In
1991, Shell produced a public documentary on global warming called
Climate of Concern. It warned that trends in global temperatures
raised serious risks of famines, floods and climate refugees. But in
the quarter century since, Shell has continued to invest heavily in
fossil fuels
‘Shell
knew’: oil giant's 1991 film warned of climate change danger
Public
information film unseen for years shows Shell had clear grasp of
global warming 26 years ago but has not acted accordingly since, say
critics
Film
warned of climate change ‘at rate faster than at any time since end
of the ice age’
Damian
Carrington and Jelmer Mommers
@dpcarrington
Tuesday
28 February 2017 05.45 GMT
The
oil giant Shell issued a stark warning of the catastrophic risks of
climate change more than a quarter of century ago in a prescient 1991
film that has been rediscovered.
However,
since then the company has invested heavily in highly polluting oil
reserves and helped lobby against climate action, leading to
accusations that Shell knew the grave risks of global warming but did
not act accordingly.
Shell’s
28-minute film, called Climate of Concern, was made for public
viewing, particularly in schools and universities. It warned of
extreme weather, floods, famines and climate refugees as fossil fuel
burning warmed the world. The serious warning was “endorsed by a
uniquely broad consensus of scientists in their report to the United
Nations at the end of 1990”, the film noted.
“If
the weather machine were to be wound up to such new levels of energy,
no country would remain unaffected,” it says. “Global warming is
not yet certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be
irresponsible. Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.”
A
separate 1986 report, marked “confidential” and also seen by the
Guardian, notes the large uncertainties in climate science at the
time but nonetheless states: “The changes may be the greatest in
recorded history.”
The
predictions in the 1991 film for temperature and sea level rises and
their impacts were remarkably accurate, according to scientists, and
Shell was one of the first major oil companies to accept the reality
and dangers of climate change.
But,
despite this early and clear-eyed view of the risks of global
warming, Shell invested many billions of dollars in highly polluting
tar sand operations and on exploration in the Arctic. It also cited
fracking as a “future opportunity” in 2016, despite its own 1998
data showing exploitation of unconventional oil and gas was
incompatible with climate goals.
The projections for future
global warming in Shell’s 1991 film stand up “pretty well”
today, according to Prof Tom Wigley. Photograph: Climate of Concern
The
film was obtained by the Correspondent, a Dutch online journalism
platform, and shared with the Guardian, and lauds commercial-scale
solar and wind power that already existed in 1991. Shell has recently
lobbied successfully to undermine European renewable energy targets
and is estimated to have spent $22m in 2015 lobbying against climate
policies. The company’s investments in low-carbon energy have been
minimal compared to its fossil fuel investments.
Shell
has also been a member of industry lobby groups that have fought
climate action, including the so-called Global Climate Coalition
until 1998; the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council
(Alec) until 2015; and remains a member of the Business Roundtable
and the American Petroleum Institute today.
Another
oil giant, Exxon Mobil, is under investigation by the US Securities
and Exchange Commission and state attorney generals for allegedly
misleading investors about the risks climate change posed to its
business. The company said they are confident they are compliant. In
early 2016, a group of congressmen asked the Department of Justice to
also “investigate whether Shell’s actions around climate change
violated federal law”.
“They
knew. Shell told the public the truth about climate change in 1991
and they clearly never got round to telling their own board of
directors,” said Tom Burke at the green thinktank E3G, who was a
member of Shell’s external review committee from 2012-14 and has
also advised BP and the mining giant Rio Tinto. “Shell’s
behaviour now is risky for the climate but it is also risky for their
shareholders. It is very difficult to explain why they are continuing
to explore and develop high-cost reserves.”
Bill
McKibben, a leading US environmentalist, said: “The fact that Shell
understood all this in 1991, and that a quarter-century later it was
trying to open up the Arctic to oil-drilling, tells you all you’ll
ever need to know about the corporate ethic of the fossil fuel
industry. Shell made a big difference in the world – a difference
for the worse.”
Prof
Tom Wigley, the climate scientist who was head of the Climate
Research Unit at the University of East Anglia when it helped Shell
with the 1991 film, said: “It’s one of the best little films that
I have seen on climate change ever. One could show this today and
almost all would still be relevant.” He said Shell’s actions
since 1991 had “absolutely not” been consistent with the film’s
warning.
A
Shell spokeswoman said: “Our position on climate change is well
known; recognising the climate challenge and the role energy has in
enabling a decent quality of life. Shell continues to call for
effective policy to support lower carbon business and consumer
choices and opportunities such as government lead carbon
pricing/trading schemes.
