A Crystal Ball Special Investigation, Continued

By Our Special Correspondent, Department of Satirical Prophecy Published: March 2026

DISCLAIMER: The following is Part Six of a satirical commentary based entirely on documented matters of public record: Shell’s own internal documents, declassified corporate reports, Dutch court judgments, European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence, the findings of investigative journalists at De Correspondent, Inside Climate News, DeSmog, and Follow The Money, and the proceedings of the Milieudefensie litigation, which is currently en route to the Dutch Supreme Court and shows no signs of tiring. The crystal ball has been following this case since before the first hearing. The crystal ball has opinions.

PART ONE: THE DOCUMENT THAT TIME FORGOT — AND THEN REMEMBERED

There is, in the archives of the Shell Environmental Conservation Committee, a report.

It is dated 1988. It is marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” It is titled “The Greenhouse Effect.” It was prepared by Shell’s own Greenhouse Effect Working Group, drawing on research commissioned from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and completed, according to the document’s own account, in 1986.

The document is, by any reasonable measure, a remarkable piece of corporate self-knowledge. It is thorough. It is scientifically literate. It is alarmed, in the measured, careful way that scientists who are genuinely alarmed tend to be alarmed. And it contains, in the careful language of internal corporate advisory documents, a sentence that subsequent decades have rendered rather more significant than its authors may have intended when they wrote it:

“By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.”

The document was marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” It stayed confidential for thirty years. It was discovered in 2018 by Jelmer Mommers, a journalist at the Dutch outlet De Correspondent. It was published. It was read. It generated considerable attention.

According to the documents, Shell recognised in the 1980s that it played a role in global warming and that the threat from rising temperatures was growing. The research determined that the company generated four percent of the world’s carbon emissions in 1984. Scientific American

This is the part of the story where the crystal ball suggests the Issues Brief team take a short break, perhaps with a calming beverage.

Because the story does not begin in 1988.

PART TWO: HOW FAR BACK DOES “KNEW” GO?

The short answer, as subsequent research has established, is: further than anyone originally suspected.

The newly unveiled records show that Shell already began collecting knowledge about climate change in the 1960s. The company not only kept well abreast of climate science, but also funded research. As a result, Shell already knew in the 1970s that burning fossil fuels could lead to alarming climate change. Common Dreams

To be precise: Shell’s knowledge of the risks posed by the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels can be traced to at least the early 1960s. In 1962, Shell’s chief geologist, Houston-based Marion King Hubbert, produced a book-length report on energy DeSmog that engaged directly with these questions. Shell was commissioning greenhouse effect research, the 1988 document reveals, as early as 1981 — seven years before the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded, the body that would eventually become the world’s primary scientific authority on the subject.

Faced with a global oil crisis, rather than using its climate information to publicly sound the alarm and shift to cleaner practices, the company focused instead on a nonsustainable profit model, launching Shell Coal International in 1974. Common Dreams

The crystal ball pauses here to note: Shell, having identified the problem of burning fossil fuels, responded by acquiring more fossil fuels to burn.

This is, in the taxonomy of corporate decision-making, a choice.

Meanwhile, Shell’s 1981 film Time for Energy makes no mention of the greenhouse effect, despite it being a topic of unequivocal scientific concern at the time. By the closing credits, the viewer is left in little doubt that there is only one fuel plentiful and versatile enough to carry the world “safely” into the 21st century: coal. DeSmog

The film does not mention the coal assets Shell had recently acquired.

PART THREE: WHAT THE 1988 DOCUMENT ACTUALLY SAID

The 1988 “Greenhouse Effect” report is worth dwelling on, because its content is — even in summary, even thirty-eight years later — striking.

The confidential report includes a thorough review of climate science literature, including acknowledgement of fossil fuels’ dominant role in driving greenhouse gas emissions. More importantly, Shell quantifies its own products’ contribution to global CO2 emissions. It includes a detailed analysis of potential climate impacts, including rising sea levels, ocean acidification, and human migration. Climate Files

Shell researchers noted that “the main cause of increasing CO2 concentrations is considered to be fossil fuel burning.” By 1988, internal deliberations showed that Shell believed the energy industry had a role to play in climate policy. Scientific American

The document also, in a passage that has attracted rather a lot of legal attention since 2018, said this: “With the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything. The potential implications for the world are, however, so large that policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part.” Inside Climate News

The energy industry. Needs to consider how it should play its part.

Shell’s part, as subsequently played, included: membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that raised doubt about mainstream climate science, until 2015; membership in the Global Climate Coalition in the 1990s, an industry group that battled against climate policy; and backing of the American Petroleum Institute, which had a coordinated campaign in the 1990s to sow public doubt about climate change. Scientific American

The crystal ball observes that this is one interpretation of “playing its part.”

