how Shell planned over periods of decades, and would have been keenly able to incorporate considerations of climate change and the need to phase out fossil fuels. Instead of making choices to avoid climate catastrophe, Shell continued pushing to open new oil and gas horizons. Despite the awareness of the need to decarbonize the energy mix, Shell continued aggressively pursuing new carbon reserves, even when doing so was financially dubious, as in the company’s highly criticized efforts to open the Arctic to decades of oil drilling.80 For years, Shell pursued This pattern would become common for Shell; the company would make declarations about the dangers and severity of climate change, yet developed significant additional reserves and helped perpetuate a carbon-based energy mix. plans to drill in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, even as environmental activists and the company’s own shareholders fought against it, believing the project to be environmentally devastating and financially unwise.81 Still, in light of these pressures, and with a keen awareness of global carbon budgets,82 Shell spent $7 billion on Arctic exploration before abandoning its plans in 2015.83 This pattern would become common for Shell; the company would make declarations about the dangers and severity of climate change, including what it planned to do to combat it, yet developed significant additional reserves and helped perpetuate a carA Crack in the Shell | bon-based energy mix. It would join groups intent on opposing climate action, including by spreading misinformation, but then leave once the damage had been done. This practice continues today. In March 2018, Shell released a model scenario it claimed would meet Paris Agreement goals,84 which the UNFCCC supported and promoted.85 This model scenario, however, distracts from Shell’s actual behavior. Shell’s new model scenario, called the Sky Scenario, is not a blueprint for how Shell plans to decarbonize. As Shell makes clear in the scenario’s accompanying legal disclaimer, “we have no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 1020 years.”86 However, even if it were an outline of Shell’s operational and investment plans, it would still contain significant flaws. First, the Sky Scenario simply does not meet Paris goals. It proposes a scenario in which the world has a two-thirds chance of avoiding two degrees of warming, 87 which is a massive dilution of the Paris target of keeping warming “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”88 Second, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the Sky Scenario relies extremely heavily on continued fossil fuel use and assumes the development and deployment of unproven and economically unviable carbon capture and negative-emissions technologies on a massive scale. The scenario allows for global levels of oil, gas, and coal use at 88%, 93%, and 62% of current consumption in 205089 and accounts for the overshoot with negative emissions technologies. 13 | These projections are both unrealistic and problematic. The Sky Scenario would require the construction of up to 10,000 large carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities and the use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) over a land area the size of Australia.90 Again, though, even if one were to set aside the issues with the Sky Scenario, Shell does not plan to pursue a course of action to actually meet its targets. As demonstrated by an analysis by Carbon Tracker, 30-40% of Shell’s planned upstream capital expenditures through 2035 are unneeded in a two-degree warming scenario (which would still fail to meet Paris targets and cause massive climatic change).91 Instead, Shell projects dramatic increases in fossil fuel use through at least 2060.92 This fits Shell’s pattern, whereby the company publicly purports to support action on climate change and appears friendlier to regulation than its peers. Meanwhile, Shell still plans for – and contributes to – vast increases in the use of fossil fuels.93 Conclusion Like ExxonMobil, Shell has been at the leading edge of climate science at least since the scientific debate began in earnest. The company actively participated in the research and communications apparatus of the American Petroleum Institute, which was studying the issue no later than 1958. In 1962, Shell’s Chief Geologist acknowledged the potentially significant climate risks of fossil fuel combustion and echoed the recommendations of other scientists that society must transition to more sustainable energy sources. By 1968, API had received an explicit warning that, while uncertainties remained, Center for International Environmental Law