On the eve of a pivotal global climate summit, the world’s oil giants have been swamped by calls from activists, investors and lawmakers to move faster to transform their businesses, cut down greenhouse gas emissions and take responsibility for their role in the climate crisis.

This week, Third Point LLC took a $750 million stake in Royal Dutch Shell and called for a breakup that would separate its legacy extraction and refining operations from renewables and liquefied natural gas. The hedge fund’s leader said Shell’s “incoherent, conflicting set of strategies” made for unhappy shareholders and an unhappy public, and that it should stop trying to “be all things to all people.”

A day later, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP executives were being pressed on Capitol Hill about Big Oil’s alleged efforts to mislead the public about climate change — an industry grilling that drew comparisons to a 1994 hearing at which tobacco executives testified under oath that they believed nicotine was not addictive.

Meanwhile, teenage demonstrators have been on hunger strike outside the Capitol and White House for days, some so weakened they required wheelchairs as they called on the Biden administration to deliver on its climate promises.

The developments reflect the challenge of squaring ballooning short-term demand for fossil fuels against the growing urgency for cleaner energy. World leaders will assemble Sunday for the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, where they will face pressure to make more ambitious commitments to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. Existing pledges fall short of what’s needed to stop catastrophic warming, experts say, and most nations aren’t on track to meet them anyway, according to an analysis from Climate Action Tracker.

But whatever strides the sector might be making are overshadowed by the focus on its profit center: oil and gas. Clean energy investments accounted for just 1 percent of total capital expenditure in the oil and gas industry in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency’s 2021 “World Energy Investment” report. The outlook for 2021 has improved slightly, with capital investment in clean energy on track to rise more than 4 percent, the report said.

The call to break up Shell is an example of how some investors might press for change. Splitting the oil and gas assets off has “long been seen as a logical next step for the business,” Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, wrote Thursday in comments emailed to The Post, but “no one has really called for the company to proceed until now.”

A lesson from our prior engagements is that it is often most impactful to invest in companies where the opportunity for positive change is the greatest,” wrote Dan Loeb, the billionaire investor leading Third Point, in a letter sent Wednesday to investors calling for the company to break its business into multiple stand-alone companies. “While daunting, there is perhaps no bigger ESG opportunity than in “Big Oil,” and specifically, at Royal Dutch Shell.”

The seven major global oil producers — BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Total Energies and ENI — are expected to collectively generate $1.1 trillion in sales and $133 billion in pretax profit this year, Mould said. But many investors consider it a “sunset industry” as the need for a faster transition to clean energy becomes more and more apparent. Others “don’t care what the company does so long as it makes money.”