping and uses.

With that in consideration, ventures like Onward allow their mother conglomerates, Shell in this case, to pretend it is working toward a cleaner future but only accelerate the climate crisis in reality, Drilled quoted the host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, Paris Marx, as saying.

Shell has diversified its branches into three other energy-friendly ventures, investing time and large sums of money into safe consumption innovation. In 2022, it was revealed that the conglomerate invested 89% more money in low-carbon energy solutions than it did the year before. Energy giants Aramco and Exxon have both also invested $7 billion in research, development, and implementation of renewable energy and low-emission solutions.

Greenwashing among energy giants

However, the reality is these giant companies, who have made multi-billions in profit from energy consumption, are using the move to green energy as a facade to boost their appeal in a rapidly changing and more aware world that aims to save the earth from the climate crisis.

For example, energy giants have, despite pledging to cease energy exploration as recommended by experts to avoid irreversible climate damage, retracted to older ways and methods that neglect climate goals. Shell's new CEO, Wael Sawan, has discarded the company's previous vows and steered its path onto more energy and oil exploration. It is worth noting that energy exploration has given Shell $28 billion in profits in 2023.

Onward was invited to comment on the allegations, but Drilled and The Guardian were not given a direct answer. In other instances, Onward's CEO revealed that the enterprise is working on finding energy solutions at a more rapid rate, he told Axios.

Melissa Aronczyk, a professor of journalism and media at Rutgers University, said that the facade of collaboration in climate-crisis solutions is a "Trojan horse of legitimacy. You’re under cover of the idea that the climate movement is an all-hands-on-deck situation, but what you’re really doing is bringing in players who have very different ideas of what it means to ‘solve’ the climate crisis.”

A charade boosted by rich countries

The world's richest countries breached their self-proclaimed climate commitment to limit fossil fuel investments and spent a record $1.4 trillion in subsidies on coal, oil, and gas in 2022.

Double the cash flow poured into non-renewable resources in 2019, an international organization that monitors anti-environmental practices of governments said in its latest report.

According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the G20 broke a unified agreement reached at a climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.

By lowering prices through public subsidies, countries are encouraging citizens and industries to stick to consuming non-renewable energy sources. In 2022, G20 countries spent $1 trillion on subsidies, $322 billion in investments by state-owned firms, and $50 billion in loans from governmental finance institutions.