“SHELL BOSS SAYS MASS REFORESTATION NEEDED TO LIMIT TEMPERATURE RISES TO 1.5C.”

(Article from the Guardian)

Ben van Beurden says ‘another Brazil in terms of rainforest’ will help achieve UN target

“You can get to 1.5C, but not by just by pulling the same levers a little bit harder, because they are being pulled roughly as fast and as hard as we are currently imagining. What we think can be done is massive reforestation. Think of another Brazil in terms of rainforest: you can get to 1.5C,” he told an oil and gas industry audience in London.

“It’s not what some people sometimes think: we’ll just do a little bit more solar, a bit more wind and we’ll get there,” he added.

Reforestation is seen as essential in the scenarios outlined this week by the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change, if the world is to restrict warming to 1.5C.

But Van Beurden stressed that meeting the challenge would be an uphill battle, because while it was “technically about doable”, it would not be commercially viable without changes to government policies and regulation. “Already to get to less than 2C will be [a] quite unimaginable, unprecedented scale of collaboration. Getting to 1.5C is a major challenge on top of it,” he said.

But the Shell chief executive was adamant that gas, which makes up a growing share of the firm’s portfolio, would have have a role to play in a 1.5C world.

“You can have an endless discussion about semantics. Is it a transition role, a destination role? In the end it is a bit of both,” he told the Oil and Money conference.

He said observers should not mistake headlines on the company’s forays into low-CO₂ projects as a sign it was “going soft” on oil and gas.

In the past year, Shell has made investments in electric car infrastructure firms, offered support to the government bringing forward its proposed ban on new petrol and diesel car sales and bought up one of the UK’s biggest electricity and gas suppliers.

[Original Article from the Guardian]