 Good afternoon. I'm Alexander Sklo, I will moderate this session, net zero and carbon removal. So welcome to the audience and to the speakers. So we have five speakers here and the first one is Gregory Trencher. Good luck. Gregory is from the Kyoto University Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies. So yeah, I'll be presenting on the net zero pathways for four oil mages. Two of these are from the US and two of these are from Europe. My sidekick is in another session right now, so he's a pretty busy guy, he's I think physically stretched right now. So the oil mages, so they're very important to have involved in the energy transition as we know, but historically that has not been the case. They've been working, if anything, to impede the transition. There's been a whole bunch of research about this. Some of the confirmed acts to sort of delay the transition, for example, of being by spreading disinformation, by withholding their spending on renewables or by lobbying against climate policies. However, over the past few years, these same oil mages have sort of started to brand themselves as being part of the solution, has been now working towards the goal of reaching net zero. They give the impression their website is so green and so sustainable. It gives the impression of being sort of born again transition evangelists that are no longer involved in the dirty business of pumping up oil and gas, which we know that they still do. So my research is looking at this same four here, and the objective is to sort of to unpack their so-called net zero strategies and to compare them. And I have a set of three questions. So first of all, what are the similarities and the differences regarding their objectives for 2050? And do their plans include the intention to downscale the supply of fossil fuel? And also the second point is about offsets. So do they plan to use offsets as a mean of reaching the net zero targets? So very quickly, so it's mainly a qualitative study, and I collect a huge amount of data, and I try to systematically organize it around three indicators which I'll present on the next slide. But I do try and include some quantitative information, and that relates mainly to the offsets. And so I collect information on offsets. The major source is from these registries here, which basically tell the public if a carbon credit has been retired and what particular project that belongs to and what year that was retired from and what the vintage year was. So in other words, what the year of the climate benefit was. So I try and use that data as much as possible. There's been a lot of previous research that's looked at the transition activity of the oil mages, and lots of people, and myself included, have developed lots and lots of indicators. And some of them, for example, the recent work has looked at the presence of net zero targets. But other people, for example, have looked at the traditionally environmental ones, like annual greenhouse gas emissions. A lot of scholars look at their investments in renewable energy, which we know are still just a side business, and also their fossil fuel production. So a lot of the scholarship focuses on renewable energy. But we know that this is just one part of the transition. The more important question that we're all interested here at this conference is, what are they doing with their core business, which is fossil fuels? So that's where my research really focuses on. So I work with just very simple triple set of indicators. This is like a triple litmus test that I think leads to a very clear conclusion of whether or not they're pursuing a transition pathway or not. The first one is, does the plan for 2050, does that include scope three emissions or not? If it doesn't include scope three, that means that it does not include the carbon that's embedded in the fossil fuel products. So in other words, when that's burnt, that's not counted. So that's a big difference between the majors already. And then in terms of tackling the supply of fossil fuels, not only the supply of self-produced fossil fuels, but also the supply of fossil fuels that are produced by third parties that are then sold by that major. This is a very, very important question that previous research has not really looked at. And finally, are offsets going to be used to reach the net zero target? Most scholarship, myself included, haven't looked at this before. So this is kind of the novelty of my study. So a quick little crash course in offsets, we don't have time to go into the details, but there are different types. We have the nature-based solutions up here, and then we have the technology-based solutions down here. But I want you to pay attention, especially to the red and green, which is the avoidance-based and the removal. So basically, I'm not sort of trying to promote offsets here. But basically, the most kind of benign type, the most benign type, are kind of those that tackle, but draw down CO2 directly from the atmosphere. If we're going to use offsets, that's what we want to see happening. And because forests only offer a short-term solution in terms of the global carbon cycle, our better solution is to put that CO2 back underground permanently with technological approaches such as BEX or DAX. Please try and remember that. The worst approach from our climate benefit perspective is these avoidance-based approaches, for example, saying protecting a forest and saying we're going to stop logging, and therefore give us, we're going to produce a whole bunch of credits, and then you can go and burn fossil fuels, and that you can count that as carbon neutral because we've saved logging. Those avoidance approaches are sort of regarded as low-quality in terms of climate benefits. And the other important indicator is also the age. We want to sort of see carbon credits being recent. And I've used like the yardstick of 2016, which is used in the aviation offset scheme in Europe. So just to summarize this, basically, if we see credits that are avoidance-based, if we see credits that are starting to be pretty old, for example, above six years, that means we're looking at pretty crappy, cheap, old stuff, you could consider this as a subprime mortgage, for example. So let's go to the results. So I don't have time to go into the details here, but we can see looking at the scope three missions, Chevron and Exo-Mobile have conspicuously left out of their net zero plants. All four majors market themselves as being pursuing a net zero goal, but there's a huge difference here regarding the inclusion of scope three. Regarding the supply of fossil fuels, so BP actually have attracted a lot of attention recently by fixing a goal to reduce the oil and gas production by 40%. A lot of people kind of got excited by it and said, oh, you know, they're tackling production. But what that doesn't take into account is this BP here that actually sell more oil and gas produced by other people than what they produce themselves. So they're basically saying they're going to reduce this part by 40%, they're leaving out this part from the equation. So this is not an adequate sort of solution to the supply problem in my perspective. And Shell also is doing the same thing. Chevron and Exo-Mobile, they both explicitly communicate in their shareholder communications that they're trying to increase their fossil production. So I'm coming back to this table here. So we see that none of the majors have a plan to tackle sales. And we only have limited action here regarding supply. Offsets, all the four majors are planning to use offsets to meet their 2050 targets. So I don't see any evidence