LONDON - Six months after becoming the chief executive at Shell, Mr Wael Sawan quietly ended the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, the environmental projects designed to counteract the warming effects of carbon dioxide missions.
Those goals for the offsets programme have been retired, the company confirmed, along with the plan to harvest a whopping 120 million carbon credits annually by the end of the decade from projects that sequester carbon with trees, grasses or other natural resources, many of which Shell would develop itself.
It is a newly damning indictment of offsets, which have become an important if controversial “climate solution” for most big companies: Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates the voluntary carbon market, which totals around US$2 billion today, could grow as high as US$950 billion by 2037. Offsets, even of the highest quality, were never intended to be the only solution for Shell or anyone else. The Science Based Targets initiative, a UN-backed agency that evaluates companies’ net-zero goals, recommends offsetting no more than 10 per cent of emissions, and then only after making every other possible cut.