Back in 2015, InsideClimate News broke the news that ExxonMobil had known for decades about the damages its product caused. The story was huge: it spurred follow-on coverage, created the #ExxonKnew rallying cry, and, of course, inspired the ongoing wave of lawsuits.
But as it turns out, Exxon wasn’t alone in drilling down on its responsibility. In 2017, Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers of De Correspondent uncovered a video by Shell from 1991, in which the company warned of the impacts of climate change. This year, Mommers published a whole new tranche of documents at ClimateFiles.com
Shell’s climate concern goes back even further than the video from ‘91, as a new DeSmog story by Mike Small and Chloe Farand details. The story digs into the documents to trace the company’s climate learning curve, starting with a 1981 report which breaks down the causes of rising CO2 levels: “the total emission of 5.3 GtC 44 percent came from oil, 38 percent from coal and 17 percent from gas.”
According to the documents, whether or not warming would be significant was apparently still up for debate in 1983-- but also it would be “useful to give consideration to measures to counteract the likely effects.”
A year later, Shell had quantified just how much its own products contribute to the problem: the documents calculate the company’s sales were responsible for a full 4% of global carbon emissions. (Which might sound relatively small, as the billion-dollar damages start rolling in, that 4% might look a lot bigger.)
Then there’s a major 1988 report in which Shell’s GHG Effect Working Group reviews climate science, impacts, uncertainty, and policy, summarizing the state of science, including its own past reports. It found “reasonable scientific agreement” that the warming from burning fossil fuels “could have major social, economic and political consequences.”
Despite the “reasonable” ‘88 findings, four years later Shell director Lodewijk van Wachem maintained that “there is still debate among authoritative individuals and groups.”
It’s in the ‘90s, Desmog’s Small and Farand write, that Shell begins to backslide. Ignoring how it “previously acknowledged scientific consensus, Shell...introduce[d] doubt and talk of a ‘significant minority’ and ‘distinguished scientists’.”
That same time period also saw the rise of the first organized climate denial operations. For example, the George C. Marshall Institute (now the CO2 Coalition) was founded in ‘84, but started focusing on environmental issues in ‘88 and ramped it up through the ‘90s. Similarly, Steve Milloy and his tobacco astroturfing shifted to fossil fuels in the ‘90s, as the industry adopted Big Tobacco’s view that “doubt is our product.”
Then there was The Global Climate Coalition, which was started in 1989. Whether in the pages of the WSJ or the halls of the HW Bush Whitehouse, these industry-funded merchants of doubt were all too successful in their mission to “reposition global warming as theory” and not a fact.
Shell was a member until 1997.