here that a major could be considered as pursuing a transition regarding the criteria that I've set. So I'm going to try and jump in now into the offsets with the limits of time I have, and try and characterize this. So basically, ideally, I would go to the registries where carbon offsets are disclosed to the public in terms of the volume of credits that are retired, in terms of the vintage of the credits. And I would use that. However, there's big data gaps. So basically, what I've done is decided to organize a database in terms of offset projects. So that means I go to the websites of BP, Shell, Chevron, and every time I see that they mention a particular offset project, I put that into the database. Then I go on to the public registries and I look and see if I can find that recorded or not. And all this stuff in Orange is telling me that most of these projects that they tell the public that they're actually purchasing offsets from, they're not disclosing that activity. So there's a big data gap here. And then when we do, and then I've classified these projects, and if you remember before, I said that avoidance based is kind of like that low quality type of offset. BP especially and Chevron are using predominantly avoidance based projects. And Shell is kind of balanced. We don't see any technological based approaches to removal. There's not one, but there's not one single project here. The last thing is the age issue. The overall finding is that the vast majority of these projects are using age offsets. To give you a qualitative example, Shell has purchased a huge amount of offsets from a project in Indonesia, which is called the Canton Gann-Petland Restoration Project. It's a red project. It's conservation. The idea is we're not going to cut down the forests. We're going to sell these credits to people. So there are, for example, shipping LNG to Asia calling the carbon neutral, but these credits are actually have a vintage of 2010. This is like you eating a pizza on Sunday to celebrate for your jog around the park 10 years ago because of the calories that burnt. This is what the majors are doing, and they're doing this at a massive scale. And this I find is extremely worrying, and I'd be pleased to explain in more detail. So if you look here at the blue and the pie here, all the blue is the so-called age offset activity. You notice that ExxonMobil didn't shop in any of my graphs. ExxonMobil seems to be very silent regarding the use of offsets. So basically, other majors transitioning. I had three indicators. No, according to my analysis. Long story short, for some few supply, Chevron Exxon is trying to increase the supply. BP and Shell are very cleverly sort of hiding their plans to increase the supply as well. Yes, and so there's a symbolic photograph of Mount Fuji with a shipment of LNG. That's because Japan is actually one of the major consumers globally of this so-called carbon neutral LNG. So as I've showed you very quickly, the majority of these offset projects are avoidance based, and they're involved in these age credits. And don't forget that of all the offsets types that exist, these offer the most doubtful climate benefits. So I think that this is evidence that the authenticity of the claims of net zero or carbon neutral are contestable. So sorry I had to rush through 100 miles an hour. I'll be very pleased to give you more details on the methods and everything. A bit of a self-plug. Sorry, this is the paper that a student might produced in February this year that got a bit of attention. And so the paper I just presented to you now is kind of like a bit inspired by this first paper. Try to fill in a few of the gaps, and hopefully you get a bit of attention as well. So thank you very much. Then my talk is as can carbon level technologies compatible with monastic kind of fossil fuels. I say I guess it's many of you expecting I will say no. But my answer is probably yes and no. And I tried to find a way answer to to maybe like moving a little bit to was to yes. So first of all I'm going to try to understand the challenge of the decarbonisation so that you stop like in a daunting challenge of the decarbonisation we are facing. So basically we have three different approaches to how to achieve energy systems. First is an increasing supply of the non-carbon energies like renewable like energies or nuclear or maybe like bioenergies. And the second one is a demand side like an approach like reducing the energy demands and increasing like energy efficiencies or say energy savings. But even though these like combining two different approaches there could be like you know there will be like you know reduced emissions from some of the very hard to obey like sectors like steel, cements or international variations and sipping. So those kind of like in the remaining emissions has to be offset by by CO2 like renewable like carbon dioxide removal. And so that's a basic like you know like in basic pictures with the challenge we are facing decarbonisation. But anyway the the consensus among the I think us is like we need to reduce the shield fossil fuel use as much as possible. But I guess I guess this challenge is also quite difficult and and I think so we don't need to actually comment I can say much about that but there's committed emissions from from existing and proposed like energy infrastructure structures which already exceeding will be exceeding like you know 1.5 carbon budget. So it means like you know we need to have a premature retirement of coal power plants or other any like energy infrastructure structures. But at the same time this challenge of like you know like in the phasing analysis is also extremely difficult because of the like you know carbon and not only about infrastructure but also like technological behaviour of the green since interlocking each other. So it's it's not about technical like challenges but more political economic challenges. And so that's that's the background of like why there's somehow how like you know carbon removal technologies coming to into the the prey of the game of the politics of decapital relations. But I think in my view I think there are kind of like a contradictory discourse around this carbon removal CDL. So it's a one hand IPCC other like an IEA like you know I like talking like you know basically like you pointed out the CDL as a necessity for the offsetting digital emissions from hard-to-based sectors. But on the other hand there is a lot of like in criticism and in concerns among like particularly among the NGOs as you know the CDL could be used and is using actually as as Gregory talked about as excused to avoiding the necessary emission reductions and hence and perpetuating a state of scale fossil fuel. So how come to these two different like you know very like in a competing like contradictory discourse coming to to portal in CDL. How we could make sense of these like in a contrary discourse. And and to understand of this like in a contradictory I think that looking back to the history of the CCS might be like you know beneficial I can help with understand. And and then CCS is a peer has a very like you know like attracted a lot of like in a political I can appeal among particularly industry sector like you know actors. This is because the nature of the CCS as a non-disciple and end of pipe technologies which allows the like continuous or use of fossil fuel while maintaining I can know while the mitigating issues emissions. So it is kind of like in a portrait as a programmatic like a compromise resolving that is like in a political dilemma arising from the like carbon law cream. But when you look at like