The admission that continued growth in fossil fuel output is incompatible with 1.5C is significant, because it comes from one of the world’s biggest public oil and gas companies.

Shell had previously claimed that oil and gas production could rise for another decade, even as warming was limited to 1.5C.

The dramatic shift in its new “Energy Security Scenarios” is not explicitly acknowledged, but, as Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, is hidden in plain sight.

Key to the faster fall in fossil fuel use in the new pathway is much slower growth in global energy demand, which Shell had previously insisted was all-but unchangeable.

While Shell’s new scenarios are more closely aligned with the conclusions of independent research, its 1.5C pathway still contains relatively high levels of ongoing fossil fuel use.

If the world followed Shell’s pathway, it would “overshoot” the 1.5C limit for decades, before returning below that level by using largely unproven, energy-intensive machines to suck large volumes of carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the […]