“Today,
Shell applies a $40 per tonne of CO2 internal project screening value
to project decision-making and has developed leadership positions in
natural gas and sugarcane ethanol; the lowest carbon hydrocarbon and
biofuel respectively,” she said.
Patricia
Espinosa, the UN’s climate change chief, said change by the big oil
companies was vital to tackling global warming. “They are a big
part of the global economy, so if we do not get them on board, we
will not be able to achieve this transformation of the economy we
need,” she said.
The
investments the oil majors are making in clean energy are, Espinosa
said, “very small, the activities in which they are engaging are
still small and do not have the impact that we really need.”
Espinosa,
who visited Shell’s headquarters in the Hague in December, said:
“They are clear that this [climate change] agenda has to do with
the future of their company and that business as usual, not doing
anything, will lead to crisis and losses in their business.”
Exxon
knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers
for 27 more years
A
newly unearthed missive from Lenny Bernstein, a climate expert with
the oil firm for 30 years, shows concerns over high presence of
carbon dioxide in enormous gas field in south-east Asia factored into
decision not to tap it
ExxonMobil
chief named as Donald Trump’s secretary of state
Suzanne Goldenberg,
US environment correspondent
@suzyji
Wednesday 8 July
2015 21.41 BST
ExxonMobil, the
world’s biggest oil company, knew as early as 1981 of climate
change – seven years before it became a public issue, according to
a newly discovered email from one of the firm’s own scientists.
Despite this the firm spent millions over the next 27 years to
promote climate denial.
The email from
Exxon’s in-house climate expert provides evidence the company was
aware of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and
the potential for carbon-cutting regulations that could hurt its
bottom line, over a generation ago – factoring that knowledge into
its decision about an enormous gas field in south-east Asia. The
field, off the coast of Indonesia, would have been the single largest
source of global warming pollution at the time.
“Exxon first got
interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to
develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia,” Lenny Bernstein, a
30-year industry veteran and Exxon’s former in-house climate
expert, wrote in the email. “This is an immense reserve of natural
gas, but it is 70% CO2,” or carbon dioxide, the main driver of
climate change.
However, Exxon’s
public position was marked by continued refusal to acknowledge the
dangers of climate change, even in response to appeals from the
Rockefellers, its founding family, and its continued financial
support for climate denial. Over the years, Exxon spent more than
$30m on thinktanks and researchers that promoted climate denial,
according to Greenpeace.
Exxon said on
Wednesday that it now acknowledges the risk of climate change and
does not fund climate change denial groups.
Some climate
campaigners have likened the industry to the conduct of the tobacco
industry which for decades resisted the evidence that smoking causes
cancer.
In the email
Bernstein, a chemical engineer and climate expert who spent 30 years
at Exxon and Mobil and was a lead author on two of the United
Nations’ blockbuster IPCC climate science reports, said climate
change first emerged on the company’s radar in 1981, when the
company was considering the development of south-east Asia’s
biggest gas field, off Indonesia.
That was seven years
ahead of other oil companies and the public, according to Bernstein’s
account.
Climate change was
largely confined to the realm of science until 1988, when the climate
scientist James Hansen told Congress that global warming was caused
by the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due to the
burning of fossil fuels.
By that time, it was
clear that developing the Natuna site would set off a huge amount of
climate change pollution – effectively a “carbon bomb”,
according to Bernstein.
“When I first
learned about the project in 1989, the projections were that if
Natuna were developed and its CO2 vented to the atmosphere, it would
be the largest point source of CO2 in the world and account for about
1% of projected global CO2 emissions. I’m sure that it would still
be the largest point source of CO2, but since CO2 emissions have
grown faster than projected in 1989, it would probably account for a
smaller fraction of global CO2 emissions,” Bernstein wrote.
The email was
written in response to an inquiry on business ethics from the
Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics at Ohio University.
“What it shows is
that Exxon knew years earlier than James Hansen’s testimony to
Congress that climate change was a reality; that it accepted the
reality, instead of denying the reality as they have done publicly,
and to such an extent that it took it into account in their decision
making, in making their economic calculation,” the director of the
institute, Alyssa Bernstein (no relation), told the Guardian.
“One thing that
occurs to me is the behavior of the tobacco companies denying the
connection between smoking and lung cancer for the sake of profits,
but this is an order of magnitude greater moral offence, in my
opinion, because what is at stake is the fate of the planet,
humanity, and the future of civilisation, not to be melodramatic.”