in a history of course we know CCS is stagnated as it's not with the canceling of the demonstration projects which like you know the promise of CCS is in some way like you know we could say it's failed. And but when we look at the discourse of how this is like in this like in the industry use the CCS they use I can like in a bridging technology metaphor and try to present the CCS a sort of like you know temporary solutions and by just just buying time until the better options and you know become available. And of course we know this is a this bridge like a bridge framing is this fraud like an argument because adding CCS into like you know with the coal power plant or gas power plant actually it's making more difficult to abort like you know moving away from the like you know fossil fuel law cream and so it is actually increasing the risk of the the enforcing of carbon law cream and then the failed promises of CCS actually you know it's just basically like you know like in a delaying the actions and as an action using CO2 emissions and on the other hand the criticism that around the CDL it's a little bit different and then it's I think is that it's fair to say there are a huge I can know like in concerns I can a serious concerns among the like you know the scholars about like you know the CDL is sort of creating like no mitigation deterrence or the or some other people called like more or hazard and this is like in a like in a popularized by by the Duncan McRodden from the Lancaster universities and it's this concerns originally from the debate a lot over the solar geoengineering or solar validation management and then solarization management is is a sort of idea to not without reducing CO2 emissions and releasing the particles and inflicting particle to atmosphere and by doing so quickly I can know the stop like an increase of the global temperature and then because of this feature of the SRM it's it's like you know like famously called like it is a chief fast and an imperfect like in a solutions and and because of this like in a very controversial nature of the SRM it's a very severe criticize and and one of the I think the Jenny Stefan this very fierce criticism like a critiques of this SRM and I am very also very worried about SRM and and one of the reason is because the SRM has a real risk to be like in use as undue substitution of mitigations and and then because of the history of the SCDR and SRM was bump I can know you I can group together as an I like you know the the rubric of the geoengineering so it's a one of that's somehow a way to carry out to do the CDL I call in debate on CDR and CDL consider it to be like in the constitution and undue substitutions but at the same time also we look at like an audio history particularly controversy on over the law of the fullest carbon sinks and like a particularly inclusion of the lucif activity that's code protocol which kind of like you know also the similar way of the argument say you know using that the tertiary carbon sink as the sort of like an offsetting and perpetuating the status goal of the fossil carbon emissions and then these entry then now like you know the the biological sink particularly for alpha versions deforestation is reframed as a CDL and then it's pretty much the same like in a like in a structures like continuing like we CDL actually has the actually real risk of the being used as undue substitution and I think the Gregory pretty much clearly showed that's how it's portrayed and used in a net delgerical discourse by and fossil fuel companies and but I wanted to point it out there is a crucial differences between CCF and CDL and when you think about like look at CCS, CCS mostly like you know considered to use retrofit or like equipped with with a fossil fuel like you know in that infrastructure like like power like coal power plants and and and a gas power plant so this is a CCS use is physically coupled with a fossil fuel interest rate for example so which is you know by the fact de facto it's it's you know they're continuing like now the first stages are the fossil fuel use but on the other hand CDL in principle it's not like in a physically like you know detached to the fossil fuel infrastructure so it's this nature of the physical decoupling actually make it possible to do CCS or CDL can be used not to increasing like our reliance on the fossil fuel use and and then so then perhaps we could a little bit think about the some hope that like you know maybe like you know I'm a bit of a too politically naive to think about like you know transforming like the fossil fuel company interested to carbon disposal industry but I think CDL can be the way to to you know as function as a political middle ground for mitigating like in a fossil fuel resistance and then it's the reason why I think that there is a load of the fossil fuel industries because they do have a extra like an engineering expertise for the geological storage but also they have a capital asset which could be in principle the purpose for the large-scale project like for the CDL and so yeah I think it there's no like you know reason to think about in principle why not to like in a pursuing future try to incentivize responsibly intensified the the pressuring to the the fossil fuel industry to transform into the first carbon disposal industries and so this is my last slide yeah so just like I will say like you know the nasal target it's normalized CDL as a mitigations and and they continue the debates about CDL whether they have a law but I think I will say this debate is nothing to do it's less to do with technology itself but it's more with with this priority to breaking the fossil fuel for the green I will say CDL can be that kind of like you know one way to actually to align the CDL with declining the fossil fuel sorry for that a little bit like you know about time so but that's my talk thanks thank you and it's great to be with you guys today and I guess I'm a a bit of an anomaly in this panel because I guess I'm coming from the world of working with governments so supporting them and I'm trying to move on to responsible policies and the regulatory and legal framework to help accelerate the transition so I think it's a nicely way because I think there is personally in terms of you know the the distraction and the proliferation of net really results in because we're losing a focus on the first element which is the reduction so yeah so in terms of what we do what's looking at as I mentioned the policies the fiscal regime the regular regulatory system and I'm going to focus my remarks on a missed opportunity I think in terms of helping this discourse which is around the government's approval so you know through the last two days we've been talking about you know the known issue which is the fact that we're all limited carbon budget we are well in excess of where we need to be now how do we rectify and tackle that it requires a multi-pronged approach so both on the demand and supply side but also in terms of looking at it from the international mechanisms as well as the national and you know when we talk about the national components even that is I think being subsumed within net targets so you know now we're hearing about not just country targets net 2050 but industry targets within national components but again without very a lot granularity what are the details behind this and I think I'm actually going to talk even much more getting into the specifics of projects and so this is against a backdrop of the reality being you know on average we have about 90 to 100 billion dollars of investments continuing every year so as we've heard