Here we go again, another Warmist group suing a fossil fuels company rather than advocating that all their fellow Warmists stop using fossil fuels. The accompanying photo shows great parental responsibility
Environmental Groups to Sue Shell Over Climate Change
Climate activists delivered a court summons Friday to oil company Shell in a court case aimed at forcing it to do more to rein in carbon emissions.
Friends of the Earth Netherlands, one of the groups involved, said it wants a court in The Hague to order Shell to reduce its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2010 levels and to zero by 2050, in line with the Paris Climate Accord.
“Shell’s directors still do not want to say goodbye to oil and gas,” said the group’s director, Donald Pols. “They would pull the world into the abyss. The judge can prevent this from happening.”
The summons, more than 250 pages long and backed up by boxes of supporting documents, was wheeled into the headquarters on a trolley as a couple of hundred activists looked on. (snip)
The Shell case, which has more than 17,000 claimants, follows a groundbreaking ruling by a Hague court in 2015 that ordered the Dutch government to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels.
The new case is not seeking compensation; it focuses instead on pushing Shell to take more action to rein in emissions.
Here’s what would be fun: Shell could hire private detectives to follow those 17,000 claimants around and video them in their fossil fueled vehicles, especially when they are at the gas station. Bonus points for filling up at a Shell station.
They could also just refuse to sell their products in the Netherlands. Have fun getting government services without the gasoline, oil, and other products. They could give the kid back what he’s giving them.
Porter Good is helping the oil companies spread lies and misinformation.
Is Good doing this for free, or does he receive compensation for his campaign of deceit?
Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago
By Shannon Hall
Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation — an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.
Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,†says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.
In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees — a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” In other words, Exxon needed to act.
But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,†ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.â€
One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,†Oreskes says.
But experts are still piecing together Exxon’s misconception puzzle. Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf). “We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt,†says union president Kenneth Kimmel. “There’s even a quote in it that says something like ‘Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.’ So it’s pretty stark.â€
Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,†Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.â€
Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon’s deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. “I think there are a lot of parallels,†Kimmell says. Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is global in its reach,†Kimmel says.
To prove this, Bob Ward — who on behalf of the U.K.’s Royal Academy sent a letter to Exxon in 2006 claiming its science was “inaccurate and misleading†— thinks a thorough investigation is necessary. “Because frankly the episode with tobacco was probably the most disgraceful episode one could ever imagine,†Ward says. Kimmell agrees. These reasons “really highlight the responsibility that these companies have to come clean, acknowledge this, and work with everyone else to cut out emissions and pay for some of the cost we’re going to bear as soon as possible,†Kimmell says.
It doesn’t appear, however, that Kimmell will get his retribution. Jeffers claims the investigation’s finds are “just patently untrue, misleading, and we reject them completely†— words that match Ward’s claims against them nearly a decade ago.
Oil companies knew, so what. Can you elaborate on how taxes and the destruction of the US will lower CO2. Why do liberals believe hoaxes such as Russia and Climate fraud?
Shorter versson:
One scientist at Exxon made fantastic claims. Exxon does not support those claims. What you have here is a very elaborate effort to make a nothingburger look like something tasty. Liberals always fall for the superficial masking as the substantial.
“One scientist at Exxon made fantastic claims.”
That’s a lie. Climate deniers lie. That’s what liars do.
No Bill you are the liar and sick.
And Commies accuse others of what they always do.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.â€
― Upton Sinclair
Of course ExxonMobil knew, and of course they decided to keep making billions of dollars. But it’s not the oil companies’ responsibility, it’s governments’. Dr. Hansen was right in 1988 and we did nothing. Just think if 30 years ago the US had decided to price oil/coal/gas at the true social cost. The rest of the world would follow and we’d be in less trouble now. But the fossil-fuel companies and their minions in Congress and in the right-wing echo chamber decided to follow the dollars.
So you do want a dictatorial government to impose the kind of radical change you say we need.
Good to know.
Since acid rain was all the rage in the mid 70s, of course they knew it.
They also knew it was all a lot of nonsense.
What would actually be an interesting headline is “Scientific American Refuses To Continue To Shill For AGW Liars”. Now that’s a headline. Good follow ups would be ” Naomi Oreskes Admits she’s paid by Harvard to promote AGW”. Or maybe “Fake News once again uses Greenpeace as “expert” when they are little more than financed and funded accomplices to AGW.
Here’s an actual scientist who is brave enough to tell the truth.
https://youtu.be/GujLcfdovE8
Still waiting for Kye to find his backbone and answer the questions he was asked yesterday and the day before.
Still waiting for an answer to the question posed this morning concerning the measured increase in OLR which is diametrically opposed to Hansen’s “greenhouse” theory.
Don’t go running to Skeptical Science or to the woods again you little coward.
Lil,
Your question was answered fully, clearly and distinctly. Re-read what was written earlier.
Do you need explained to you more simply?
I think you’re just trying to save face after being gutted like a catfish previously.
It’s what liars do.
Clearly, Jeffery has no answer and is bluffing his way out again.
Page 79 of the Commie playbook.
Did you not read the answer? It was complete.
But this is what right-wingers do – re-disc the same ground over and over and over ad nauseum.
See this previous comment for the explanation. It was in the Burgers and Fossil Fuels thread. Sorry you missed it.
Bill Bear says:
April 6, 2019 at 9:17 am
As the Earth warms it emits MORE long wave infrared radiation, but the increased CO2 in the atmosphere blocks certain wavelengths of infrared, warming the atmosphere, oceans and surface.
But what difference does it make to you since you think all research data that contradicts you is fraudulent.
Since I answer your questions (the few that make sense)… Where does all that CO2 in the atmosphere accumulate? Measurements show it throughout the troposphere, you imply that it sinks to the ground.
We’re all waiting for you to find sanity.
Funny the guy who hides behind his neuroses talks about backbone to a man with 2 Silver Stars and a Bronze Star.
Of course, you were rooting for the bad guys.
A man who claims to have medals from the Vietnam era.
What did you do during the war, formy?
Why not sue Heineken/Amstel to demand they reduce beer production by 50%? By liberal logic, that will reduce CO2 emissions AND alcoholism by 50%.