Papers Of Frits Bottcher, Dutch Climate Liar, Detail How Shell & Others MNCs Funded Him For A Decade

[hatrack]

Shell and other Dutch multinationals donated over a million guilders – close to half a million Euros – to prominent Dutch climate science denier Frits Böttcher during the 1990s, documents from his personal archives reveal. Böttcher’s explicit objective: to question human responsibility for global warming.

“In the past three years I managed to coordinate the scientific opposition against the CO2-Hetze [hate campaign]”, Böttcher, who died in 2008, writes in a letter to Hubert Knoche, then secretary general of the lobby group of European oil refiners Europia. The year is 1996 and the emeritus professor of chemistry, although 80 years old, is at the height of his prominence in the climate debate.

In May of the same year he would appear before the Dutch parliamentary committee, investigating the causes and consequences of human-made climate change, to argue that the UN’s official advisor, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had it all wrong. In Böttcher’s view, carbon dioxide had mostly positive impacts on plants and the greenhouse effect was an unproven hypothesis. The expected rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere should not be feared, he stated on Dutch national television: “For the plant world, it’s only a small step in the right direction.” He would repeat that message countless times in his publications, public lectures and statements to the Dutch and foreign press.

EDIT

The letter to Knoche is one of the thousands of documents in Böttcher’s personal archive uncovering his role in the climate science denial movement in the Netherlands and abroad during the 1990s. Personal notes, letters, faxes, e-mails and minutes of meetings with sponsors are stored in the provincial archives in Haarlem, where Böttcher’s legacy was moved after his death in 2008. The archive was recently discovered by Platform Authentieke Journalistiek (PAJ), a Dutch collective of investigative journalists, as part of the Shell Papers project, exposing the influence of the oil major on Dutch politics. Close examination of the archives reveals Böttcher was paid by prominent multinational companies to spread doubt about the human causes of climate change. Between 1989 and 1998, he received at least 1.13 million guilders (worth around €784,000 today) from 25 different companies. His largest donors were Shell (fl. 271,849 or €195,823), steel producer Hoogovens, now Tata Steel (fl. 166,000 or €123,274) and chemicals company DSM (fl. 85,000 or €61,194).

EDIT

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/05/14/bottcher-shell-funding-european-climate-science-denial

[Grins]

1. Reminds me of...

... the personal papers of Thomas Hofeller, the Republican redistricting “strategist” famous in death after his daughter gave his private papers to Common Cause that had a voter fraud lawsuit against North Carolina Republicans to overturn the rigged voting district maps that Thomas Hofeller helped draw.