Shell does not plan to stop selling oil and gas anytime soon. So to reach its goals, it needs ways of delivering cleaner energy products that will dilute the overall emissions from those fossil fuels. For a company as sprawling as Shell, which is Europe’s largest company, that can take many forms: having electric charging points and hydrogen, a clean fuel, available at its filling stations, and generating large amounts of green power from wind and solar installations to sell to industrial customers.

Still, some environmentalists and investors are skeptical about Shell’s intentions, noting that the $2 billion a year that it proposes to invest in new energies is still relatively small.

Mark van Baal, founder of Follow This, a Dutch shareholder activist group, said that accepting responsibility for the emissions of its products was “an industry-leading move” by Shell. But he added that the plan that Mr. van Beurden had outlined, which would allow oil and gas production to grow, was “not enough” given the dangers of global warming.

For Shell’s annual meeting on May 22, Follow This has proposed a resolution asking the company to set specific targets for meeting the Paris goals on climate change. Aegon, a large Dutch insurer, and Actiam, a fund manager, have already said they would support the resolution. Last year, a similar Follow This proposal won a small but notable 6 percent of the vote.

On April 16, Shell directors advised shareholders to reject the proposal, saying that it might “tie the hands” of management to a rigid standard and that Shell’s efforts in the area were already “more progressive” than what Follow This was advocating.

Critics, though, continue to say Shell is overly wedded to fossil fuels.

“At the moment, the scale between their oil and gas business and their alternative energy business is still pretty disproportionate,” said Charlie Kronick, a senior adviser for Greenpeace in Britain. “You can’t really have it both ways.”