Is the Oil and Gas Industry Serious About Climate Action?

Far more than a legal document, the 2015 Paris Agreement marks the culmination of half a century of evolutionary developments spanning science, technology, policy, and culture. As early as 1965, the U.S. President’s Science Advisory Committee warned that human activities could produce significant climatic consequences. With much prescience, that committee highlighted possible outcomes that have since become reality, from the melting of the Antarctic ice cap to the rise of sea levels and extreme weather events.
Only some time later, in 1988, was the first institution established to address climate issues: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was mandated by the United Nations (UN) to assess the available information on this topic and to foster a scientific consensus that could inform policy. This was followed in 1992 by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), one of the three global conventions adopted amid the optimism of the Rio Earth Summit, marking the official start of international climate policymaking. Since then, the number of actors and fora dedicated to climate change has exploded, leading to what some have called the climate change regime.