you know from Kristoff and others there's a massive gap in terms of the activity that's being approved and the investments in these decisions so really and truly a renewed regulatory focus on the approval component at the project level is I believe a huge opportunity that really requires us to take a much more a different approach to it and again looking at what does net zero mean in terms of at a project level why the project why the approval so again we're hopefully in this audience know the project life cycle and quite often we go to the numbers around the projects that have been sanctioned so this is actually the investment decisions but there are a lot of key milestones that occur before that yes you have the discovery but critically you know in terms of it's the government's approval for those investments the decisions that are being made and prior to any actual investment being preceded by companies companies need to submit to government in every single country in every single regime an approval process they need to come to the government and say these are my plans for developing these discoveries this resource and that you that must or should I say cover all the entire suite of factors so the strategic the technical the economic the social and the environmental critically no prudent company would nor do they actually increase investment or activity unless they have that government approval now the reason this approval process is so important is because it sets the stage for everything that happens on a field and an investment including down to how decommissioning will be treated and again there are elements of risks with stranded assets on how decommissioning will be funded and in many countries there are zero regulatory systems for that so again it's a huge risk when we're thinking about adjust an equitable transition so I believe it's a critical tool for effective regulation of of greenhouse gases and here I'm saying greenhouse gases not CO2 or CO2 equivalent the whole suite of them so typically when an FDP field development plan or plan of development POD as it's called in some jurisdictions are submitted these are the typical sort of contents that are included so this is the you know after a multi-year process of two to three years of evaluation at a specific asset level one of the requirements is you know reports and analysis under the HSE health safety and environmental factors you know I would make the argument that there should be clear requirements for any associated greenhouse gas management plan now you know what are some of the things that could be included in that clearly we need to have a view on what is the asset level view of greenhouse gas emissions from that specific project you know including how that has come about what's the assessment methodology and benchmarking against similar projects really important small decisions on design make a huge difference in terms of how assets are operated and what the greenhouse gas footprint of those assets are it's things around flaring, venting, methane leakage you know these are typical issues of which 70% of them can be avoided with known technology existing processes these very small things that can be done at this point in time to help in terms of minimizing it going forward again there should be an assessment of the risk to the value of the asset from carbon pricing and that can come about in various ways as well as an indication of how the company intends to manage, measure, report greenhouse gas over the entirety of the project's life cycle you know and I would argue there needs to be a credible plan for the project to be net zero so again this is at an asset level what do I mean by that and bear in mind I also share healthy skepticism around the use of net zero as I mentioned so the first step is really about ensuring that any asset is being done at the lowest possible greenhouse gas emission so quite often you know as we all know in this room averages hide a lot there is a huge range of variability and performance of greenhouse gas at the asset level and it depends very much even in terms of what type of what type of asset we're looking at onshore offshore you know light heavy sweet sour etc so again you know and we've heard there's a lot of good work now going in terms of increasing the transparency of this but there is very little in terms of what is the projected greenhouse gas footprint for a new project and again a lot can be done so that they can operate at the best in class and I think that should be the default position any sort of any development going forward should we shouldn't be talking about the industry average it should be done at the best in class and what are the measures being put in place to ensure it is near zero I mean these developments cannot be zero by default but how can we get there near zero in terms of today and I would argue again that the management plan should include carbon removal options as we heard from from others this afternoon so in terms of what that entails you know this is just sort of an indication of what that would look like so in terms of if you were to look at a typical similar project in terms of the footprint and the purple bars are sort of like taking through those the steps of the first stage which is how do you get given you're approving a project today what is possible in terms and what are your plans to have that be done at the lowest possible so in terms of you know some of the issues there in addition to the flaring etc the efficiency that was mentioned you know the electrification of these operations and of course there will be unavoidable emissions from a project that's being developed and then here we come in terms of the use of offsets again offsets are fraught with a lot of issues difficulties challenges around them as have been alluded to but I think here again we need to possibly think about how we can leverage it so that the offsets here are used and are really tangible and deliver benefits so in particular for developing countries you know we need to ask the questions of how are offsets actually going to be used are they going to be via purchasing offset you know in terms of six seven years as we saw from the previous speaker or is it going to be in real removal and where is it going to happen quite often it's done at the company level what happens when assets are sold transferred how are those offsets being treated it's not necessarily tied to the asset if we were to use that with requiring developments to be done in country that may be a good way to leverage it so that you have physical delivery in country so in wrapping up you know the potential for net zero projects could be an indispensable tool I think the critical thing here is not looking at this from the broader perspective but the specific asset the specific project and getting into the details and requiring transparency and again the last pieces you know the support to do this is a critical need these are very complex issues and quite often the government's review of this needs to be done in a way that is yes that is not a check-in-a-box exercise and a simple approval you do need to have the adequate technical review of these types of approval systems so that you're enabling this to happen yeah thanks very much so I'm I'm Kathy Mulvey I direct the fossil fuel company accountability campaign at the union of concerned scientists which is a US-based science-based advocacy organization and I want to talk about some burning questions about net zero and fossil fuel company accountability through the lens of internal corporate documents that were released earlier this month