Shell Oil

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Climate Foreknowledge

As early as 1959, Shell was warned about the future consequences of climate collapse such as sea level rise and the role its products played in generating the crisis.[1] By the 1980s, Shell had extensive knowledge about the risks and reality of climate collapse and numerous major political, social, economic and ecological impacts.[2][3] A 1988 internal Shell document called “The Greenhouse Effect,” detailed Shell’s knowledge that climate change was real, that fossil fuels were a principal cause, and that 1.5 to 3.5 degrees Celsius warming was possible. The document also warned that society could turn against fossil fuels if they learned about how serious climate collapse was.[4]

Europe

Nazi Financing

In the years leading up to WW2, the Dutch founder of the Royal Dutch Shell Group, Sir Henri Deterding became an ardent Nazi. He financially backed the Third Reich and met directly with Hitler at Berchtesgaden on behalf of Royal Dutch Shell. Hundreds of Shell employees were fanatical Nazis, and Shell publicly boasted at the time about the importance of its financial contribution to the German economy, in Germany while the country was under Nazi control.[5]

In years leading up to WW2, Shell conspired with partners, Standard Oil, and German chemical giant I.G. Farben, to covertly import oil products, including airplane fuel, from the US into Nazi Germany. [6] As a major financial contributor to Nazi Germany in pre-WW2 years, the Royal Dutch Shell Group, under Dutch leadership, had some responsibility for the death toll in the subsequent war, in which over 50 million people perished. I.G. Farben supplied the Zyklon-B gas used in the German Holocaust to kill millions of people.

Secret Intelligence

Royal Dutch Shell has been a client of Hakluyt, “a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers…” founded by former officials of the English Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), for more than two decades. [7][8][9]

Hakluyt’s record includes being caught planting spies in Greenpeace and other environmental groups on behalf of energy giants British Petroleum (BP) and Shell.[10]

British Cycling

350 Open Letter(Sign Here):

"British Cycling has just announced a sponsorship deal with oil giant Shell - one of the world's worst polluters who are continuing to drill for oil and gas in the face of catastrophic climate breakdown. We can't let them get away with using British Cycling to greenwash their reputation." [11]

Africa

Rhodesian Occupation

Western oil companies – including British Petroleum, Shell, and Mobil – regularly defied the embargo against Rhodesia by not-so-secretly routing supplies through Apartheid South Africa and/or Mozambique (under Portugeuse occupation at the time).[12][13]

Royal Dutch/Shell published its business principles for the first time in 1976, as a direct reaction to bribery allegations against the company in Italy and the allegations of Shell busting sanctions against Rhodesia.[14]

Nigeria Ecocide

The Shell Petroleum Development Company, a joint venture between Shell Oil and the Nigerian State, is responsible for almost half of Nigeria's oil extraction (47%), followed by Exxon Mobil (22%), Chevron (19%) and ENI/Agip (5%).

Poverty in the oil-rich Niger Delta is inseparable from ecocide. Oil extraction started in 1958, promised to the population as the basis for future wealth. Today, the 70,000km² Niger Delta is one of the most polluted regions in the world.

At 2.5 million barrels a day, the country is the sixth biggest oil exporter of the world. Yet while petroleum provides 90% of Nigeria's public revenue, many of the poorest Nigerians live in the Delta region where the oil is drilled from. Soil, rivers and water are contaminated to such a high degree that agriculture and fishing, the former livelihood base of the people, are almost impossible.

The consequences have been disastrous: 20% child mortality, high unemployment rates, mass exodus, extremely high crime rates and forced prostitution.[15]

Water pollution

The Niger Delta is also Africa’s third largest water reservoir and the groundwater is heavily contaminated. In 2011, the World Health Organisation (WHO) found an extremely high concentration of hydrocarbon in Nigeria's groundwater. It was more than 900 times higher than international standards allow and 1000 times higher than the limits defined by the Nigerian State itself.[15]

Soil pollution

Niger Delta soil is also extremely contaminated, damaged up to five metres deep.[15]

Massacre + Exodus

At the end of the 1980s, the government brutally attacked peaceful protests against multinationals and the military regimes. The Ogoni people led the protests, guided by author and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

To suppress the emerging protests, Shell-Nigeria asked the military for help. A massacre followed, along with large-scale jailings without charges and a mass exodus from the Delta. Saro-Wiwa was arrested and put in solitary confinement.

