LONDON, (Reuters) – Top oil and gas companies have made little progress in turning away from hydrocarbons and towards the goals of the 2015 Paris climate deal, multinational nonprofit platform CDP said yesterday.
Scientists say that by 2030 the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 43% from 2019 levels to stand any chance of meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
The CDP’s Oil and Gas Benchmark report, published together with the World Benchmarking Alliance, said its latest assessment had shown the oil and gas sector “has made almost no progress towards the Paris Agreement goals since 2021”.
None of the 100 oil and gas companies it had assessed is set to cut its overall emissions “at a rate sufficient to align with a 1.5°C pathway over the next five years”, it said.
CDP has emerged as the world’s biggest repository of environmental data submitted on a voluntary basis by companies, which are under pressure from some shareholders to disclose how they plan to navigate the transition to a lower-carbon future.
The CDP said 81 oil and gas companies with extraction activities show “no significant reduction” in production before 2030, with production not expected to peak until 2028.
The world’s biggest Western oil and gas companies have set varying targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and the combustion of the products they sell, with the latter, known as Scope 3, accounting for the lion’s share.
Less than a third of companies in the report had any Scope 3 targets.
Only three European companies assessed – Neste NESTE.HE, Naturgy NTGY.MC and Engie ENGIE.PA – are investing more than 50% of their budget in low-carbon technologies.
TotalEnergies TTEF.PA, which sees no big cut to its emissions by 2030, Eni ENI.MI and Repsol REP.MC are in the top 10, and Shell SHEL.L and BP BP.L in the top 20.
Big U.S. producers Chevron CVX.N, Conoco COP.N and Exxon XOM.N are in the top 40.
The lower ranks are dominated by state-owned firms from Russia, the Arab Gulf, Nigeria, Algeria, Libya, Venezuela, Iraq and Iran.
Netanyahu says he dropped part of Israeli judicial overhaul -WSJ
JERUSALEM, (Reuters) – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he has dropped a central element of a bitterly contested plan to roll back Supreme Court powers that has roiled Israel for months, though he was still pursuing changes to the way judges are selected.
In a filmed interview posted on the Wall Street Journal website yesterday, Netanyahu said he was no longer seeking to grant parliament the authority to overturn Supreme Court rulings.
“I threw that out,” Netanyahu said of the highly-disputed ‘override clause.’
He said that another part of his nationalist-religious government’s plan that would give the ruling coalition decisive sway in appointing judges, will be changed but not scrapped.
“The way of choosing judges is not going to be the current structure but it’s not going to be the original structure,” Netanyahu said without elaborating on details.
Netanyahu’s remarks upset his far-right police minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who accused the premier of caving to protesters. “We were elected to bring governance and change, the reform is a cornerstone of this promise,” he tweeted.
Netanyahu’s government unveiled its plan to overhaul Israel’s justice system in January soon after it came to power, saying the Supreme Court had been increasingly encroaching into political areas where it had no authority.
The plan triggered mass protests, with critics saying it was a threat to democracy. Washington urged Netanyahu to seek broad agreements over reforms instead of rapidly driving unilateral changes it said would compromise Israel’s democratic health.
After weeks of demonstrations and with financial markets increasingly nervous over the proposed changes and the ensuing political upheaval, Netanyahu paused the plan in late March for compromise talks with the opposition.
But after those talks were suspended this month, Netanyahu said he would press on with judicial changes. His coalition began work this week on a new bill that would reduce Supreme Court power to rule against the government by limiting ‘reasonableness’ as a standard of judicial review.
Opposition leaders offered no immediate reaction to the latest comments by Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges he denies. His office did not offer additional details.