by the US House oversight and reform committee pursuant to its investigation of fossil fuel company disinformation on climate change so I did want to crowdsource from you all some ideas near the end of this two-day conference about how we address and prevent greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry so if you want to go to that link I will figure out how to share the results afterwards I'm not sure I have that quite planned out but we'll get there so this congressional if folks have the the code there I should have put the QR there but this congressional investigation was launched a year ago it's involved a series of hearings including with the CEOs of the same four companies that that Gregory covered in his his study and they have issued subpoenas since the the launch of the investigation as they as the companies were not as responsive as they should have been and these actually focus on the period since the Paris agreement and the and during the rise of the net zero claims and pledges and so hundreds of pages of documents were released and there are more to come next month so essentially one thing that we see is that all of these companies engage in in greenwashing and the European companies get credit for including their scope three emissions in their net zero pledges but they actually still individualize the problem BP of course notoriously invented the concept of the of the carbon footprint and has this calculator on its website now but BP is not actually reorienting itself toward clean renewable energy and even as it touts CCS as the centerpiece of its net zero plans this April 2016 internal memo reveals how the company views carbon capture and storage internally so it has the potential to enable the full use of fossil fuels across the energy transition and beyond and I should say this annotated version of the documents is courtesy of Kurt Davies of the Climate Investigation Center so Exxon Mobile also features CCS and algae biofuels in its ad campaigns and here's an example of an ad that you might have seen it's part of a campaign that the company has spent 68 million dollars on while at the same time only pledging to spend 300 million dollars on R&D for this technology and the documents released the oversight committee show that Exxon Mobile had to curb the enthusiasm of its ad agency BBDO and make it clear that the solution is more future focused and of course Exxon Mobile is counting on emissions cuts in the 2040 to 2050 range and not in the crucial decade between now and 20 or less than a decade between now and 2030 so one thing I looked at is what was happening at this time November 2016 well there was a major shift in the US political landscape and it was also the deadline for submission of shareholder proposals for the for consideration at Exxon Mobile's 2017 annual shareholders meeting and you know I think at this time of political change one might presume that investors would no longer be expecting US government policy action and thinking they needed to step it up and indeed in May 2017 the first time a climate related shareholder proposal ever won majority at Exxon Mobile by a two to one margin Exxon shareholders called on the company to report on how Paris aligned policies would affect its strategies so you know this breakthrough laid the groundwork for mounting investor pressure on Exxon Mobile that of course culminated in 2021 with a revolt and the ousting of three board members and and sort of coalesced an expectation among the shareholder community that focuses on environment social and government governance issues that that major oil and gas companies need to take responsibility for scope three emissions from burning their products and and aim to reduce those so shifting gears a bit here another form of green washing is a bait and switch really between scenarios and weasel and using weasel words like pledges aims and ambitions and shell you know released its sky scenario with some fanfare and presents it as Paris aligned but it's actually so misleading that they have to really carefully train their spokes people not to say explicitly what they really secretly hope all of us will think which is this is a business plan so this is internal messaging guidance for shell around net zero from January of 2020 and you'll see they want to make sure that spokes people are presenting it as a goal for society not a target for shell and that there is no immediate plans to move to a net zero emissions portfolio over an investment horizon of tent of over shells investment horizon of 10 to 20 years now some context here that's interesting in April of 2019 the Dutch organization Friends of the Earth Milieu Defensie sued Shell calling on the company to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement and Shell and other major oil and gas companies are acutely aware of liability and litigation risks associated with their misleading and deceptive claims so both misrepresenting the scale and scope of their corporate climate action or or inadvertently committing the company to climate action that it doesn't intend to take so this is is from that same messaging training where you can see Shell's being very careful to avoid content or use balanced complete and accurate content and messages to avoid litigation risks so our last example is related to the oil and gas climate initiative which was launched at the pair in Paris in 2015 Exxon mobile and Chevron joined in September of 2018 and this is from an Exxon mobile briefing memo for an OGCI meeting in the memos from April sorry August of 2019 and you can see they developed their plans in consultation with Chevron and this lays bare really oh sorry the desire to pay lip service to Paris while actually not backing up its support with policy advocacy so you can see you know we don't want to talk about Paris in a way that would commit us to advocate for it so here the context is a rising call from the investor community for companies to align their climate policy advocacy with their stated positions and that began in Europe that was in October of 2018 with shareholder proposals in the spring of 2019 and US non-governmental organizations picked this up in the emerging civil society society expectation our organization Union of Concerned Scientists and other major environmental and public interests organizations took out a full page ad in the New York Times in October of 2019 calling on the US business community to align its policy advocacy with stated company positions and actually actively advocate for positions that they claim to support and to allocate their funding accordingly as well for political spending and their support to lobbying and advocacy groups so essentially what we see here is that this concerted advocacy from affected communities elected representatives shareholders and through litigation is really pushing pushing on net zero and we've heard a lot here about transparency and a few things to think about is what part of the antidote here is mandatory and standardized disclosures and you know this is necessary but not sufficient but it's clear that we need from these companies their full range of emissions scope one scope two and scope three the role that they expect offsets to play in their emissions reductions plans their actual clean energy and renewable energy investments their direct and indirect political activity and what they spend on that their climate impacts on communities and their climate related public relations spending so those are some of the provisions that ought to be in in mandatory disclosure such as what the securities and exchange commission is pursuing in