Newly-released internal documents from Shell suggest that a desire to avoid incurring the costs of shutting down its oil pipelines and cleaning up spills from them was part of the energy giant’s motivation in selling off its onshore oil assets in the Niger Delta.

The company has been accused by campaigners of cutting and running by selling its controversial oil infrastructure to African firms without the resources to deal with the pollution or decommission the pipelines, leaving Nigeria’s oil-rich southern region worse off.

Climate Home News has previously revealed that highly-polluting gas flaring in the Niger Delta has soared since the sell-off, while Shell avoids responsibility and continues to profit from the oil assets it sold.

The documents – which were cited in UK court proceedings and featured in a new Amnesty International report released on Wednesday – show that in June 2013 a Shell presentation to a policy forum on Nigeria considered options for “handling potential liabilities related to [Shell] past oil spills”.

The presentation identified 375 square kilometres of mangrove forests – an area the size of a large city – which had been affected by oil spills and asked “do we have the appetite to take on this open-ended problem?”

The next year, in 2014, Shell’s then CEO Ben van Beurden was warned by colleagues that closing down the company’s pipelines in the south of Nigeria would cost billions of dollars and take several decades.

The year after that, in 2015, Shell began to divest its Niger Delta oil businesses by selling its stake in a pipeline to Nigerian oil company Aiteo for $1.7 billion.

“Well aware” of the costs

At the time of this divestment, Amnesty International’s report says Shell “appears to have been well aware of the massive costs of decommissioning the entirety of its aged and decaying infrastructure. Rather than cover these costs, it appears that Shell decided to sell.”

The process continued, with Shell selling all its remaining onshore oil operations to a local consortium called Renaissance. At the time, Shell said its divestment “aligns with its intent to simplify its presence in Nigeria” and focus investment on offshore oil.

UN experts accuse top oil firms of rights violations over Nigerian asset sales

Despite calls for the sale to be blocked, Nigeria’s oil regulator gave it fast-track approval. Mark Dummett, deputy director and head of business and human rights at Amnesty International, told Climate Home News that this allowed Shell to “cut and run”, while communities remained trapped with polluted land, poisoned water and no justice.

Some of the affected Niger Delta communities have since taken the oil giant to local and international courts. In 2015, the Ogale and Bille communities filed a UK legal action against Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary over serious oil pollution which is scheduled to be heard in March 2027.

Shell had not responded to a Climate Home News request for comment by the time of publication. But in a statement included in the Amnesty report, the company rejected “the characterisation and portrayal of Shell” presented by the rights group findings, which it said did not reflect the “challenging operating environment in the Niger Delta at the time, including large-scale oil theft, sabotage and illegal refining carried out by organised criminal gangs”.

For blighted Niger Delta communities, oil spill clean-ups are another broken promise

The oil major added that it is “committed to honesty, integrity and respect for people, and to conducting business in an ethical and transparent manner”, noting that it had worked with Nigerian authorities, the state-owned partner and communities to clean up spills. Decontamination and restoration efforts continue in the delta under a government-led programme.

Olanrewaju Suraju, chairman of the Nigeria-based HEDA Resource Centre, an environmental justice NGO which partnered with Amnesty on the report, criticised Shell for taking oil and profits from the region and leaving pollution behind. “Communities in the Niger Delta deserve truth, justice, clean-up and full remedy,” he said in a statement.

The post “Do we have the appetite?” – Shell’s fear of Niger Delta clean-up costs revealed appeared first on Climate Home News.

“Do we have the appetite?” – Shell’s fear of Niger Delta clean-up costs revealed

A UN effort to keep the threatened 1.5C warming limit alive is exposing deep divisions over the future of fossil fuels, pitting climate-vulnerable nations seeking a faster move away from coal, oil and gas against major emerging economies and producers that oppose targeting particular energy sources.

As countries weigh in on the “Belém Mission to 1.5”, a new process launched at COP30 last year to address the global shortfall in climate ambition, submissions show that small island nations and least developed countries (LDCs) want the initiative to help speed up a shift away from fossil fuels. Their calls for a focus on emissions-cutting measures in the energy sector are supported by the EU and the UK.

But the “like-minded developing countries” (LMDC) bloc – which includes China, India – and Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have warned against singling out specific energy sources or using the mission to assess how individual countries are performing on emissions cuts. Instead, they want its scope narrowed to identifying primarily what rich countries should do to cut their own emissions and provide more climate cash to developing nations.

Keeping 1.5C “within reach”

The split hints at a fight to come at COP31 in November over what the work programme’s findings should say and how much weight they should carry in the summit’s outcome.

