The more things change, the more they stay the same. Recent public relations moves by the fossil fuel industry to try and present itself as part of the solution are not only insincere, they’re not even new.
A recent Dutch investigation exposed how a coalition of industry groups funded a Dutch denier, Frits Böttcher, in the 90s, until companies like Shell got worried about the public perception of funding a denier and instead asked him to make it look like he was doing more Earth-friendly research.
Based on what is described as “15.9 meters of documents” that Böttcher left to an archive, the investigation delves into his “Global Institute for the study of natural resources,” an industry front group for which Shell was its “number one” sponsor – in Böttcher’s words, a “godfather, so to speak.” Other sponsors included a variety of Dutch companies and other industry giants, like Texaco and Bayer, who paid for Böttcher to undertake the same sort of denial campaign that we’ve seen in the US and elsewhere, opposing “the CO2 witch hunt.”.
From attacking the IPCC as political, to denying CO2’s contribution to raising temperatures, to the old stalwart that CO2 is plant food, Böttcher’s work in Europe mirrored the efforts of similar denial coalitions here in the US. With a reference to Merchants of Doubt, the article summarizes the industry’s strategy as “find a renowned scientist, fund him to sow doubt about the damaging consequences of your product, and subsequently build your lobby against government regulation upon this foundation.”
While this worked in the early 90s, by 1996, Böttcher wrote that Shell was moving away from directly funding deniers, “fearing public opinion.” But after Böttcher was allowed to “come in and plead [his] case,” in 1997 they funded his new project on “energy and sustainable development.”
Just as we see today with Big Oil’s attempts to reframe itself as climate heroes, decades ago it was playing the same game, giving Böttcher “free reign” and full funding for his project on the “dominant role of energy in society” that aimed to “warn politicians and economists who are glib about the implementation of drastic energy taxes and comparable interventions.”
Similarly, Texaco told Böttcher that they wanted to continue supporting him, but he needed to “appear to be working on something else.” So Böttcher incorporated Sustainable Development into his work’s name.
This is an important lesson we should keep in mind as Shell continues to try and buy social influencers, and Big Oil paints itself as climate heroes. This is just a continuation of the established pattern, in which the industry funds deniers to tamp down public outrage until public opinion turns against them. At that point producers pretend to be on board with climate action while still secretly undercutting it, until the heat dies down enough for them to resume funding outright denial.
What began in the late 80s and played out through the ‘90s to oppose the Kyoto agreement repeated itself through the 00’s when George W. Bush was in power and real regulations weren’t on the table. Then denial ramped up when Obama promised regulations and pushed for the Paris Agreement, and now we can see now they’re back to pretending to be part of the solution because they know Trump will prevent any real chance for federal climate action in the face of the rising public demand for action.
So although this investigation doesn’t tell us anything particularly new, it does prove that while climate change may not be cyclical, denial sure is.