“Shell, Exxon, Energy Transfer Flip the Script” By Irina Slav

“ Climate activists have also enjoyed years of unrestricted activism, increasingly aimed at disruption and occasionally destruction. All that began to change in 2024, and this turning tide is now…”

Shell, Exxon, Energy Transfer Flip the Script

By Irina Slav- Mar 25, 2025, 5:00 PM CDT

• The energy industry is increasingly pushing back against climate activists.

• Greenpeace and other activist groups face major legal and financial setbacks.

• A broader backlash against climate activism is emerging, driven by industry fatigue, shifting public sentiment, and a new political environment in the U.S. that's less sympathetic to activist causes.

Climate activists have been instrumental in making radical changes in government policies concerning energy. Climate activists have also enjoyed years of unrestricted activism, increasingly aimed at disruption and occasionally destruction. All that began to change in 2024, and this turning tide is now gathering speed. The energy industry is striking back, and courts are siding with it.

In 2021, a Hague court ordered supermajor Shell to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide by 45% by 2030. The ruling marked the wrap of a case brought to the court by a climate activist outlet by the name of Milieudefensie, which celebrated the court order. Shell, on the other hand, appealed—and last year, it won the appeal.

As soon as the original ruling was passed, Shell commented that such a dramatic reduction in CO2 emissions by a single company would do absolutely nothing to reduce overall global emissions. If Shell cuts its oil and gas output to comply with the order, other producers would simply ramp up their output to fill the gap, then-CEO Ben van Beurden said, notoriously adding that until there was demand for oil, there would be supply.

Related: India’s Peak Electricity Demand Set to Jump By 10% in 2025

Shell’s appeal win marked a new stage in the hot conflict between climate activists and the energy industry. Until very recently, there was a general feeling in activist circles that they could do no wrong and courts would side with them—even though most lawsuits against Big Oil went nowhere and even though several radical climate activists in Britain were sentenced to time in prison for their form of activism. This appears to be no longer the case.

While Shell was appealing the Milieudefensie ruling, a couple of activist investors tried to force Exxon into making greater emission reduction commitments, with a focus on so-called Scope 3 emissions, those generated through the use of hydrocarbons. Exxon responded to the attempt by stating this would have a negative impact on its financial performance. The activist investors pushed harder. Exxon filed a lawsuit, declaring that Arjuna Capital and Follow This had “become shareholders solely to campaign for change through shareholder proposals that are calculated to diminish the company’s existing business.”

This suit was ultimately dismissed because Arjuna Capital pulled its proposal and promised not to do that again, but the whole affair strengthened a perception that Big Oil had had enough with activists and was starting to fight back. Shell sued Greenpeace for boarding a platform in the North Sea—a criminal offense—and won. TotalEnergies also sued Greenpeace for disseminating false information after the group published a report claiming TotalEnergies was under-reporting its emissions. That lawsuit was dismissed in an increasingly rare win for the activists—but Greenpeace had a short time to celebrate that.

Last week, a North Dakota court slammed Greenpeace with a bill of over $660 million for its participation in the organization of the massive protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in a win for Energy Transfer, the operator of the pipeline, which sued the activists for defamation, conspiracy, and physical damage to the piece of infrastructure. The verdict could bankrupt the U.S. arm of Greenpeace, representatives said in comments on the news.

There are suggestions that it was the change of the guard at the White House that has made the energy industry more active in seeking “revenge”, per the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the industry started fighting back earlier, as demonstrated by the Shell, TotalEnergies, and Exxon cases. “We’ve just kind of been the frog in the boiling pot, and it’s just gotten worse, and worse, and worse,” the chief executive of pipeline operator Williams, Alan Armstrong, told the WSJ.

Meanwhile, one of the most public climate scientists who became famous for his so-called hockey-stick diagram of global warming—which fueled a lot of climate action— was found guilty of making misleading statements to the court during a lawsuit he had filed against two critics of his hockey stick hypothesis. He won the case, but the critics counter-sued. Michael Mann and his lawyers “each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information,” the judge said before ordering Mann and his lawyers to pay the same amount Mann had won as compensation from the two critics, Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg.

The tide is turning, indeed, and while some of that turning could be attributed to the change in the federal government in the United States, part of the reason must be a simple case of getting fed up with relentless attacks that seek to ultimately damage the business performance of oil and gas companies that the attackers choose as their targets. The “stop oil and gas” refrain is the ultimate refrain for climate activists, after all. It is unfortunate that the rest of the world disagrees with it.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com