Governments launched the Belém Mission to 1.5 at last year’s UN climate summit in the Brazilian Amazon city, after the latest round of national climate plans left the world set to shoot past the Paris Agreement temperature goals. Full implementation of current pledges is expected to limit global warming to only around 2.3-2.5 C by 2100, according to the UN. 

Comment: The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream

The current and two preceding COP presidencies – Türkiye, Brazil and Azerbaijan – are gathering views from governments on how to raise the ambition of national climate plans (NDCs) and adaptation plans (NAPs).

The initiative will culminate in a report at COP31 outlining priority actions for keeping the 1.5C goal “within reach”. But the proposals submitted by individual governments and negotiating blocs representing nearly four-fifths of all countries point to wildly diverging visions of what the Belém Mission should achieve, especially on the transition away from fossil fuels. 

Tracking COP28 commitments

The Marshall Islands has proposed an ambitious package of concrete actions that would enable deep emissions reductions, led by a global commitment to build no new oil, coal and gas infrastructure. Together with its fellow Pacific island of Vanuatu, it also calls for a formal process to monitor progress towards the COP28 energy commitments, map fossil fuel subsidies and help countries phase them out.

The EU also said in its submission that the Mission to 1.5C is “well placed” to provide updates on how countries’ national climate plans have incorporated the COP28 agreement, including the commitment to accelerate a transition from fossil fuels in energy systems.

Countries wanting to build on the COP28 Dubai agreement have struggled to find a dedicated space for those discussions in the face of opposition from fossil fuel producers and big emerging economies.

The COP28 outcomes in response to the first stocktake of global climate action represent “one package… and not a pick-and-choose menu”, the European Commission emphasised in a thinly veiled reference to comments made by the Saudi energy minister in 2024 that the Dubai deal was an “à la carte menu” allowing nations to choose their own priority. 

Push to boost NDC ambition

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) also advocated in its submission for “high-level approaches” towards developed countries and other major emitters ahead of COP31 to spur them to produce updated NDCs with additional emissions-cutting measures. 

Vanuatu called on the COP presidencies overseeing the Mission to 1.5C to “exhibit leadership” by taking steps at home to phase out fossil fuels and reduce their “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.

Azerbaijan and Türkiye continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels in their energy systems, while Azerbaijan and Brazil remain significant oil and gas producers with plans to expand output.

In its submission, the LDC group of the world’s poorest nations says the failure to align global climate commitments with a pathway to keep warming under 1.5C is driven primarily by insufficient ambition from major emitters.

The Mission to 1.5C should focus its efforts on the “highest-impact” and “most feasible” solutions to curb emissions such as phasing out fossil fuels, it added.

Both the island nations and the LDCs, as well as the African group of nations, stress that significantly scaling up financial resources, and making it easier to access them, are necessary steps to enable the global energy transition.

Focus on “emissions”, not energy sources

Fossil fuel producers and several large developing economies, however, argue that the mission risks straying beyond its mandate if it singles out particular fuels or evaluates countries’ climate plans.

The Arab group, which is led by Saudi Arabia and includes the UAE, Qatar and Egypt, wrote that it should maintain a focus on “emissions management” rather than targeting specific sectors or energy sources.

Their submission says investments in fossil fuels “must increase” both to better manage the emissions associated with their production and to meet growing energy demand.

The LMDCs, a negotiating bloc that includes China and India, similarly argue that climate action should address emissions regardless of how they are produced, warning that energy sources should not be traded off against the need for growth. “Poverty eradication and sustainable development remain a key challenge for developing countries, which cannot be compromised in the name of 1.5°C,” the group’s submission says.

No “parallel” processes

For both Arab states and LMDCs, the mission’s primary goal should be to identify how rich countries that are historically responsible for the bulk of emissions can be required to further cut their greenhouse gases and channel more money to developing countries. 

Both groups also caution against allowing the initiative to evolve into what they describe as a “parallel process” that could assess countries’ climate plans or create new expectations for what developing countries should do. Instead, they argue, it should simply produce a report identifying options for international cooperation.

The two sides disagree just as sharply on what should happen to the mission’s report once it lands. AOSIS and the LDC group explicitly want its findings carried forward into the COP31 outcome decision text and used to inform future negotiating rounds. The LMDC bloc, on the other hand, wants a guarantee that the report will not be used to support other processes.

The post UN bid to keep 1.5C alive exposes deepening divisions over fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

UN bid to keep 1.5C alive exposes deepening divisions over fossil fuels

Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org and David Hillman is director of Stamp Out Poverty.

This coming week, as record-breaking heat has morphed into killer wildfires, major oil and gas companies will report their second-quarter earnings and are widely expected to announce profits that have doubled or even quadrupled in the last three months. The obscenity of that contradiction is impossible to ignore.

