Oil Giant Consultant Resigns, Citing Operations Beyond ‘Limits of Our Planetary Systems’

From this piece on Shell Oil and climate collapse:

A long-time Shell consultant based in the United Kingdom quit with a bang on Monday, condemning the fossil fuel giant for its dangerous efforts to expand oil and gas production despite numerous scientific warnings about the need for swift decarbonization to avert climate disaster.

“Shell’s stated safety ambition is to ‘do no harm,'” Caroline Dennett, who worked with the company for 11 years as a senior safety consultant, said in a video shared on LinkedIn, which echoed points made in a resignation letter she emailed to CEO Ben Van Beurden and 1,400 employees.

This so-called “Goal Zero” pledge “sounds honorable,” said Dennett. “But they are completely failing on it. They know that continued oil and gas extraction causes extreme harms to our climate, to our environment, and to people.”

The tweet introducing this post begins, “This is a huge story.”  Not to sound cynical, but is it, really?

People of conscience have been cutting ties to Big Oil for decades, and this trend will continue, perhaps even grow, over whatever period of time this planet has left before a great deal of it becomes uninhabitable.

We need to come to terms with the fact that the most powerful industry in the history of humankind is a runaway train.  Its allegiance, which is bound by the same laws that govern all U.S.-based corporations, is to maximize shareholder profit, and its governance must take all legal measures to make that happen.  Morality and compassion for the human race do not figure into this calculus at all.

What could happen, of course, is that the shareholders themselves might jump in and demand that executive leadership change course while there is still time to do so. And indeed, we have seen small-time attempts that have been made along these lines, most recently at ExxonMobil, where a vocal, if small contingency voted to replace two of its 12 board members with people who understand that their company is actively destroying our species, along with all life forms.

As suggested in the piece linked above, however, we’re making almost zero progress toward environmental sustainability.  Big Oil is also Big Litigation and Big PR, and they have effectively convinced us that they’re on our side, where nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s assisted by the vast majority of its shareholders.  Yes, some are decent people, but most really couldn’t care less about anything but their net worth.