Together with eight others, Saro-Wira was sentenced to death and executed in 1995 — despite international protests.[15]

Propaganda / Cover-Up

After Nigeria's military dictatorship executed playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995, the dictatorship and Shell Oil Company faced international condemnation. Nigeria's security forces had massacred villages and terrorized the indigenous Ogoni tribespeople in order to quell protests against the company's natural gas drilling operations. Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni leader, had denounced Shell for waging an "ecological war" against his people. Nigeria responded by ordering multipage, glossy color advertisements in black-owned U.S. newspapers and inviting newspaper editors on expense-paid "fact-finding tours" of Ogoniland. Minority newspapers in the United States are chronically strapped for cash, and the combination of windfall revenue and guided tours succeeded in blunting criticisms. In fact, several newspapers editorialized that it was "racist" to criticize Nigeria's dismal track record on human rights.[16]

South African Coast

In December of 2021, Shell announced that it would blasting extremely loud shockwaves into the Wild Coast of South Africa, a vital whale breeding ground.

Each shockwave would be louder than a space shuttle launch, and local whales, dolphins, sharks and turtles will be subjected to them every 10 seconds, day and night, for five months, in whale mating season.

If oil is found, the operations and potential oil spills would also disrupt the local communities that depend on eco-tourism and fishing for their livelihoods.[17]

Currently, Shell's offshoring drilling is halted by court order.

[18][19][20][21][22][23]

Turtle Island

Litigation

The state of New Jersey filed a lawsuit October, 2022 against Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, Chevron, British Petroleum, ConocoPhillips, and the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's most powerful lobbying group in which the five oil companies were members.[24]

The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court, states that the companies knew about climate change for decades and actively sought to conceal that information from the public. Instead, they funded PR campaigns aimed at confusing and misleading the public. [25]

The oil companies “concealed and misrepresented the dangers of fossil fuels; disseminated false and misleading information about the existence, causes, and effects of climate change; and aggressively promoted the ever-increasing use of their products at ever-greater volumes,” the complaint states.

Greenwashing

IUCN

See: <https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A3152450/view>

and: <http://www.ililani.media/2016/09/the-shell-iucn-partnership-revisited.html>

Renewables

Despite fossil fuel giant Shell claiming to spend 12% of its annual expenditure on “Renewables and Energy Solutions”, we found that in reality the company only spends 1.5% of its overall expenditure on solar and wind power generation. Alarmingly, it appears that a significant portion of Shell’s spending on “Renewables and Energy Solutions” actually goes to investments in climate-wrecking gas.[26]

Carbon Credits

Verra

See Verra

The Nature Conservancy

<https://www.reutersevents.com/sustainability/how-shells-offsetting-move-could-help-unlock-flood-finance-forests>

The Nature Conservancy has been working with Shell since 2009. On its website, The Nature Conservancy explains that, “Using the Conservancy’s research on natural climate solutions, this work aims to develop business strategies for the company that apply these solutions to help reduce the net carbon impact of the company’s products.”[27]

Holistic Management

Soil Carbon Cowboys

Shell Oil has invested in greenwashing through Holistic Management & its promotion since funding the documentary "Soil Carbon Cowboys" in 2015:[28][29]

Shell’s interest in promoting regenerative ranching was a classic carbon offset scheme — in the words of the film’s director, “What if these oil companies used their money to help ranchers transition to AMP grazing, and then shared in the credits for the carbon being stored in the soil?” With a pitch like that, he landed a grant. In 2016, a second $500,000 grant went to Cowboys cast member and consultant Richard Teague, who has since published scores of academic articles on AMP grazing, but is not required to disclose his associations with Shell, not to mention other financial interests, such as McDonald’s, Dixon Ranches, and the Savory Institute.

Silicon Ranch

In 2020, White Oak Pastures (a major supplier for General Mills) and Silicon Ranch Corporation (Shell Oil's U.S. solar platform) announced a partnership to "bring holistic planned livestock grazing and regenerative land management practices to nearly 2,400 solar farm acres."[30] Shell Oil's solar installation on the White Oak ranch is the "first new-build of its regenerative energy holistic approach,[31] i.e. "holistically managing solar land" in the tradition of Holistic Management as taught by Allan Savory[32].

Like White Oak Pastures, another Silicon Ranch partner - Cabriejo Ranch - "holistically manages the land at Silicon Ranch’s Regenerative Energy® projects in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas" by implementing the Savory Institute’s Ecological Outcome Verification (Land to Market) methodology.[33] The Savory Institute also serves as one of two validators for Shell Oil's Silicon Ranch with its EOV protocol, in addition to the Restore the Earth Foundation.