Bernstein’s
response, first posted on the institute’s website last October, was
released by the Union of Concerned Scientists on Wednesday as part of
a report on climate disinformation promoted by companies such as
ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Peabody Energy, called the Climate
Deception Dossiers.
Asked about
Bernstein’s comments, Exxon said climate science in the early 1980s
was at a preliminary stage, but the company now saw climate change as
a risk.
The
science in 1981 on this subject was in the very, very early days and
there was considerable division of opinion
Richard Keil, Exxon
spokesman
“The science in
1981 on this subject was in the very, very early days and there was
considerable division of opinion,” Richard Keil, an Exxon
spokesman, said. “There was nobody you could have gone to in 1981
or 1984 who would have said whether it was real or not. Nobody could
provide a definitive answer.”
He rejected the idea
that Exxon had funded groups promoting climate denial. “I am here
to talk to you about the present,” he said. “We have been
factoring the likelihood of some kind of carbon tax into our business
planning since 2007. We do not fund or support those who deny the
reality of climate change.”
Exxon, unlike other
companies and the public at large in the early 1980s, was already
aware of climate change – and the prospect of regulations to limit
the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, according to
Bernstein’s account.
“In the 1980s,
Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate
change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna and other
potential projects. They were well ahead of the rest of industry in
this awareness. Other companies, such as Mobil, only became aware of
the issue in 1988, when it first became a political issue,” he
wrote.
“Natural resource
companies – oil, coal, minerals – have to make investments that
have lifetimes of 50-100 years. Whatever their public stance,
internally they make very careful assessments of the potential for
regulation, including the scientific basis for those regulations,”
Bernstein wrote in the email.
Naomi Oreskes, a
Harvard University professor who researches the history of climate
science, said it was unsurprising Exxon would have factored climate
change in its plans in the early 1980s – but she disputed
Bernstein’s suggestion that other companies were not. She also took
issue with Exxon’s assertion of uncertainty about the science in
the 1980s, noting the National Academy of Science describing a
consensus on climate change from the 1970s.
The White House and
the National Academy of Sciences came out with reports on climate
change in the 1970s, and government scientific agencies were studying
climate change in the 1960s, she said. There were also a number of
major scientific meetings on climate change in the 1970s.
“I find it
difficult to believe that an industry whose business model depends on
fossil fuels could have been completely ignoring major environmental
reports, major environmental meetings taken place in which carbon
dioxide and climate change were talked about,” she said in an
interview with the Guardian.
The East Natuna gas
field, about 140 miles north-east of the Natuna islands in the South
China Sea and 700 miles north of Jakarta, is the biggest in
south-east Asia, with about 46tn cubic ft (1.3tn cubic metres) of
recoverable reserves.
However, Exxon did
not go into production on the field.
Bernstein writes in
his email to Ohio University: “Corporations are interested in
environmental impacts only to the extent that they affect profits,
either current or future. They may take what appears to be altruistic
positions to improve their public image, but the assumption
underlying those actions is that they will increase future profits.
ExxonMobil is an interesting case in point.”
Bernstein, who is
now in his mid-70s, spent 20 years as a scientist at Exxon and 10
years at Mobil. During the 1990s he headed the science and technology
advisory committee of the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group
that lobbied aggressively against the scientific consensus around the
causes of climate change.
However, GCC climate
experts accepted the impact of human activity on climate change in
their internal communications as early as 1995, according to a
document filed in a 2009 lawsuit and included in the UCS dossier.
The document, a
17-page primer on climate science produced by Bernstein’s advisory
committee, discounts the alternate theories about the causes of
climate change promoted by climate contrarian researchers such as
Willie Soon, who was partly funded by Exxon.
“The contrarian
theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of
climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against
the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate
change,” the advisory committee said.
The 1995 primer was
never released for publication. A subsequent version, which was
publicly distributed in 1998, removed the reference to “contrarian
theories”, and continued to dispute the science underlying climate
change.
Kenneth Kimmel, the
president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said ExxonMobil and
the other companies profiled in its report had failed to take
responsibility about the danger to the public of producing fossil
fuels.
“Instead of taking
responsibility, they have either directly – or indirectly through
trade and industry groups – sown doubt about the science of climate
change and fought efforts to cut emissions,” he wrote in a
blogpost. “I believe that the conduct outlined in the UCS report
puts the fossil fuel companies’ social license at risk. And once
that social license is gone, it is very hard to get it back. Just
look at what happened to tobacco companies after litigation finally
pried open the documents that exposed decades of misinformation and
deception.”
