Companies Criticised for Prioritising Shareholders Over Climate Emergency

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The UK’s largest energy companies, Shell and BP, have been called out for putting shareholders before the planet. The companies lavished £25 billion on their shareholders last year, while spending less than two percent of their capital expenditure on low-carbon technologies, according to a new report.

Between them, Shell and BP have pledged a whopping $220 billion on extracting CO2 emitting fuel in the next ten years. If burned, this would be guaranteed to contravene the UK’s internationally-agreed commitment to limit warming to less than 1.5 degrees.