This Tuesday, it's Shell's AGM in London. If you can, do come and join the protest:

They will be celebrating their obscene profits - £7.6 billion over the first three months of 2023, almost £1000 every second - and obscuring the truth about the impact on people and the planet with greenwash.

So lets get our facts straight about Shell and their corporate cronies:

1. We can't afford any new fossil fuel infrastructure 

Climate scientists have been warning for years that we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. In 2021, even the International Energy Agency did the maths and concluded there could be no new fossil fuel infrastructure. But fossil fuel companies and governments never got the memo. They continued drilling, building pipelines and exploiting new fossil fuel fields. Analysis last year found just eight oil and gas companies to be involved in over 200 expansion projects

2. Shell and other companies are making record-breaking profits because the rest of us are getting poorer

Last year, the West’s five largest oil and gas companies, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies made $134 billion in excess profits, (profits in addition to what they would normally expect). These profits came from higher energy bills, taken from households and from businesses which then passed on the higher costs to consumers. The cost of living crisis in the UK is part of a wider global crisis caused in large part by energy companies profiteering from the war in Ukraine.

3. The UK's planned North Sea oil and gas expansion would be a climate disaster

The UK government is on the brink of approving Rosebank, a massive potential North Sea field. It has the potential to produce 500m barrels of oil, which when burned would emit as much CO2 as running 56 coal-fired power stations for a year. The UK's carbon budgets can't even accommodate the emissions from getting the oil out of the ground.

4. Fossil fuel expansion doesn't help workers or those of us struggling with the cost of living.

Can North Sea oil and gas help with UK energy bills? No - the vast majority of what will be produced is oil, not gas, and will be owned by the companies extracting it and exported. Longer explanation here.

But will it help the UK economy? Also no. The windfall tax ('energy profits levy') which Rishi Sunak brought in last year came with a giant loophole - a tax break for oil companies opening up new fields for drilling. For Rosebank, this would mean UK taxpayers handing back £3.75 billion.

A just transition is possible. Recent research by Platform and Friends of the Earth Scotland with oil and gas workers sets out their concerns about working conditions, fears for the future, and what they need for a just transition: making it easier for oil and gas workers to move into the renewable industry; ensuring safety, job security and fair pay across the energy industry; new public owned energy companies and a tax regime that works for the public good.

5. Greenwash enables destruction.

Companies like Shell and BP produce a barrage of advertising on social media and elsewhere, with prominent photos of wind turbines and solar panels. But in 2021 Shell invested just 1.5% of its total capital expenditure ($244 million out of £19.7 billion) in wind and solar. 

So what makes up the rest of its so-called 'Renewables and Energy Solutions' expenditure ($2.4 billion in 2021)? Analysis by Global Witness revealed this included not just 'solutions' such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen and carbon offset projects but also marketing and trading of fossil gas.

Government subsidies are also being diverted to false solutions. A recent leaflet produced by our trade union group sets out the facts behind the greenwash around carbon capture, hydrogen and biomass in the UK.

We have also increasingly seen the capture of UN climate negotiations by fossil fuel interests and consequent greenwash - a huge concern for this year's COP28 to be held in UAE. (more detail here)

Photo credit: Flickr user fotdmike

The main headline from COP27: after twenty-seven years of climate negotiations, progress on actually cutting emissions is as painfully slow as ever. Meanwhile the chance of staying under 1.5C of warming is rapidly disappearing, and the impacts of climate breakdown are devastating communities around the world.

The Egyptian government saw hosting the summit as an opportunity to enhance prestige, but the international attention also shone a spotlight on its human rights abuses, with a crackdown on protesters ahead of COP27. The most powerful voice at the summit was arguably a man who who was not even in Sharm el-Sheikh, but in prison. Alaa Abd El Fattah, a British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist and writer, who has been in prison for most of the past nine years, escalated his ongoing hunger strike to stop drinking water as COP27 began.

Due to the restrictions imposed on protest in the streets of Egypt , for the first time ever, climate activists marched within the Blue Zone (governed by UN rules). Their slogan, "We have not yet been defeated" echoed the the title of Alaa Abd El Fattah's book of essays, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Solidarity climate protests around the world called for the freeing of Alaa and the many other political prisoners in Egypt, that there could be no climate justice without human rights.

Loss and Damage fund finally established

COP27 did produce one big win for countries on the frontline of climate breakdown. After decades of blocking by rich nations, a loss and damage fund was agreed for countries most affected by climate change to cover devastating impacts like flooding and drought. In the run up to COP27, negotiations had been needed to even get loss and damage onto the agenda. This fund is a significant win for powerful advocacy by climate-vulnerable countries and the global climate justice movement, and one which was fought over all the way.

But the new loss and damage fund is, for now, empty. The track record of rich nations on climate finance is not encouraging. Thirteen years ago in Copenhagen, rich nations pledged to provide US$100 billion a year to less wealthy nations by 2020, to help them adapt to climate change and develop sustainably. That promise was broken, not just falling short on the total amount, but also in the substance of what has been provided, which has overwhelmingly been given as loans only, rather than grant funding.

The UK desperately needs cheap, clean energy, home insulation and real leadership on the climate and cost of living crises. But based on the showing of the two candidates to lead our country, we won't be getting it any time soon.

At a recent Conservative leadership hustings, Liz Truss promised to change the rules to ensure farming is prioritised over new solar projects. She also vowed to exploit all the gas in the North Sea and said she would allow fracking in locations "where communities supported it".

Rishi Sunak has already indicated his own opposition to the most cost-effective, clean energy, saying he would restrict solar development on farmland and reverse proposed moves by the government to lift the block on onshore wind farm development in England.

Truss also repeated her pledge to suspend 'green levies' on energy bills, despite experts warning that this would save an average household just £150 off their annual bills. Neither this, nor Sunak's pledge to suspend VAT on household energy bills, even scratches the surface of this crisis with rising fossil fuel prices sending average bills to over £3000, and the cost of living rising much faster than wages.

Both candidates have expressed a lukewarm commitment to the UK's legally binding target to reach 'net zero' emissions by 2050. Truss said we needed to find "better ways to deliver net zero" that won't "harm people and businesses", and Sunak warned "If we go too hard and too fast then we will lose people."

At a time when other European countries are pushing to reduce their gas dependency, and just two weeks after the UK's record-breaking 40C heatwave, it seems surreal that the candidates to be the UK's Prime Minister fail to grasp what is at stake.