https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05042018/shell-knew-scientists-climate-change-risks-fossil-fuels-global-warming-company-documents-netherlands-lawsuits
[links in on-line article]
Shell Knew Fossil Fuels Created Climate Change Risks Back in 1980s,
Internal Documents Show
A trove of documents shows the oil company’s scientists urged its
leaders to heed the warnings. That could now play into lawsuits over
global warming.
By John H. Cushman Jr.
Internal company documents uncovered by a Dutch news organization show
that the oil giant Shell had a deep understanding, dating at least to
the 1980s, of the science and risks of global warming caused by fossil
fuel emissions.
They show that as the company pondered its responsibility to act,
Shell's scientists urged it to heed the early warnings, even if, as they
said, it might take until the 2000s for the mounting evidence to prove
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were causing unnatural climate change.
"With the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for
society to wait until then before doing anything," company researchers
wrote in a 1988 report based on studies completed in 1986. "The
potential implications for the world are, however, so large that policy
options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry
needs to consider how it should play its part."
Otherwise, a team of Shell experts said, "it could be too late to take
effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the
situation."
For the next decade—as the emerging science was becoming increasingly
robust, and as international efforts to curb heat-trapping emissions
gained steam and calls for action grew more urgent—the company persisted
in emphasizing the lingering uncertainties of climate science and the
costs of ambitious policies, the documents show.
Shell's own "review of the scientific uncertainty and the evolution of
energy systems indicates that policies to curb greenhouse gases beyond
'no regrets' measures could be premature, divert economic resources from
more pressing needs and further distort markets," a February 1995
management brief advised.
The documents were unearthed by the journalist Jelmer Mommers of De
Correspondent, whose investigative article was published on Thursday in
Dutch. Many of the documents, along with explanatory notes, were
released on the Climate Files website, where researcher and climate
advocate Kert Davies maintains extensive archives. To get their work
before a broader audience, they shared embargoed copies of the documents.
What Shell Knew & What It Means for Lawsuits
Just like researchers at other oil and gas companies, notably Exxon,
Shell's scientists and managers understood, before the general public,
that uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions could eventually put its core
businesses at risk—and alter ecosystems and put much of the world's
population in peril.
The accretion of evidence complicates the industry's position as Big Oil
defends itself in a broadening array of climate-related litigation.
On Wednesday, Dutch environmentalists said they plan to sue Royal Dutch
Shell to force it to cut its oil and gas investments and production.
Donald Pols, director of Friends of the Earth
Netherlands/Milieudefensie, said the company "should take its
responsibility to stop wrecking the climate."
Responding to the litigation, Shell said that it has long embraced
climate change science and strongly supports the Paris climate agreement
aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less. But it
said that meeting that target is a complex social challenge, that energy
is important to the global quality of life, and that the issues should
not be tackled in court. Rather, it called for sound government policy
and a cultural shift toward green energy.
Shell is already a defendant in other court cases.
The key legal question in much of the litigation is whether the
companies understood risks of global warming well enough, and early
enough, to be held accountable for damages that are already occurring
and are likely to grow.
'Major Social, Economic, Political Consequences'
The Shell documents released so far don't address in significant detail
questions of liability or whether Shell was properly disclosing risks to
shareholders.
Litigators are sure to note a brief, but telling, remark in the 1988
document: The fossil fuels Shell consumed and sold at the time "account
for the production of 4 percent of the CO2 emitted worldwide from
combustion." Two tables broke the data down.
"In the light of the possible effects of an increase in greenhouse
gases, it is important to examine the likely political responses to
expressions of environmental concern," Shell's report said.
The emerging problem "could have major social, economic and political
consequences," it said—a powerful enough upheaval to be "the greatest in
human history."
By then, Shell had to be acutely aware of the growing political
repercussions of its contribution to the climate problem. After all, the
1988 document was circulated just as NASA scientist James Hansen
testified in Congress that global warming had already arrived and had to
be dealt with urgently.
Shell's What-If Scenario: East Coast Hurricanes
Over the decades, Shell spent considerable effort generating what-if
scenarios to help it grope its way forward.
In one, a 1998 planning document carrying the acronym TINA (for "there
is no alternative"), the company even imagined events in the year 2010
after violent and damaging storms wreaked havoc on the East Coast of the
U.S.
"Although it is not clear whether the storms are caused by climate
change, people are not willing to take further chances," the document
speculates. "After all, two successive IPCC reports since 1995 have
reinforced the human connection to climate change."
"Following the storms, a coalition of environmental NGO's brings a
class-action sit against the U.S. government and fossil-fuel companies
on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have
been saying for years: that something must be done," the scenario states.
How Shell's Thinking on Climate Changed
Shell's documents of the era, like papers from Exxon at the time that
were published in 2015 by InsideClimate News, are full of passages about
the uncertainties that surrounded the emerging science. A nuanced
reading suggests that Shell, then as now, gave more attention to the
need for global action on climate, and did so earlier, than Exxon.
To this day, the company opens the door a bit wider to a more responsive
approach to the climate crisis. But its current thinking continues to
generate debate over whether its vision is ambitious enough.
The Dutch archives trace the evolution of the company's thinking over
years of considerable climate policy turmoil.
For example, Shell participated in the work of the Global Climate
Coalition, founded in 1989 to fight the Kyoto Protocol, only to leave it
10 years later over irreconcilable differences over the protocol's
emissions targets, which Shell embraced.
All the while, concentrations of carbon dioxide moved inexorably upward.
Children born since that time have never lived through a year in which
the world's climate was cooler than the previous average.
One passage from 1988, even though written in a dry corporate style,
reads now like an evocation of this perspective across the generations.
"The changes in climate, being considered here, are at an unaccustomed
distance in time for future planning, even beyond the lifetime of most
of the present decision makers but not beyond intimate (family)
association," it said.
In other words, it said you might not see the results of your decisions,
but your children and grandchildren might.
In the Mid-1990s, Straddling the Line
In a 1995 "management brief" on climate change that stressed its "major
business implications for the fossil fuel industry," Shell conceded the
"general consensus" of its human causes while making a nod to what it
called "well-grounded scepticism." It said "a definitive, unequivocal
position on the science of global warming ... quite simply is beyond
current capabilities."
Still, it suggested that "over the next decades renewable forms of
energy can gradually become competitive" and concluded that "CO2
emissions could peak at about 10 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) a year
before the middle of the next century and decline." (In fact, global
emissions from energy reached 32.5 gigatonnes last year.)
The next year, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was
publishing its second major assessment of climate science, Shell found
itself in a delicate balancing act between accepting the scientific
consensus and arguing that there was still too much uncertainty to
dictate aggressive action.
"Although climate change is a long term issue, today's responses do not
have to be long term," Shell argued. "'Irreversible' actions need to be
avoided."
'An Evolutionary, Not a Revolutionary Process'
In hindsight, it's possible to say that this ambivalence would prove costly.
And the litigation over who should pay these costs will hinge on how
jurists today read this kind of document from the past—along with any
more evidence yet to emerge from these lawsuits.
It's not so much that any one document contains a smoking gun. It's
rather that the steady accumulation of documents, which is bound to
continue, will build up the weight of the evidence.
In that way, the legal question resembles the scientific question Shell
addressed in a 1995 document called "Is Climate Change Occurring Already?"
"Detection of a human induced change in the earth's climate will be an
evolutionary and not a revolutionary process," it said. "It is likely
that a slow accumulation of evidence, rather than a 'smoking gun,' will
indicate man-made emissions as the cause of some part of the observed
climate change."