Today Shell is celebrating 50 years of operations in the North Sea. But there isn’t really much to celebrate. Fifty years ago, the oil industry already knew that climate change was a threat, yet they carried on regardless. The American Petroleum Institute had commissioned US scientists to look at the consequences of burning fossil fuels. In 1968 those scientists said that carbon dioxide was definitely a concern, that continuing to burn fossil fuels would lead to increases in temperature at the earth’s surface, and that significant temperature increase could lead to melting ice caps, rising seas, and potentially serious environmental damage worldwide. They said “there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.” They said that 50 years ago. And so began half a century of wilful denial. In the 1970s another oil company, Exxon, spent millions of dollars on newspaper ads trying to cast doubt on climate change. Meanwhile the company’s own scientists were telling senior executives that climate change is real. In 1998 Shell’s own scientists wrote an internal report warning that “by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilise the situation.”
Scotsman 14th Aug 2018 read more »
