Club of Rome founder Frits Böttcher was the Netherlands' leading climate denier. He died in 2008. Investigative journalists combing through his papers, discovered that he was paid €500K by Shell and others to sow doubt about climate change.
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His network pushed out scientific frauds like the idea that excess atmospheric CO2 would be "good for plants" through books, lectures and reports.
He was good at it. His work was crucial to stalling action on climate change in the 1990s.
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He was good at it. His work was crucial to stalling action on climate change in the 1990s.
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Despite this, his 24 sponsors dumped him in 1998 after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, worried that outright climate denial had lost credibility.
No wonder! This was the guy who'd called climate science "a witch-hunt on CO2" and declared "Our planet is not a greenhouse."
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No wonder! This was the guy who'd called climate science "a witch-hunt on CO2" and declared "Our planet is not a greenhouse."
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In his papers, Böttcher notes that after he published these frauds, Shell contacted him and offered him giant sums to keep it up and amplify it. The work was personally commissioned by Shell managing director Huub Van Engelshoven.
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Böttcher was a packrat. His papers in the Noord-Hollands Archief in Haarlem stack 15.9m tall. Inside of them is an eye-wateringly detailed account of how wealthy, planet-wrecking firms deliberately and maliciously paid for climate denial.
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That means that we now can name names. We think of climate denial as a kind of emergent property with no human agent, but as the world drowns, roasts, and writhes with pandemic, we have the names and addresses of the people who engineered that situation for their own gain.
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We know who his political allies were: the VVD party. When the Netherlands' dikes fail and the country begins to drown, these politicians might still be running for office.
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It's tempting to think of the climate crisis as something we all bear responsibility for, because we didn't sort our recycling or because we didn't use the underfunded, anemic public transit options available to us.
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But efforts like this - from Platform Authentieke Journalistiek and Follow the Money - show we were corralled into our complicity by a network of super-rich plutes for their own gain, who knew they were wrecking the world and dooming our children but did not care.
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