(Shell reports it must follow that ruling regardless of its tax residence.) This fall, ABP, the Netherlands’ largest state pension fund, purged Shell and other fossil fuel companies from its portfolio. In May, a Dutch court ruled in a landmark case that the company must deepen greenhouse gas emissions cuts to align with the 1.5-degree goal.
In announcing the company’s streamlining, Mackenzie stressed the need to “speed up Shell’s transition to a net-zero emissions energy business.” Moving its headquarters from The Hague to London will also allow Shell to avoid Dutch taxes - which run higher than Britain’s - and tensions building with Dutch authorities and activists over climate change. Shell’s oil and gas tankers are not large enough to hold the irony. “What we are seeing hasn’t happened with 1.5 degrees,” Albano told me. What concerns Albano most is to see such common animals dying long before the world reaches the 1.5-degree Celsius planetary limit commonly cited as the goal to avert catastrophic warming. But they could not survive the ocean temperatures off the Israeli coast, which have risen 3 degrees Celsius in three decades. The region’s murex remained common until a few decades ago, Albano says. The animals for which Shell’s first tanker was named were so abundant historically that they survived centuries of harvest by the Phoenicians, who crushed them for the famed purple dye used in royal garments. He found that especially true for one genus: murex. The heat, he says, has been “disastrous” for native mollusks. Albano, senior scientist at Italy’s Anton Dohrn Zoological Station, uses empty shells to understand changes in species distribution over time. Along the coast of Israel, not far from where Shell’s first SS Murex entered the Suez Canal in 1892, researchers found mollusk populations in the soft shallows have collapsed by nearly 90% in recent decades, unable to tolerate ocean warming caused by the fossil fuels carried in those holds. Earlier this year, scientists who study marine mollusks - the shy, squishy animals that build the sea’s extraordinary shells - discovered the world’s worst climate-driven loss of marine life to date in the Mediterranean Sea. The live murex has not proliferated similarly. Today, Royal Dutch Shell is on its fifth Murex, a 100,000-ton tanker that hauls liquified natural gas across the global seas.
The tradition endured after Shell’s merger with Royal Dutch Petroleum in 1907. All were named for seashells: the Conch, Clam, Elax, Bullmouth, Volute, Turbo, Trocas, Spondilus, Nerite and Cowrie. They christened that first tanker the Murex - for a marine mollusk that builds an ornate, spiked shell.Īfter the Murex successfully hauled 4,000 tons of Russian kerosene through the Suez Canal that fall, the company launched 10 other tankers. They named their new transportation company Shell in honor of their father. Rockefeller and Standard Oil to build the first tanker that could carry bulk oil through the Suez Canal.
In the next generation, Samuel’s sons, still surrounded by seashells in the curio shop, began transporting kerosene to their father’s old trading partners in the East.