Oxfam analysis, released as the Q2 earnings season gets underway, shows that the world’s six largest fossil fuel corporations – BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – are on course to nearly double their combined net income compared with the first quarter of the year, from $23 billion to around $45 billion.

Their projected full-year profits of $147 billion would exceed everything the six firms made combined over the previous 21 months. Chevron’s profits alone are expected to have quadrupled to $1,200 a second over the last three months; ExxonMobil’s have roughly tripled to $1,800 a second. The juxtaposition of profit on that scale, arriving in the same weeks that communities are counting the cost of deadly heatwaves, forest fires and high energy bills, is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Covering the cost of climate damage

Not long ago, the idea that fossil fuel companies should contribute directly towards the cost of climate damage was dismissed as activist rhetoric. Today it is reflected in legislation, litigation and mainstream policy debate.

Several US states have passed “Climate Superfund” laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help fund climate adaptation and disaster recovery. Courts are hearing cases seeking compensation for climate harms, while governments across Europe continue to debate the future of windfall taxes on outsized energy profits.

Comment: Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed

These developments may appear disconnected, but they reflect a broader shift in public thinking: if societies are paying an ever higher price as our climate warms, should the excessively profitable fossil fuel companies whose products have substantially caused those costs not bear more of the burden of paying for them?

Europe’s heatwaves fuelled by emissions

The events of this summer have only sharpened that question. Europe has experienced repeated heatwaves, with temperatures exceeding 40°C across parts of Spain, Portugal, France and Germany. England recorded its hottest June on record, while wildfires have affected communities across southern Europe and, increasingly, parts of the UK.

According to researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, more than 2,300 heat-related deaths occurred across twelve European cities during one recent ten-day heatwave alone, with climate change estimated to have roughly tripled the number of deaths.

Separate Oxfam analysis of academic data published in Nature goes further, finding that the emissions of just five of these corporations – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – were sufficient to cause around one in four of the heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023: heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.

WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in

Nor is Europe unique. There is looming famine in Uganda and India endured prolonged pre-monsoon temperatures above 48°C earlier this year. North America has faced successive heat domes, while smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires has periodically produced some of the world’s worst urban air quality, affecting millions of people across Canada and the United States.

Scientists have become increasingly confident in attributing many of these extremes to human-caused climate change. Rapid attribution studies, pioneered over the past decade, now routinely assess how much more likely or more intense individual weather events have become because of greenhouse gas emissions.

‘Polluter pays’ principle in law

Against this backdrop, the “polluter pays” principle is a basic standard of responsible behaviour: if you cause damage, it is on you to pay for it. It is a longstanding concept in environmental law and economics that those responsible for creating pollution should bear a proportionate share of the costs it imposes on society.

In 2025 a survey found that 81% of people supported increased fossil fuel taxes being directed to help communities most impacted by extreme weather. And it is no longer just a hypothetical prospect.

A mandatory surtax on highly polluting industries is gaining support as part of the UN Convention on International Tax Cooperation, alongside robust measures to prevent jurisdiction-shopping and anchor taxing rights in real economic activity. Governments meeting in New York next month to negotiate the framework convention should seize the moment to get behind both.

The stakes are high because the economics of the energy transition are increasingly clear. Renewable electricity is now among the cheapest forms of new power generation in much of the world. Yet many countries with abundant renewable resources continue to face prohibitively expensive borrowing costs, limiting their ability to invest at the speed required. Meanwhile, massive fossil fuel profits remain only lightly taxed or entirely avoided in many jurisdictions.

Analysis by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and partners estimated that a 20% surtax on the profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies could have generated more than US$1 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

Time to design mechanisms for justice

Whether governments choose that particular mechanism is ultimately a political decision. But the analysis illustrates a broader point: claims that public investment in climate resilience or clean energy is unaffordable sit uneasily alongside the scale of profits regularly generated by the fossil fuel industry, profits that, this quarter, are on course to nearly double in three months.

There are legitimate debates about the design of windfall taxes, competitiveness, investment incentives and international coordination. But the wider principle – that those who have benefited most from fossil fuel extraction should pay more towards managing its consequences – is no longer confined to campaign groups.

Extreme heat costing India’s poorest workers 2% of GDP, survey finds

It is increasingly part of mainstream discussions among policymakers, economists and legal scholars and, if well designed, such mechanisms will incentivise investment where it’s needed and strengthen international coordination.

This summer has made that conversation harder to avoid. The question is no longer whether fossil fuel giants should pay for the enormous economic and human costs being suffered by communities every day due to our rapidly warming climate. It is when will governments step up and make them pay, for the damage already done and to build the resilience we need going forward?

The post The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream appeared first on Climate Home News.

The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream