Earth Matters: Shell oil makes another $10 billion profit; 14,000 'orphan' oil wells need plugging

Last week, the oil giant Shell posted a first quarter profit of $9.65 billion, up from $9.1 billion in the first quarter of 2022. It put $6 billion of that into stock buybacks and shareholder dividends. This wasn’t the highest ever quarterly profit for the world’s fourth largest oil company. For the final three months of 2022, Shell reported $9.8 billion in profit, and a record annual profit of $40 billion. That’s more in one quarter than the average of what the Inflation Reduction Act was originally expected to lay out on a yearly basis to address the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, according to Dutch climate activist Vatan Hüzeir, as reported by Birte Schohaus and Merel de Buck at the investigative journalism site Follow the Money, Shell, like Exxon-Mobil and others, has known for a very long time that its operations risked dire consequences for the Earth. In 1986, its own internal study—The Greenhouse Effect noted that “The environment may be degraded to such an extent that some parts of earth will become uninhabitable.’”