the US and facing a lot of blowback thank you Naomi Klein the author and a journalist came to Australia in 2015 and she remarked that in Australia it's impossible to tell where the coal industry ends and the federal government begins so it's a fairly generous assessment in my opinion because actually in Australia it's impossible to tell where the gas and coal industry begins ends sorry and where the federal government begins and the reason why I mentioned that straight up straight off the bat is because in Australia this is sort of a beautiful culmination of what the other speakers have been talking about government and industry are so inextricably and symbiotically linked that if I talk about fossil fuel expansion in Australia you know that it's one is shorthand for the other they're basically synonymous so Australia is I don't know if you know the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world if you count our global contributions from exports it's about a 7% contribution to global emissions so it's significant to maintain and protect what I would say is a fairly dubious honour the Australian government carries out a practice that in our research we have termed state-sponsored greenwash so industry is often you know credited with promoting CCS carbon neutral gas in Australia actually it's the government who is as deeply involved if not more so in carrying out this activity so just for background in Australia we've just had an election it was called a green slide election because the incumbent you know completely unambitious climate government was voted out in favour of a more nominally ambitious government and accordingly the Australian government soon after it was elected updated its Paris to our Paris target so we're now 43% reduction on 2005 levels by 2030 previously it was 26 to 28% so it's not huge but it's better unfortunately despite this sort of nominal increase in ambition the the new government remains just as committed to fossil fuel expansion as the previous government did so that comes in the form of you know fast-tracking these these approval projects that you were talking about but we also subsidised the industry to the tune of about $10 billion every year the industry contributes very little in terms of tax or royalties or employment to Australia however it does donate significantly to both major political parties including the government that's just been elected the gas industry dictates a lot of our policies I won't go into that but certainly they dictate our climate policy and the independent statutory body that's been appointed to advise the government on its you know increased ambition is led by former gas executives so you can see that actually if you scratch below the surface not a lot has changed in Australia except for a change of brand what has changed is that now that we have increased climate ambition the pressure to conceal that inherent contradiction in you know increased climate ambition and fossil fuel expansion has increased significantly so the the temptation for greenwash by the new government and industry under the new government has also increased significantly of course you see a similar contradiction globally that you've mentioned in industry where fossil fuel companies you know have a nominal support for climate action they even support the Paris Agreement but at the same time they're lobbying governments strenuously to to increase and support and subsidize production in Australia and what we think is going to be increasingly common globally is that the key to bridge the gap between this climate ambition and fossil fuel supply or fossil fuel expansion is an unlimited supply of carbon credits regardless of the vintage so in Australia the government's plan to meet its climate target is not to reduce absolute emissions you know through incentivizing absolute reductions or regulating those more recalcitrant industries or you know facilities it's literally to create an unlimited supply of carbon credits available to industry and when I say unlimited we're up in the hundreds of millions so far that have already been generated and I should just I was getting so enthusiastic I forgot to go to my first slide this is Australia's updated NDC looks great there's all the right things what it doesn't tell you is that Australia actually has over 100 new gas and coal projects in development the offshore or the exported emissions from those as well as the domestic emissions would be 1.7 billion tons every year the onshore emissions alone would be 150 million tons every year so obviously the participation in carbon markets by the fossil fuel industry is not new as we've heard from some of our speakers what is new is just how sophisticated the industry and government together are becoming with this so you know in the face of increased scrutiny greenwashing claims climate litigation government and industry know now that just buying carbon credits or paying someone to plant trees is no longer enough so as a result they've become deeply involved in all aspects of carbon markets so involved in the design of carbon credits supply of carbon credits and the demand of carbon credits what's going to happen and what we see happening in Australia is that they're also becoming involved in the regulation of carbon credits this has largely been in the voluntary domain but but in Australia is an excellent case study is in the way that this is becoming I guess baked into regulatory and compliance emissions reductions or emissions offsetting offsetting schemes so this is a focus of our work is basically the greenwashing of offsets this is what we mean by state sponsored greenwash this includes the being involved in the supply of carbon credits so in Australia we nominally have like this government regulated carbon credit scheme so we have this independent statutory body that is tasked with administer like generating administering and regulating all our carbon credits industries become involved in this scheme and they now generate offsets under this scheme for themselves to use but also to sell to others whether it's actually having projects themselves or in the case of Shell actually buying up you know project developers but we also now have industry designing these carbon credits with government and no there is I think no more egregious example of this in the way the Australian government invited fossil fuel industries to help design a carbon credit method for carbon capture and storage so what I mean by that is a gas company can earn carbon credits for capturing a small amount of its reservoir CO2 just a fraction of its emissions that gas company has these credits that are certified by government the gas company can then sell those credits to another gas company to offset its emissions and then the Australian government will certify that gas company is carbon neutral so you have this sort of beautiful like life cycle of greenwash all kind of under the auspices of a government scheme and research by the Australia Institute has sort of documented on the basis of freedom of information just how the government invited industry Santos having the first project registered was instrumental in this scheme so just to be clear Australia's carbon credit scheme has not reduced emissions it's a few years old emissions from industry have actually increased we see this globally you know 30 years of global carbon trading have not seen emissions reduce they've increased it's given industry social license to continue operating or while the literature is riddled you know regardless of vintage with perverse outcomes you know trees burning down trees not existing in