On Monday morning staff based at BP’s head office in central London woke to find that their building had been blockaded by climate protesters. Greenpeace activists put five large steel containers in position to block off the entrances, and abseiled down the front of the building to hang a banner saying “Climate emergency”. The containers had people inside, with food, toilets and internet connections so they could stay in place for several days, but the protesters were removed by police early on Monday night and 10 activists were arrested.
The protest might have been shortlived, but it was a dramatic curtain-raiser for the debates over climate change at the annual general meetings of BP and Royal Dutch Shell the following day. The two companies have taken similar positions on the issue: acknowledging the threat and the need for action, and positioning themselves to show they can be part of the solution with investments in low-carbon technologies. Helge Lund, BP’s chairman, had an opinion article published in the Financial Times on Monday, warning that the world’s energy consumption is “on an unsustainable path”. Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, talked in his speech to the company’s annual meeting about how it had to adapt to changing customer needs “as the global energy transition unfolds towards a lower-carbon future”.
Shell is leaving a large US oil industry group following differences over climate policy © Bloomberg The companies have diverged, however, in their approaches to addressing that common challenge. Shell has set targets for cutting its greenhouse gas emissions, meaning not just those from its operations and the energy it buys, but from the use of its products as well: scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, as they are known in the jargon. BP, on the other hand, has accepted the need for greater disclosure of how its strategy and policies relate to climate risk, and has targets for its own emissions, but has rejected calls for it to emulate Shell in setting targets for the emissions created by its customers’ use of its products.