On Friday, July 31, Bill McKibben wrote:
"[T]here is no more contemptible company on earth than Shell Oil."
For the week prior, incredible activists from 350PDX, Greenpeace, Rising Tide and others had blockaded an icebreaker ship on Shell's payroll, dangling from bridges to form a human curtain and clogging the ship's path with kayakers. McKibben wrote his words as the blockade ended and the icebreaker resumed course to assist Shell with drilling in the arctic, a project that will go down in history as a moment of incredible stupidity and greed--if Shell and companies like it leave us a future where people can read and write history, that is.
I thought Bill's claim was pretty strong, so I thought I'd look into it. TL;DR: I think he's right. Shell is an incredibly rich, incredibly powerful, and completely corrupt and contemptible company, a corporation for which the planet-defiling Arctic drilling project is just another escalation along a long history of unbelievably evil acts. For those of you who've been putting your bodies on the line in the fight to save the future, this is probably not news. But for folks who may doubt McKibben's strident language, I thought I'd pull together a quick primer and show you how disgusting this company actually is.
"Shell" is the common name for Royal Dutch Shell, a multinational fossil fuel company incorporated in the U.K., headquartered in the Netherlands and operating in more than 70 countries. Shell has several subsidiaries, including Shell Oil Company, Shell Canada Limited, Shell Nigeria, Pennzoil-Quaker State and others. In 2014, the company brought in $421 billion in revenues and company made roughly $14.7 billion in profit. Their CEO, Ben van Beurden, made $26 million for 2014.
Shell makes this money by selling products that wreck the planet. According to its latest annual report, the company produces more than 3 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, and each year they sell 24 million tons of liquefied natural gas. These products are significant drivers of climate change—their use as fuel adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, trapping heat and raising global average temperatures. According to the Guardian, Royal Dutch Shell is responsible for putting 30.75 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. To put that in perspective, the U.S. government estimates that a single ton of carbon emitted in 2015 costs $36 in economic damage to our economy. That doesn't sound like much, until you consider that Shell is responsible for 30 billion times that amount of carbon.
Shell's crimes extend beyond its impacts on climate change. In places where they extract oil from the ground, they have a well-earned reputation for environmental destruction, lawlessness and corruption. Take, for example, their operations in Nigeria.
Amnesty International reports that Shell was responsible for at least 204 oil spills on the Niger Delta last year alone. These spills wreck Nigerians’ livelihoods and food and water sources. For decades, Shell has blamed the spills on sabotage and illegal refining, but recent court documents showed they knew for years that degraded pipes and equipment were putting the oil at risk for spillage, but failed to act to stop it. And when local Nigerians stood up for themselves, Shell and its security personnel responded viciously, with methods including extra-judicial killings and torture. In one case, Shell agreed to pay $15.5 million to settle a legal action in which it was accused of having collaborated in the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Ogoni people in Southern Nigeria. The plaintiffs alleged Shell conspired with the Nigerian military government to capture and kill the men, as well as supplying and helping to plain terror raids against villages.
More broadly, a trove of confidential documents show that Shell regularly paid off Nigeria's military and police to put down protests against its polluting activities. Their corruption of the Nigerian extended beyond the security forces: a diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks showed Shell's top executive in Nigeria bragging that she had placed informants in every relevant department of the Nigerian government and knew "everything that was being done in those ministries."
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say oil companies, led by Shell, have overseen a human rights tragedy in Nigeria. Presumably, we can expect more of this exemplary behavior as they ramp up operations in the Arctic.
This staggering level of immorality hasn't prevented Shell from being able to do business with the U.S. government as a contractor, though. True to form, they're ripping off the taxpayer, with $1.6 billion racked up in penalties for misconduct. Their offenses include:
• False reimbursement claims for environmental cleanup;
• Clean Air Act violations;
• Foreign bribery;
• Human rights violations;
• Price fixing; and
• Violations of federal securities laws.
Their continued ability to access taxpayer funds might be explained by the way they take advantage of campaign finance laws to participate in what some observers call legal bribery. Royal Dutch Shell has given $1.5 million to federal campaigns (through Q2 2014). Their U.S. subsidiary, Shell Oil, though, has given much, much more: $2.6 million given to federal campaigns, with their top individual recipient being Barack Obama, whose administration recently approved the permits to allow Shell to drill in the Arctic.
Shell’s influence on the public discussion around climate change is just as pernicious as their interference in American politics. They back fossil fuel industry trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the Western States Petroleum Association who intentionally mislead the public about the effects of fossil fuel emissions on the environment, even after the industry’s own internal communications admitted that global warming—and human emissions’ effect on global warming—are undeniable. Shell is also a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a group that serves as a conduit for half-baked climate denial arguments and policy proposals from industry backrooms to elected officials. Shell remains a member of ALEC even after other reputable companies like Google cut ties to the organization because, on climate, ALEC was “just lying.”
Shell is a vile organization, corrupt to its core, willing to say or do anything to keep money flowing into the pockets of its executives. Cheating American taxpayers, running disinformation and propaganda campaigns, causing billions in economic damage to the U.S. economy—even spying on governments, worsening armed conflicts and risking planet-wide crisis, all lie within the range of acceptable activities to Shell’s leadership, as long as they can profit from them.
If Shell were a nation, we would be at war with them—because they are certainly at war with us.