the first place just really quickly I'm going to skip over this but this is an important point rather than abandoning the concept of offsetting industry and government has just doubled down and said actually the carbon doesn't really matter we generate these things called co-benefits when we make offsets which is all the nice biodiversity benefits from planting trees or giving indigenous people jobs and that's where they're placing the emphasis now I've heard people in the industry not even refer to co-benefits anymore but refer to them as as core benefits and it's actually incredibly clever because it makes it impossible to scrutinize the lack of carbon reduction in a carbon credit because if you do so you're racist or you hate nature and you're attacking all these other good things so I'm serious it's it's incredibly sophisticated way of doing it and and just keep an eye out for this I was going to skip over that but I just am so into it so just beyond the actual machinations of designing carbon credits and I think this is the starkest example of state sponsored greenwash our work shows the Australian government has a scheme where it certifies fossil fuel companies as carbon neutral and promotes them okay cool as progressive climate leaders and I'll just like literally offsetting the emissions from their offices and and then they can be labeled as carbon neutral and climate leaders so state sponsored greenwash in Australia is not limited to carbon credits but this is where the focus is lying in Australia and I think this is what's going to happen globally as you know scepticism around CCS remains and it's in the distant future this is real-time greenwash happening now and governments increasingly are looking for a way to meet their targets but also support you know the industries that are that have captured them or donating to them so what we're seeing with carbon credits in Australia I think is indicative what you're going to see globally with with offsetting coming out of that voluntary domain into the regulatory sphere so industry and governments can say we're meeting our Paris target where we're on our way to net zero but we're also supporting fossil fuel production and expansion too thank you the session is net zero and the carbon removal and just to be sweet because of the Rosasana I think the presenters the speakers said that they doubt about net zero and carbon removal they doubt about net zero targets from the oil companies we saw some scary message from the majors and also the world greenwashing I think is the more frequent word here in these presentations and we have also the conflict of interest that maybe can undermine the approval of the regulation of the approval of the project but let's start the round of questions I have one two and three yeah I think the first one is here please identify yourself and show the speaker I work in the international coal industry I think we need to make it absolutely clear that the IEA last year said that no new fossil fuel project was compatible with net zero the offsetting that's and CCS that will be used will be in addition to no new carbon and no new fossil fuel production we need that offsetting and carbon credits for other things not to ameliorate in any way fossil fuel production I wonder if the panel have any comments so it's for the old banalists so a new question yeah I think here and then her yeah so it's Mike Kaufman from Carbon Tracker I had a question for Nadira around just a clarification on net zero projects there it looked as though it was just scope one and two emissions the operational emissions so the that you were talking about in the presentation as opposed to any of the end use emissions 85 percent of the problem can I just could you as a direct question of am I correct in that and the second follow-up question would be do we think it's then appropriate for anyone to say they're a net zero company if all they're doing is looking at scope one and two emissions thank you thank you another question here in the front I guess I guess the question I want to ask you is in your mind what is the what is the strategy what is the missing thing that we're missing to expose this because I guess I'm feeling like I've sat on so many of these panels over the last five years and read so many documents that are clear that this is a sham and yet we keep just having these kind of don't-look-up moments I mean Polly your presentation could easily have been made by someone in the UK or Norway or the US or Canada these are the exact same arguments and so they're whether it is through the arguments around race to zero and the criteria the G-fins criteria the you know the the conversations that will happen at COP 27 and are happening at COP 26 or the conversations we're all experiencing if we come from those countries in the domestic forum it is you know our governments are still approving more projects and they keep saying they're in line with net zero because of all this stuff and the public wants to believe that there's a technological fix and and I and the thing that's really driving me nuts is even with BEX one of you said BEX was the better you know the better system I sat down with a group of scientists last week and I said so so in the modeling we need we need BEX the size of India twice the size of India every year in order to make this global modeling work right that's what they tell us so how much are we doing right now and they said zero so we we don't actually have successful BEX projects projects but our our plan globally to save the planet is somehow to do these massive scale BEX projects so all of it is absurd and use and being used as a cover to stop so we don't have absolute emissions in production decline so why aren't we breaking through and how do we break through like I just want your thoughts on that you're all working on it and it just seems to me like this is the place where we can have that conversation so it's for all the speakers well anyone who wants to yeah so I skip here just because of time I don't know if we're going to have time for the second round please the first question for all the speakers I don't know if someone wants to comment in the third question because this second question was just for Nadia so for the first question about the offsets and the role of the offsets please I don't know if all speakers want to comment or I think you made a really good point and the IPCC says the same thing that you know it's we need carbon removal it's just that the industry ignores the bit where it says no new gas and coal and they cherrypick the information so in their brochures they say all the IEA in the IPCC says we need removal and we need offsets so we're actually in line with that best practice advice it's not as I know it's not an inadequate example answer sorry but I think it just shows that even putting that out there even having something like offsets available shows that industry will just game it at every available opportunity so I agree entirely with what you're saying someone more wants to comment on that yeah happily chime in you know I I think it's quite clear the science is quite clear in terms of what the world needs and I think that the difficulty is again as we've been discussing the the dissonance between what's needed and what's happening on the ground today so you know I again I just agree with those comments and I think Mike you raise a really excellent point because again of course the majority of the emissions are scope three but I was looking at it from the perspective of the approval process that governments face so in terms of the scope of what they're approving