European oil companies made headlines in June 2015 when they came out in favour of a global climate deal. ‘We want to be a part of the solution,’ wrote BP, Shell, Total, Statoil, BG and Eni, in a letter to UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. The solution, as they see it, revolves around carbon pricing and a shift from coal to gas.
However, this was not the ‘man bites dog’ story some newspaper editors perhaps imagined. To anyone who has watched the companies’ disruptive tactics over the past 20 years, it was more one of ‘dog is still biting man’.
