2024-01-15 21:56:42
– Shell shareholders demand climate targets
Twenty-seven investors, who hold 3.4% of the Shell group’s capital, hope to force the group to define a target for reducing its emissions.
Published: 01/15/2024, 10:56 p.m.
The Shell group will publish an update of its energy transition strategy in early 2024.
AFP
A group of shareholders of the hydrocarbon giant Shell will submit a resolution for the general meeting aimed at forcing the group to define an objective for reducing its emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement.
Twenty-seven investors, including the European asset management giant Amundi, representing a total of 3,654.5 billion francs of Shell shares, are mobilizing 3.4% of the major’s capital to support this climate resolution, according to a press release published Monday by the shareholder activist organization Follow This, at the origin of this initiative. Follow This had already proposed a climate resolution to the vote of shareholders at the general meeting in May 2023. It received 20% of votes in favor.
This year, the resolution of the group of shareholders provides that Shell “aligns its objectives for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, including those linked to the use of its products (Scope 3), in the medium term with the “objective of the Paris Agreement: limit global warming to 2 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels and continue efforts to limit the increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees.” The text plans to let the board of directors develop a strategy to achieve these objectives.
Energy transition strategy
By involving 27 investors in filing the resolution, Follow This founder Mark Van Baal hopes that other shareholders will follow suit and vote in favor of the text. For him, “large shareholders hold the key to tackling the climate crisis thanks to their votes at general meetings”, the date of which for that of Shell is not yet known.
For Shell’s board of directors, the Follow This resolution, almost identical to last year’s, is “unrealistic and simplistic”, would have “negative consequences for [ses] consumers” and would be “contrary to the interests of the company and [ses] shareholders”. “In 2023, Shell has not improved its climate targets and the new CEO appears to be backtracking on climate action,” the FollowThis press release points out.
For its part, Shell indicates that the group will publish an update of its energy transition strategy in early 2024. Last June, Shell announced that its oil production would remain “stable” until 2030, while the group had presented reduction targets of 1 to 2% per year in 2021.
Its general director Wael Sawan estimated a month later that reducing hydrocarbon production currently would be “dangerous and irresponsible” and might cause bills to skyrocket once more. He also said the world was still “desperately in need of oil and gas” because the shift to renewable energy was not fast enough to replace them.
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