When will it ever be enough for environmentalists? Royal Dutch Shell just can’t please Europe’s greenies. Today’s Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) has the skinny:

The Anglo-Dutch oil giant drew fire from activist groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth for past attempts to extol its environmental responsibility. It tended to boast of its investments in alternative energy with ads that spoke of the “power to create a cleaner, safer world.” Now, in a campaign designed by ad agency JWT, part of London-based WPP, Shell is stressing technology and innovation and its potential contributions to fighting global warming. Shell, its ads say, is working on ways to squeeze out “difficult” oil trapped in sand, rock and in the deepest seas. And it is trying to capture carbon-dioxide, a global-warming gas, and store it safely underground. But alternative energy is still part of the mix. One of Shell’s new print ads features a diagram of a human brain full of “unexpected” fuel sources like algae and woodchips. The ad has revived old allegations that Shell is “greenwashing” its business. Shell is trying “to hide the fact that the company is actually going backward when it comes to renewable energy,” says Greenpeace climate campaigner Jim Footner. Last year, Shell spent “billions of dollars extracting dirty oil from Canada’s tar sands” while pulling funding from wind- and solar-energy projects in Europe, he says.

And it’s not just Shell, of course. BP has taken similar heat:

Last year, BP used slogans like “The best way out of the energy fix is an energy mix.” But environmental activists objected, arguing that alternative energy accounted for just 7% of the British company’s spending.

I guess doubling up on renewables after 2005 just wasn’t enough for the greens; which begs the question, “When will it ever be?” Will oil companies ever capitulate enough to please rabid environmentalists? And, by the way, why should they even bother? They are OIL companies. OIL is their business. If investors demand other business functions, then so be it. But enviromentalists aren’t investors; and oil companies, which day in and day out perform immensely valuable services to consumers–allowing us to live more comfortably and affordably than we would in their absence–should remember that.