ConocoPhillips ’s $9.5 billion deal to buy shale assets from Royal Dutch Shell Plc will boost the amount of carbon the company pumps into the atmosphere. Yet the company says the pact will actually allow it to reach one of its climate goals faster. Greenhouse gas emissions intensity, or emissions per barrel of produced oil, is now targeted to drop by about 45% by 2030 versus a 2016 baseline, ConocoPhillips said Monday. That compares with a goal of about 40% unveiled last year for so-called Scope 1 and 2 emissions. ConocoPhillips, like many of its U.S. peers, favors emissions intensity over absolute levels of pollutions because it helps to differentiate between clean and dirty assets. So long as customers are still using fossil fuels, they should be produced by the cleanest operators, and reducing absolute emissions only hands market share to high-polluting companies or state, they argue. But the […]