Silicon Ranch's collaboration with the Pentagon includes the provision of solar installations for bases: [34][35]

Blockchain

Energy Web

In 2017, Energy Web officially launched with 10 founding companies in the energy sector, primarily fossil fuels, including Shell Oil.[36]

In 2018, Microsoft (a major Shell Oil and Equinor petroleum business partner) and several other companies test the first version of Energy Web's first blockchain app, EW Origin.[37]

Upon the launch of Energy Web, Shell Oil's blockchain tech lead told Forbes: "As one of the first affiliates of EWF, of course we are delighted that the chain is live. It’s a huge accomplishment which we are proud to be part of. "[38]

Today, the company proudly advertises on its website that it's "a founding member of Energy Web," and was responsible, along with Energy Web, for completing its "proof of concept of a blockchain solutions to support... the movement towards 24/7 green energy."[39]

Gitcoin

On August 14th, 2023, Gitcoin announced a year-long collaboration with Shell Oil.[40][41]

Fortnite

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/after-decades-climate-deception-shell-uses-fortnite-court-demographic-most

Sources

  1. ↑ https://www.climatefiles.com/shell/1959-shell-earths-carbon-cycle-article/
  2. ↑ https://www.desmog.com/shellknew/
  3. ↑ https://www.desmog.com/2018/04/04/here-what-shellknew-about-climate-change-way-back-1980s/
  4. ↑ https://www.desmog.com/2022/10/18/new-jersey-sues-shell-exxon-api-oil-public-deception-climate/
  5. ↑ shellnazihistory.com
  6. ↑ https://www.shellnazihistory.com/?p=13
  7. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/world/asia/bo-xilai-scandal-and-the-mysterious-neil-heywood.html
  8. ↑ http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/london/mi6-a-death-in-china-and-the-very-secretive-mayfair-company-full-of-spooks-7603151.html
  9. ↑ https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/meet-hillary-clintons-other-more-powerful-shadowy-oppo-research-firm/
  10. ↑ https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2018/03/18/hakluyt-company-and-the-clinton-trump-scandals/
  11. ↑ https://twitter.com/TheFulhamMonk/status/1580486782386597889
  12. ↑ https://scheerpost.com/2020/05/11/the-white-lobby-when-the-u-s-was-the-sanctions-buster-extraordinaire/
  13. ↑ https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/When-Sanctions-Worked%3A-The-Case-of-Rhodesia-Minter-Schmidt/e3bbd96b4fd772ce4330516bfbdeace37441a0c5
  14. ↑ https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/78517862/complete+dissertation.pdf, p. 127
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/shell%E2%80%99s-nigeria-ecocide-creating-refugee-crisis
  16. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20011112032931/http://www.tompaine.com/print.php3?id=1837
  17. ↑ Greenpeace Petition, 11k signatures, https://petition.act.greenpeace.org.nz/oil-stop-shell-seismic-blasting-whales
  18. ↑ https://www.dispatchlive.co.za/news/2021-12-28-breaking-court-orders-shell-to-halt-wild-coast-seismic-blasting/
  19. ↑ https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/safricans-protest-against-shell-oil-exploration-pristine-coastal-area-2021-12-05/
  20. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/03/shell-go-ahead-seismic-tests-whale-breeding-grounds-court-oil-south-africa
  21. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/world/africa/south-africa-shell-oil.html
  22. ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/26/south-africa-shell-wild-coast/
  23. ↑ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02092022/oil-exploration-south-africa-wild-coast/
  24. ↑ https://www.desmog.com/2022/10/18/new-jersey-sues-shell-exxon-api-oil-public-deception-climate/
  25. ↑ https://www.nj.gov/oag/newsreleases22/2022-1018_NJ-Climate-Complaint-FILED.pdf
  26. ↑ https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-gas/shell-faces-groundbreaking-complaint-misleading-us-authorities-and-investors-its-energy-transition-efforts/
  27. ↑ https://redd-monitor.org/2019/04/09/shell-and-natural-climate-solutions-us300-million-for-carbon-offsets/
  28. ↑ https://jacobin.com/2022/03/big-agriculture-funding-regenerative-ranching-amp-grazing-soil-carbon
  29. ↑ https://robbwolf.com/2016/03/18/sustainability-part-2-the-game-changers-of-small-ag/
  30. ↑ https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/solar-farms-will-capture-greenhouse-gases-to-store-in-the-soil-300987117.html>
  31. ↑ https://www.siliconranch.com/regenerative-energy-more-than-electricity/
  32. ↑ https://regenerativeenergy.org/land/
  33. ↑ https://regenerativeenergy.org/people/
  34. ↑ https://www.earlycountynews.com/articles/regenerative-energy-more-than-electricity/
  35. ↑ https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2019/12/u-s-military-bases-find-added-resiliency-from-solar-and-storage-systems/
  36. ↑ https://www.energyweb.org/why-we-exist/
  37. ↑ https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/engie-microsoft-sp-group-dbs-bank-twl-e-on-444145d44af4
  38. ↑ https://www.forbes.com/sites/benjaminpirus/2019/07/16/shell-sees-importance-in-blockchain-plans-to-harness-ewf-public-chain/?sh=7d2a97b124d0
  39. ↑ https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/digitalisation/digital-technologies/blockchain.html
  40. ↑ https://www.gitcoin.co/blog/gitcoin-shell-collaboration
  41. ↑ https://twitter.com/gitcoin/status/1691092823872073728
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