PART FOUR: THE DESCENT — FROM KNOWLEDGE TO DENIAL TO DOUBT TO HEDGING

The trajectory documented by the researchers who have studied Shell’s internal documents over thirty years is, in its way, a masterwork of institutional communication strategy — viewed from the outside, at least.

In the 1980s Shell was acknowledging anthropogenic global warming. Then, as the scientific consensus became more and more clear, it started introducing doubt and giving weight to a “significant minority” of “alternative viewpoints” as the full implications for the company’s business model became clear. DeSmog

The 1994 internal report conceded the “consequences of global warming could be dramatic” while noting the “major business implications” and countering that “ill-advised policy measures” would also be dramatic — a rhetorical move that the crystal ball recognises as the classic double-edged precautionary argument: we agree something must be done, but please not that.

By 1995, a Shell management brief acknowledged the “general consensus” on the human causes of climate change while making a pointed nod to what it called “well-grounded scepticism.” It also noted that “a definitive, unequivocal position on the science of global warming… quite simply is beyond current capabilities.”

A 1997 Shell presentation challenged climate science, stating: “Man-made carbon dioxide is only a small fraction of the flux in natural systems. I believe that we are still not in a position to know whether any effect will be good, bad, or indifferent, whether it will be lasting, or whether the earth’s natural processes will restore stability.” Climateinvestigations

The 1988 document, it will be recalled, had already concluded that this position was untenable. The 1997 presentation took it anyway.

Meanwhile, externally, Shell was funding the research of a Dutch climate sceptic whose published work would prove useful to those arguing against binding international climate commitments. Böttcher, who had chaired an influential industry-backed report on energy, would go on to become a prominent climate science denier during the 1990s while receiving more than a million guilders — the equivalent of more than 750,000 euros — from Shell and other Dutch multinationals. In 1996, Böttcher appeared before a Dutch parliamentary committee investigating climate change to argue that the UN’s official scientific advisor had it all wrong: CO2 had positive impacts on plants and the greenhouse effect was an unproven hypothesis. In one document in his archives, Böttcher described Shell as the “godfather” of his “CO2 project.” DeSmog

The crystal ball finds this detail, specifically the word “godfather,” worthy of extended contemplation.

PART FIVE: THE 1998 SCENARIO — SHELL’S OWN PROPHECY

Buried in the archive of Shell’s internal planning documents is a 1998 scenario exercise carrying the acronym TINA — “there is no alternative” — which is either a reference to the economic philosophy of Margaret Thatcher or a moment of unusual corporate candour, depending on one’s interpretive inclinations.

The TINA document imagined events in the year 2010, following violent storms on the East Coast of the United States. “Although it is not clear whether the storms are caused by climate change, people are not willing to take further chances. After all, two successive IPCC reports since 1995 have reinforced the human connection to climate change.” Inside Climate News

The document then imagined what would follow. “A coalition of environmental NGOs brings a class-action suit against the US government and fossil-fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done. A social reaction to the use of fossil fuels grows, and individuals become ‘vigilante environmentalists’ in the same way, a generation earlier, they had become fiercely anti-tobacco. Direct-action campaigns against companies escalate. Young consumers, especially, demand action… The power, auto, and oil industries see billions wiped off their market value overnight.” Climateinvestigations

Shell’s scenario planners, in 1998, wrote down, in a planning document, a description of almost exactly what subsequently happened — the class action litigation, the NGO campaigns, the anti-tobacco parallel, the demand from younger consumers — and filed it in the archive.

The archive was subsequently discovered by journalists.

The journalists published it.

The lawyers read it.

The crystal ball notes that the words “including their own” — describing the scientists whose warnings had been ignored — appear in Shell’s own internal document, written by Shell’s own planning team, in 1998.

PART SIX: THE FLOWERS, REVISITED

As noted briefly in Part Three of this series, Shell ran an advertising campaign featuring refinery chimneys emitting flowers, suggesting the company was piping its carbon dioxide to greenhouses to grow blooms.

The Advertising Standards Authorities of both Britain and the Netherlands found the advertisement misleading. The Financial Times coined, or at least popularised, the word “greenwashing” in connection with it.

This episode is, in the context of the full climate knowledge archive, rather more than a charming anecdote about misleading imagery. It is a data point in a pattern: the same company that had, since 1981, been commissioning internal research on the catastrophic potential of greenhouse gas emissions was, in the same period, running advertisements suggesting that its emissions were being transformed into flowers.

The flowers were, as this series noted, decorative.

The gap between the CONFIDENTIAL archive and the public advertisement is the gap at the centre of the entire Milieudefensie litigation. It is the gap between what Shell knew and what Shell said. It is, the plaintiffs argued, an unlawful gap — because the consequences of maintaining it were not merely commercial but civilisational.

PART SEVEN: THE HAGUE, MAY 2021 — THE WORLD-FIRST

On 26 May 2021, the District Court of The Hague issued a judgment that made legal history.

