Shell: “Don’t Just Stand There. Plant A Tree”

In October 1989, Shell put out a confidential report titled “Scenarios 1989-2010: Challenge and response”. The report states that,

Although there are many areas of environmental concern, climate change - the greenhouse effect, global warming - is of especial significance because:

• It is the most global of environmental problems.

• It is directly tied to man’s economic activities by the use of energy.

Hence, it could be the most important issue for the energy industry.

The report is part of a collection of 201 company documents, correspondence, reports, and academic studies compiled by Dutch climate activist Vatan Hüzeir. The documents show that from the mid-1970s Shell was supporting research that clearly showed the dangers of continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Sustainable world vs Global mercantilism

The report imagines two possible scenarios. “Sustainable world addresses the potential problem and greatly reduces emissions compared to global mercantilism.” Sustainable world, the report states, “will not prevent the problem arising, but it could mitigate the problem”.

Under sustainable world, greenhouse gas emissions would peak in 2000 and decrease rapidly from then. CO₂ concentrations would level off at about 400 ppm.

Under the global mercantilism scenario, Shell predicts that emissions will continue rising. This is, of course the path we are currently on. The prediction for concentration of CO₂ in 2023 is pretty accurate (it reached 419 ppm in February 2023).

Shell predicts that under the global mercantilism model,

There would be more violent weather - more storms, more droughts, more deluges. Mean sea level would rise at least 30 cm. Agricultural patterns would be most dramatically changed. Something as simple as a moderate change in rainfall pattern disrupts eco-systems, and many species of trees, plants, animals and insects would not be able to move and adapt.

Shell’s report also predicts an “unprecedented” refugee problem. “Boundaries would count for little - overwhelmed by numbers,” Shell writes. “Conflicts would abound. Civilisation could prove a fragile thing.”

Ben Franta @BenFranta

Compiled by @VatanHuzeir, the latest cache of internal documents describing Big Oil's concealed knowledge of global warming is a gold mine. One bombshell is a confidential @Shell scenario report from 1989 which imagined two futures: SUSTAINABLE WORLD and GLOBAL MERCANTILISM 🧵

Shell’s CEO: “I fundamentally believe in the role of oil and gas”

Shell, of course, decided to help push the world into exactly this scenario. For almost a decade, Shell funded the the Global Climate Coalition, an industry lobby group formed in 1989 to represent the fossil fuel industry. Shell stopped funding GCC in 1998, but it still backs several anti-climate lobby groups.

A 2019 study showed that in the four years since the Paris Agreement, Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron spent a total of more than US$1 billion on delaying, controlling, and lobbying against climate legislation.

Since about 2000, Shell has claimed to be moving away from burning fossil fuels. In fact, between 2010 and 2018, Shell has used just 1% of its long-term investments on low-carbon energy like wind and solar.

The company is still exploring for new oil and gas sources. Shell has no plans to reduce the amount of oil and gas it produces before 2030.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Wael Sawan, Shell’s new CEO said, “I fundamentally believe in the role of oil and gas for a long, long time to come.”

Shell and carbon offsets

While doing little or nothing to reduce the amount of oil and gas it produces, Shell is very keen on offsetting. The 1989 confidential report includes a box about a tree planting project in Guatemala:

Don’t Just Stand There. Plant A Tree

A tree is a CO₂ collector. Scientists, foresters, and environmentalists are exploring the feasibility of planting enough trees on a crash basis to ease the threat of global warming. The size of the job appears daunting - one estimate is that enough more trees [sic] to cover an area one-half the size of the USA are need to absorb today’s CO₂ emissions. but undertaking large-scale tree planting programmes on degraded tropical lands, encouraging farmers to plant trees on erodable set-aside land, and making urban areas more green with trees are some of the proposals.

A model effort is one announced a year ago. Applied Energy Services of Arlington, Virginia, is helping to pay for the planting of 52 million trees on plantations and farm plots in Guatemala. That number of trees are claimed to be able to absorb as much CO₂ as will be emitted by a new coal-fired generating plant AES is building in Connecticut. This 180 megawatt plant will emit an estimated 15 million tonnes of CO₂ over its 40 year lifetime.

REDD-Monitor wrote about this project in Guatemala in 2016.

Hannah Wittman of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia studied the impacts of the tree planting project on farmers’ livelihoods. Wittman found land use conflicts as a result of the tree planting. When farmers started planting trees, less land was available for growing food, resulting in food shortages in the area. Activities such as gathering fuelwood for cooking became criminalised, resulting in conflicts over rights to the trees.

Ten years after the project started, an evaluation by Winrock International (which had helped set up the carbon project) found that the tree planting project was falling far below what was needed for AES’s offset target. Farmers did not receive direct payments for planting trees, and many were not aware that the trees were storing carbon to offset greenhouse gas emissions from AES’s coal-fired power plant in Connecticut.

In 1999, the first meeting of the International Emissions Trading Association took place in Shell’s headquarters. IETA exists to promote carbon trading. It was created by big polluters and many of the world’s biggest oil and gas corporations are members, including BP, Chevron, Enel, Equinor, Repsol, Shell, and TotalEnergies.

IETA was one of the founders, together with The Climate Group and the World Economic Forum, of the Washington DC-based carbon standards organisation Verra. Three employees of Shell are part of Verra’s Jurisdictional and Nested REDD+ Stakeholder Group.

At COP25 in Madrid in 2019, IETA launched its Markets for Natural Climate Solutions initiative. Shell is one of the founding members along with BP, Chevron, and Woodside Energy.

In 2019, Shell announced that it would spend US$300 million over three years on carbon forest projects to offset its emissions. Shell recently announced that it would spend US$450 million on carbon offsetting projects. The reality is that these offsets are worse than doing nothing.

In May 2021, a court in the Hague ordered Shell to cut its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of 2030 compared with 2019 levels. That is precisely what Shell should do, rather than using the dangerous distraction of offsets to continue profiting from destruction.

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