Shell game.

• Author: Assadourian, Erik
• Position: BETWEEN THE LINES

Eureka! Royal Dutch Shell, the world's second largest oil company and producer of 2.5 percent of the world's oil, has finally acknowledged that we live in a closed environmental system. The acknowledgment goes beyond ads: in the company's 2006 Sustainability Report, Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer declared, "For us, as a company, the debate about whether man-made climate change is happening is over. The debate now is about what we can do about it." But do the company's actions reflect its words, or is Shell just spewing hot air?

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"Greenhouses use our waste C[O.sub.2] to grow flowers." Shell's Pernis refinery in the Netherlands pipes carbon dioxide waste into local greenhouses to assist plant growth. According to company figures, this saves the refinery about 325,000 tons of C[O.sub.2] each year. But how long do the plants lock up that carbon? In any case, the company's direct annual C[O.sub.2] emissions are 98 million tons--not including the C[O.sub.2] that consumers of Shell's gas and oil emit. So the greenhouses reduce Shell's direct emissions by a little over 0.33 percent. Time to build another 300 greenhouses?

"Don't throw anything away." To suggest that Shell operates its business according to that statement is dreadfully misleading. According to the World Bank, Nigeria flares (burns off at the wellhead) 75 percent of the gas it produces every year. About half of it is Shell's. This gas accounts for emissions of roughly 148,000 tons of C[O.sub.2] and annual losses of about $2.5 billion. Flaring causes numerous environmental and social problems, including air pollution, asthma, and acid rain. Shell has no plans to end gas flaring before 2009; its previous targets to reduce flaring have not been met.

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Flowery Claims. Shell's claims that it's cleaning up its act are nothing new to the people of Durban, South Africa. In February 2000, the management of SAPREF Refinery, co-owned by Shell and BP, admitted to underreporting sulfur dioxide emissions by as much as 12 tons a day since 1995. Researchers found that 53.5 percent of students in the suburbs south of Durban suffered from asthma, four times more than similar populations elsewhere. The study linked exposure to air pollution to the higher incidence of asthma. If only Shell's...