The lawsuit was brought by Milieudefensie (the Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth) and others, which argued that Shell’s current and projected CO2 emissions were unlawful and violated the unwritten standard of care under Dutch law, as well as human rights protected under Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Wy4cj

Seven environmental organisations and 17,379 individual claimants in the Netherlands filed a class-action lawsuit against Shell in April 2019, arguing that Shell should change its business model to reach an emissions reduction target of 45% by 2030 in line with the Paris Agreement. Wikipedia

The District Court, in a ruling that reverberated across boardrooms from Houston to The Hague, agreed. The District Court ordered that Shell’s current sustainability policy was insufficiently “concrete,” and that its emissions were greater than that of most countries. Due to these factors, the court ordered that Shell must reduce its global emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels; the reduction targets include emissions from its operations and products. Lewis Silkin

The court wrote: “The court acknowledges that RDS cannot solve this global problem on its own. However, this does not absolve RDS of its individual partial responsibility to do its part regarding the emissions of the Shell group, which it can control and influence.” Climate Case Chart

It was, the crystal ball notes, the first time in the history of any national court that a private company had been ordered to reduce its emissions to meet the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Shell, which had pledged in February 2021 — during the trial itself — to be net-zero by 2050, received this news and appealed.

PART EIGHT: THE HAGUE, NOVEMBER 2024 — THE COMPLICATED VICTORY

Shell’s appeal was heard in April 2024. The Court of Appeal issued its judgment on 12 November 2024.

The Dutch Court of Appeals in The Hague overturned a 2021 lower court decision that had ordered Shell to reduce CO2 emissions by a net 45% by 2030. The appeals court held that even though Shell is required to reduce its CO2 emissions, it could not determine the exact percentage, and therefore dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims. LOC

Shell was, as one legal commentary noted, “pleased with the court’s decision.” Wiley Online Library

The crystal ball suggests the pleasure may be somewhat qualified, on reflection.

Because the appeals court, in the same judgment in which it dismissed the 45% target, also confirmed several things that Shell’s communications team would have preferred the judgment not to contain:

The Court of Appeal found that protection from dangerous climate change is a fundamental human right, not only in the Netherlands but also elsewhere in the world. Lewis Silkin

It confirmed that an “unwritten” duty of care law exists which requires companies to mitigate the effects of climate change by reducing their emissions. Mayer Brown

It noted, with something approaching pointed courtesy, that historically large emitters like Shell have a “special responsibility” in this respect, “even if this obligation is not explicitly laid down in (public law) regulations of the countries in which the company operates.” Climate Case Chart

And it hinted, in its consideration of new fossil fuel investments, that especially investments in new fossil fuel production activities could be at odds with Shell’s duty of care to curb dangerous climate change. Climate Case Chart

Shell won the appeal. The appeals court confirmed that Shell has a legally enforceable human rights duty to reduce its emissions; that it has a special responsibility as a historically large emitter; and that its new fossil fuel investments may be incompatible with its own legal obligations.

The crystal ball declines to describe this as a clean win.

PART NINE: THE SUPREME COURT APPROACHES

Milieudefensie has announced that it plans to appeal to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. Human Rights Law Centre That appeal was filed in February 2025. The case continues.

In the meantime, it took oil company Shell more than 16 years to directly warn its shareholders that climate policy posed a financial risk to the company’s business model, despite knowing in private and for decades what its own scientists were telling it. DeSmog

The 1988 CONFIDENTIAL document sat in an archive for thirty years.

The 1998 TINA scenario, predicting the litigation and the anti-tobacco parallel and the youth consumer rebellion, sat in an archive for twenty years.

The researchers found them. The journalists published them. The lawyers read them. The courts considered them.

And now, in March 2026, they are being summarised by an AI system, in a satirical series published on the website that Shell spent twenty-five years trying to close, on a domain name that Shell tried to seize and failed, read by whoever happens to be reading this column — which, on the basis of previous instalments, may include a number of Shell employees who will forward it to Corporate Affairs, who will add it to the Issues Brief, and who will note that the 1998 TINA scenario’s prediction of a social reaction “in the same way, a generation earlier, they had become fiercely anti-tobacco” is playing out, in 2026, with a fidelity that the scenario planners would have found professionally gratifying, had they been permitted to discuss it externally.

They were not.

The archive was.

Part Seven of the Crystal Ball Special Investigation will turn to the domain name battle: how Shell attempted to seize royaldutchshellplc.com through WIPO proceedings, why it failed, what the proceedings revealed about Shell’s relationship with its critics, and the remarkable circumstance by which the website Shell tried hardest to close became the platform on which this entire investigation is being published.

The crystal ball finds this one particularly satisfying.

It always did.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is Part Six of a satirical series based on documented, publicly available facts. Shell’s internal climate documents are available via the Climate Files database and De Correspondent. The Milieudefensie litigation record is public. All sources are verifiable. None of this has been legally challenged.