‘They’re ignoring all the alarms’: Contractor resigns from Shell with warning to staff about ‘extreme harm’ to planet

Report From:  Sky News

Caroline Dennett told Sky News that working for Shell was no longer morally compatible with her beliefs about how best to protect the planet and the people who live on it.

A safety consultant who spent more than a decade working as a contractor for Shell has publicly resigned, claiming the oil and gas company is causing “extreme harm” to the planet.

In a mass email to over a thousand Shell employees including company CEO Ben van Beurden, Caroline Dennett wrote: “The United Nations and the International Energy Agency are clear: there is no safe level of new oil and gas extraction, any new projects commit us to global overheating and an un-liveable world.

“Contrary to Shell’s public expressions around Net Zero, and as most of you will know from the inside, Shell is not winding down oil and gas, but planning to explore and extract much more.

“It pains me to end this working relationship which I have greatly valued, but I can no longer work for a company that ignores all the alarms and dismisses the risks of climate change and ecological collapse.”

Ms Dennett, whose UK based company was contracted to evaluate safety culture on projects across Shell, said she finally decided to quit after being assigned to assess two new projects under construction in Nigeria.

She contacted the environmental group Extinction Rebellion, which is running a campaign encouraging people who work for fossil fuel companies to leave their jobs.

Shell has promised to become a net zero energy company by 2050, which includes emissions from the energy products it sells.

The company says that it believes its oil production peaked in 2019 and will continue to decline by 1-2% per year until 2030.

However, its gas business is set to expand in the coming decade, including for example in the UK’s North Sea, which the government has said will help to increase energy security.

In a statement, a Shell spokesperson told Sky News: “Be in no doubt, we are determined to deliver on our global strategy to be a net zero company by 2050 and thousands of our people are working hard to achieve this.

“We have set targets for the short, medium and long term, and have every intention of hitting them.

“We’re already investing billions of dollars in low-carbon energy, although the world will still need oil and gas for decades to come in sectors that can’t be easily decarbonised.”

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