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Shell calculated that fossil fuels which are marketed and used by the Group in
1984 account for the production of 4% of the CO2 emitted worldwide from
combustion. In so doing, it not only demonstrated the ability of fossil fuel
producers to measure their own impact, it provided implicit support for similar
approaches applied in the Carbon Majors analysis nearly 3 decades later.
1991- Shell’s Climate of Concern film demonstrates that risks of extreme
weather events, super-powered storms and potential widescale human
displacement were not only foreseeable but foreseen.
• Acknowledged that the climate might “change too fast, perhaps, for life to
adapt without severe dislocation.”
• Discussed the scale and scope of risks, including
– changes to weather patterns;
– “the increasing frequency of abnormal weather;”
– saltwater intrusion in coastal ecosystems and freshwaters;
– sea level rise;
– increasingly destructive storm surges, noting “warmer seas could make
such destructive surges more frequent and even more ferocious;”
– pollution of groundwater;
– impacts on agriculture;
– displacement of people living on low-lying islands;
– potential for “greenhouse refugees” displaced by shifting climates.
• Acknowledged and warned that “If the weather machine were to be wound up
to such new levels of energy, no country would remain unaffected.”
Climate of Concern demonstrates that more than a quarter century before
Typhoon Haiyan, the potential for increasingly powerful and increasingly
destructive climate-fueled storms, and the unique vulnerability to those
impacts for people in coastal and low-lying areas, was explicitly recognized
by major producers of fossil fuels.
Q21: What did they do with that information, if you know?
A21:
In 1965—At a time when the oil industry was demonstrably on notice
that CO2, the most abundant waste product from the burning of fossil, was
of significant and growing concern as a possible global pollutant, the
American Petroleum Institute actively and successfully opposed
governmental funding for research into pollution free electric vehicles. In
testimony before the United States Senate, the President of the American
Petroleum Institute urged Congress that targeted funding for electric vehicle
research was unnecessary, because by the time electric cars became viable,
internal combustion engines would be pollution free. (Annex F)
Even as climate warnings from its own scientists became more frequent and
more serious, the oil industry actively opposed early efforts to increase fuel
economy in passenger cars to save resources and reduce emissions from
automobiles. After federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ)
standards were adopted in 1975, the oil industry continued to actively oppose
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