you know quite often it's the upstream component and in terms of that regulatory approval what's what they have what their approval process covers is one and two primarily if however they are doing domestic use then of course scope three would come under that as well so it depends very much in terms of what the project is and what the government approval is you know despite that I would say however as part of a broader conversation around the approval of those projects the discussion around scope three should be included without a doubt I think but my remarks were very much in terms of the regulatory process for the upstream component of it again not not diminishing that there are significant lion's share of it is from scope three so for the last question just not being so pessimistic or optimistic I don't know we have one million tons CO2 per year of capture being from the ethanol industry in the USA just feel means nothing and I think for this last question maybe you three you three can comment on that please maybe I can just is this microphone on yeah it's on hi so thanks for the questions so I think yeah that that kind of is a difficult question to deal with about how that you know what's being presented today as it has been well known to many of us in the game and so how do we get this message out to the people that need to hear this in terms of offsets and especially in the behavior of the oil majors regarding offsets I haven't seen many academics look at this actually for me it's been the media especially Bloomberg the Wall Street Journal and some pretty influential global media sources that have really focused on this along with NGOs and think tanks so as an academic I've been a little bit embarrassed to think that my peers have missed this huge development on you know the carbon major scene and we've been doing other more fashionable topics and I think that offsets like a lot of phase out topics it sort of is often felt that it's like an age topic people have exhausted that if you do that academically it's not novel anymore so I think anyway that yeah definitely we need to have more academics looking at this topic and then publishing a paper is obviously not enough so I think when there's a relevant message I think has value to society then ideally then this will be communicated with the media and I've got a few friends in the US that have spent a lot of time developing strategies about how to get you know research results across to the media one of the simple things that I tried myself I wasn't very successful was make what is it it's a press release and then you send it out to your contacts and actually so for the paper that we wrote that got attention the our homemade press release wasn't very successful the one from the journal and from the university that was the most successful but anyway we I think we should try as academics but I think the media is definitely an ally and I think I would just see I've got a lot of respect I think for the media and the think tanks that have been working on this topic well before I was I'm embarrassed that I didn't pick up pick up on this earlier this big sham as you called it thanks yeah I think I mean it's a good question I'm optimistic on a few fronts and multiple strategies I think one is certainly the rising tide of climate litigation to hold the major fossil fuel polluters accountable and not for for loss and damage which you know just the notion of them actually internalizing the cost of the doing business would really shift the calculus and also for for fraud for deceiving their their customers and investors and I think you know this information that's coming out through a congressional investigation in the U.S. I think investigative journalism keeps turning stuff up by you know at some point we may start to see as we did with the tobacco industry whistleblowers who who who leak internal documents I mean a little bit of that in the recent in the recent documentaries but on BBC and Paramount Plus so you know so we're we're working in concert with legal experts to help ensure that the physical and social science that's needed to inform that litigation is is advancing and and accessible I also think that making these you know these these companies that are that are lying in greenwashing pariahs and that means isolating them from other parts of the business community and you know we just had a session about finance right so that that would serve the purpose not only of cutting off financial flows but actually you know making those that are that are continuing to fuel and finance fossil fuel expansion face the consequences of what's happening the PR industry is another important lever I mean they're creating these ad campaigns so you know there's a lot of energy out there and and and I think figuring out ways that that we engage and and plug in with you know youth driven indigenous led campaigning and use the the levers of of litigation and ultimately you know undercut the the social license of these companies yeah um thank you and I think I think first question about I think it's you were quite light I think the IPCC and I am like modern research showed like not achieving a 1.5 degrees I think the particular coal power and with CCS is there's no price for that and so and then but so I think we should be very clear like there's no coal use even with with with CCS in the 1.5 degree scenarios but on the other hand and I like now I am in monitoring is heavily rely on the other Bex as you pointed out and then Bex it's it's pretty problematic because of the you know it's it has a lot of trade-off with with biodiversities of food supplies and other things so I think the rely on it Bex is also it's not necessary it's not I think it's a good idea as well and then so how what is like like you know missing churches yeah and I don't have a very good answer for that and but my sense is I think we should anyway it's the reason why the fossil and gas gas companies is very you know strong and it's because we still have a lot of huge demands and and liquid for like and gas and fuel and then in the demand sectors particularly like in the load transports and the buildings spatial heatings and we I think they will we should just like and electrify everything as much as possible and and I think that's the way we should go ahead and then in some way it's a little bit contradictory because we are talking about how to reducing the production of the the fossil fuel but actually it's we need to think about that the other side of as well as well so how we can reduce the demands of the fossil fuel and I think it actually finds like you know as many I can sector as possible is is it is for me is the like approach and then that's why I think there are a lot of like optimisms around IOA in the US because that's the how we like in a lot of the governments like spending going to do these demand sectors and increasing like you know the clean energy supplies and and electrifies as many like you know the yeah like like the yeah infrastructures and then replacing like fossil fuel like you know equipment so I think that's the that's the strategy we need to actually I mean by the same time we we couldn't ignore that like you know this like you know fraudulent rhetoric using by by the fossil for industries but I think that's not enough to to you know moving away for fossil fuel I think we need to make material benefit I can know investment on how we can expand like clean energy and and electrifies so electrification so that's my answer so we are in the time sorry for the last question and thanks for the audience and for the speakers thank you very much