After years of opposing efforts to fight climate change, Europe’s biggest oil and gas corporations have made a stunning about-face.

 

In a letter addressed to the chief of the United Nations climate agency, Christiana Figueres, the chief executives of Shell, BP, and four other energy giants asked the world’s political leaders to put a price on carbon.

 

“We need governments across the world to provide us with clear, stable, long-term, ambitious policy frameworks,” the letter read in part. “We believe that a price on carbon should be a key element of these frameworks.”

 

The absence of a global carbon price hinders rational business decision-making, the CEOs said in their letter. “Whatever we do to implement carbon pricing ourselves,” they wrote, “will not be sufficient or commercially sustainable unless national governments introduce carbon pricing even-handedly and eventually enable global linkage between national systems.

 

“Some economies have not yet taken this step, and this could create uncertainty about investment and disparities in the impact of policy on businesses,” the executives added.

 

“It’s an important positive step,” said David Hawkins, director of climate programs at environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are basically acknowledging that we need to cut carbon emissions, including from the products that they sell: oil and gas.”