In Shell’s most recent annual review of its trade group memberships, the company said they “have continued to work to ensure our memberships of industry associations support the Paris Agreement.” But as Luke Barratt and Alexander Kaufman at HuffPo revealed last week, Shell is a member of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), which as recently as last December was lobbying against climate action.
As Graham Steele of Stanford told HuffPo, the “obvious disconnect between fossil fuel companies’ actions,” in funding denial organizations while at the same time claiming they’re helpful in the fight against climate change, is the precise reason “why these trade associations and these coalitions exist ... to be the sort of back-channel voice for all these entities.”
How does Shell’s supposed commitment to net-zero by 2050 square with its memberships in IPAA or API, two trade associations vocally opposed to climate action?
It doesn’t!
Does that matter? It should! And perhaps at some point, it may!
Because yet another city has sued Big Oil. Annapolis, Maryland filed a lawsuit against 26 oil and gas companies last week, including Shell, for breaking the Maryland Consumer Protection Act, negligence, trespass and other charges.
Mayor Gavin Buckely said in a press conference that the companies “worked to deceive people of the danger, hiding their knowledge and engaging in an intentional campaign to mislead the public about the science, proving the growing danger posed by fossil fuels.”
Annapolis is having to undertake something like $100 million in construction costs to build flood walls and raise the City Dock by 9 feet, as sea level rise is already causing an increase in flooding- 925% more sunny-day flooding over the past 50 years.
As Emily Sanders’ ExxonKnews-letter highlighted on Friday, the Annapolis lawsuit was just one concerning sign for the industry last week. The other was the nomination hearing for Biden’s pick for Attorney General, Merrick Garland. His opening statement referenced environmental justice, and Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal pressed Garland to use the power of the Department of Justice to hold the industry accountable for “lying to the American public about the devastating effects of these products.”
With all this happening as the Baltimore vs Big Oil case awaits a procedural decision from the Supreme Court, it’d be a great time for Shell to show some remorse and commitment to its professed climate concern and make a public point of pulling out of the various front groups it’s funded, open up its books about what its funding secured, and expose the bad actors it’s used to carry out its covert anti-climate lobbying.
Odds are it won’t though, and it’ll be left to investigative journalists or attorneys to expose it all anyway.
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