You need to know about the Shell game
By: Ketan Joshi
Tags: Greenwashing, Shell, Climate, Oil And Gas, Fossil Fuels

The phrase ‘shell game’ originates from a dazzling trick involving walnut shells and a pea. You put a pea under one of three, whizz them around, and then ask your watcher to nominate the shell with the pea under it. Of course, you’ve done some sleight of hand to misdirect your mark — they think they’re looking in the right spot, but they never win the game. The mark always loses.

When it comes to protecting the Earth from the impacts of fossil fuels, we’re still struggling to see past the ruse. It’s understandable: there hasn’t been a climate change before. But the main driver is an intentional effort to confuse, befuddle and misdirect the public by the companies that are worsening the problem: those that sell and burn fossil fuels.

A nice example of this is an announcement or a plan that sounds like an ambitious morsel of climate action, but either does nothing or actively worsens the problem. It’s nicely illustrated by fossil fuel companies, countries and lobby groups establishing targets to reduce emissions to zero by 2050, while also working to expand their extraction of fossil fuels:

“APPEA” = the Australian Petroleum ,Production and Exploration Association, Australia’s gas lobby. Via Energy News Bulletin, hat tip to Tim Baxter

There are many ways that this happens, and the magic trick of the Shell Game only fails to work when the marks are educated about the sleight of hand. With that in mind, let’s dig into the two main tactics behind fake climate action.

Backloading (aka — the plump kitty)

Part of how this happens is by ‘backloading’ the effort of change to the very last moments of the deadline. It’s a very common tactic but not yet commonly recognised for its harm; slow action results in a far greater quantity of total emissions up to 2050, and it’s the total that matters, as I wrote here.

(I call this the ‘plump kitty’, because the delayed curve looks like a very big cat. The name hasn’t stuck, but I will never stop trying to make it a thing)

This ‘backloading’ is how you get fossil fuel companies and countries claiming they’ve got their eyes set on 2050, but also aggressively expanding the production and/or burning of fossil fuels, and headlines like the ones shown above.

There’s a nice example of this out in the wild buried in the documents for a new gas-fired power station in the Pilbara, in Western Australia, as part of a Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) project, which I’ve outlined here.

There’s another gambit contained within net zero targets that serves essentially the same function (justifying the continued extraction and/or burning of fossil fuels in the next 10–15 years). It’s important, but the trickery is deeper and slightly more complicated.

Removal promises (aka: the ultra-sponge)

Recently, Dutch oil and gas company Shell announced an update of their climate plans. As with many of their plans in the past, this one relies on promises to remove carbon far into the future, rather than plans to rapidly reduce the supply of fossil fuels today and tomorrow.

It is roughly equivalent to pouring a cup of coffee, noticing that you’re about to overflow past the brim of the cup, and simply telling onlookers that you’re going to invest in some amazing sponge technology as you tilt the coffee pot downwards and accelerate the flow of coffee. To illustrate it, it looks something like this: