Campaigners backing attempts to sue Shell over a typhoon in the Philippines have launched an online archive showing that the British oil major knew that burning fossil fuels could harm the climate as early as the 1960s.
ExposeShell.com features documents including a 1966 memo Shell commissioned from British scientist James Lovelock and the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, a confidential 1988 report predicting that human-caused warming could trigger “dramatic” changes in sea level, ocean currents, weather and precipitation — “larger than any that have occurred over the last 12,000 years.” [Read these and other documents in the DeSmog series #ShellKnew]
The interactive site went live as Shell was due to announce its latest third-quarter earnings — which are expected to rise on the back of surging oil prices due to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
“We don’t need any more reports to us that this big oily industry has been creating disaster,” Robin Wells, director of Fossil Free London, one of the groups behind the website, said in a statement. “Shell researched the reality but tore up the truth and locked it in the dark. Now, we are all facing the disastrous consequences.”
Fossil Free London protesters took to the streets outside Shell’s head office in London on Thursday, dressed in 1960s-style suits and holding banners that read “Shell Knew.”
ExposeShell.com is also backed by The Odette Case, a campaign group supporting more than 100 survivors of Typhoon Rai — known in the Philippines as Typhoon Odette — who began seeking damages from Shell last December in a first-of-its-kind case in the UK courts.
The typhoon tore through the Philippines in December, 2021, killing 400 people, injuring more than 1,000, and forcing almost 3.2 million people from their homes.
The survivors argue that Shell should be held liable for its historic contribution to the greenhouse gas emissions fuelling extreme weather events and its support for climate science denial via its past membership of industry groups such as the Global Climate Coalition — despite its early knowledge of the risks posed by burning its products.
Filed by UK law firm Hausfeld, the case draws on recent advances in attribution science that enable scientists to assess the degree to which climate change has contributed to an extreme weather event. Through Shell’s contribution of more than 2.5 percent of historical global greenhouse gas emissions, the suit alleges that Shell contributed to both the likelihood and severity of Typhoon Rai. It is the first civil claim to link the climate impacts of an oil and gas company’s activities with death, personal injury, and damage to property that has already occurred in the Global South.
Shell has dismissed the lawsuit as “baseless” and said that it had no “unique knowledge about climate change.”
