At a major oil and gas conference in Texas this week, companies publicly retreated from their flashy climate pledges of years past, redoubling their commitment to planet-warming fossil fuels.
The withdrawals illustrate the companies’ allegiance not to ordinary Americans, but to their shareholders and the climate-skeptical Trump administration, advocates said.
“We didn’t necessarily feel that those climate goals were really being done in a sincere, earnest way in the first place,” said Shiv Srivastava, an organizer and policy researcher with the Houston-based environmental justice organization Fenceline Watch. “It’s bad that they’re walking them back, but the problem was always that they could choose to walk them back if they wanted.”
Five years ago, amid climate rollbacks from the first Trump administration, BP made headlines when it announced a plan to dramatically slash oil and gas production and up its renewable energy capacity twentyfold. Months later, Larry Fink, CEO of the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, also made a much-lauded promise to “fundamentally reshape finance to deal with climate change”.
Today, the companies are singing a different tune. Late last month, six weeks into Trump’s second term, BP said it would increase its investment in oil and gas to $10bn a year while slashing more than $5bn from its previous green investment plan.
“I’m super excited we’ve launched it now,” BP’s CEO, Murray Auchincloss, said of the plan at the oil and gas conference CERAWeek in Houston on Tuesday.
In January, BlackRock said it was leaving a key international group of asset managers committed to net-zero investments, though the company pledged to continue allowing investors to place money into into climate-focused funds. The coalition has since said it is temporarily shutting down.
“We have to think about power and energy in a pragmatic way,” Fink said, adding that he believes gas will play a “major role” in the US for decades. He showed off a bracelet he wore that read: “Make energy great again.”
Other companies have similarly eschewed their past climate commitments. Shell in December announced reduced investments in renewable energy. The company is “simplifying” its portfolio and focusing on expanding gas, Shell’s CEO, Wael Sawan, told CERAWeek attendees on Monday.
Within the span of a month from December to January, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan all said they were abandoning their commitment to a UN-sponsored group, under which members pledge to zero out emissions from their investment portfolios.
The announcements bring the companies into alignment with the Trump administration’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda. If the widespread climate retreat results in additional fossil fuel production, it will have disastrous consequences for those living in the most polluted and climate-vulnerable areas, said Srivastava.
“It’s a further darkening…
Read More: US energy industry’s climate retreat is putting profits over people,
