Shell: Clean Energy Advances Too Slow To Meet UN Climate Targets

Clean energy solutions are not moving fast enough to meet the UN targets for curbing the effects of global warming, and alternative energies are unlikely to meet those targets without policy support, Charles Holliday, the chairman of oil supermajor Shell, said on Thursday.

“Our analysis says we could solve this problem with the technology we have, but there is not enough pull to get it over in the kind of time frame that the scientists say we really need to avoid that,” the Washington Examiner quoted Holliday as saying at an energy innovation forum in Washington D.C.

“Unless there is big policy action, which drives the technology, we’re just not going to get there,” Shell’s chairman said.

Policymakers could incentivize companies like Shell to invest more in clean energy by keeping predictable and constant federal funding over a period of 10 years, Washington Examiner quoted Holliday as saying. Another incentive would be the creation of clean energy programs with federal funding and private sector investment, according to Holliday.

Last year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on the climate situation on the planet, saying that the world needs to spend US$2.4 trillion every year until 2035 if it were to slow down the effects of climate change.

Shell, for its part, plans to double the annual amount of money it invests in renewable energy to US$4 billion, the supermajor’s head of gas and new energy, Maarten Wetselaar told The Guardian in an interview last month. The figure is double the maximum current annual investment Shell has allocated for cleaner energy initiatives but the increase will only materialize if these initial investments prove to make financial sense.

Earlier in December, Shell said that it plans to set short-term emission reduction targets and link these targets with executive pay, yielding to growing investor pressure about establishing short-term emission goals.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

• Oil May Never Return To The Triple-Digits
  
• Solar Investment Plunges Amid Panel Glut
  
• Oil Prices Lag Despite Early OPEC Cuts