Keil, the ExxonMobil
spokesman, confirmed that the company had decided not to develop
Natuna, but would not comment on the reasons. “There could be a
huge range of reasons why we don’t develop projects,” he said.
Full text of
scientist’s email
Below is the text of
an email from Lenny Bernstein to the director of the Institute for
Applied and Professional Ethics at Ohio University, Alyssa Bernstein
(no relation), who had asked for ideas to stimulate students for an
ethics day announced by the Carnegie Council.
Alyssa’s right.
Feel free to share this e-mail with her. Corporations are interested
in environmental impacts only to the extent that they affect profits,
either current or future. They may take what appears to be altruistic
positions to improve their public image, but the assumption
underlying those actions is that they will increase future profits.
ExxonMobil is an interesting case in point.
Exxon first got
interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to
develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia. This is an immense
reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2. That CO2 would have to be
separated to make the natural gas usable. Natural gas often contains
CO2 and the technology for removing CO2 is well known. In 1981 (and
now) the usual practice was to vent the CO2 to the atmosphere. When I
first learned about the project in 1989, the projections were that if
Natuna were developed and its CO2 vented to the atmosphere, it would
be the largest point source of CO2 in the world and account for about
1% of projected global CO2 emissions. I’m sure that it would still
be the largest point source of CO2, but since CO2 emissions have
grown faster than projected in 1989, it would probably account for a
smaller fraction of global CO2 emissions.
The alternative to
venting CO2 to the atmosphere is to inject it into ground. This
technology was also well known, since the oil industry had been
injecting limited quantities of CO2 to enhance oil recovery. There
were many questions about whether the CO2 would remain in the ground,
some of which have been answered by Statoil’s now almost 20 years
of experience injecting CO2 in the North Sea. Statoil did this
because the Norwegian government placed a tax on vented CO2. It was
cheaper for Statoil to inject CO2 than pay the tax. Of course,
Statoil has touted how much CO2 it has prevented from being emitted.
In the 1980s, Exxon
needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change
to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna and other potential
projects. They were well ahead of the rest of industry in this
awareness. Other companies, such as Mobil, only became aware of the
issue in 1988, when it first became a political issue. Natural
resource companies – oil, coal, minerals – have to make
investments that have lifetimes of 50-100 years. Whatever their
public stance, internally they make very careful assessments of the
potential for regulation, including the scientific basis for those
regulations. Exxon NEVER denied the potential for humans to impact
the climate system. It did question – legitimately, in my opinion –
the validity of some of the science.
Political battles
need to personify the enemy. This is why liberals spend so much time
vilifying the Koch brothers – who are hardly the only big money
supporters of conservative ideas. In climate change, the first
villain was a man named Donald Pearlman, who was a lobbyist for Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait. (In another life, he was instrumental in getting
the US Holocaust Museum funded and built.) Pearlman’s usefulness as
a villain ended when he died of lung cancer – he was a heavy smoker
to the end.
Then the villain was
the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a trade organization of energy
producers and large energy users. I was involved in GCC for a while,
unsuccessfully trying to get them to recognize scientific reality.
(That effort got me on to the front page of the New York Times, but
that’s another story.) Environmental group pressure was successful
in putting GCC out of business, but they also lost their villain.
They needed one which wouldn’t die and wouldn’t go out of
business. Exxon, and after its merger with Mobil ExxonMobil, fit the
bill, especially under its former CEO, Lee Raymond, who was vocally
opposed to climate change regulation. ExxonMobil’s current CEO, Rex
Tillerson, has taken a much softer line, but ExxonMobil has not lost
its position as the personification of corporate, and especially
climate change, evil. It is the only company mentioned in Alyssa’s
e-mail, even though, in my opinion, it is far more ethical that many
other large corporations.
Having spent twenty
years working for Exxon and ten working for Mobil, I know that much
of that ethical behavior comes from a business calculation that it is
cheaper in the long run to be ethical than unethical. Safety is the
clearest example of this. ExxonMobil knows all too well the cost of
poor safety practices. The Exxon Valdez is the most public, but far
from the only, example of the high cost of unsafe operations. The
value of good environmental practices are more subtle, but a facility
that does a good job of controlling emission and waste is a well run
facility, that is probably maximizing profit. All major companies
will tell you that they are trying to minimize their internal CO2
emissions. Mostly, they are doing this by improving energy efficiency
and reducing cost. The same is true for internal recycling, again a
practice most companies follow. Its [sic] just good engineering.
I could go on, but
this e-mail is long enough.
