Follow the Money reports:

Frits Böttcher would later refer to it as a ‘historic moment’. On December 21, 1989, the retired chemistry professor visited Shell’s headquarters in Amsterdam. That day, Shell supervisory director Jan Choufoer was going to introduce him to the head of the company: managing director Huub van Engelshoven.

Böttcher was highly regarded in the Netherlands. He’d been teaching at Leiden University for decades, and he was on various supervisory boards: Pakhoed, Hoogovens, Elsevier Scientific publishers and 11 others. He was an active member of the VVD [conservative-liberal political party] and – from 1966 to 1974 – he was the President of the Raad van Advies voor het Wetenschapsbeleid [the government’s advisory council on scientific policy] and from 1973 to 1976 he was a member of the Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid [scientific council for government policy]. Choufoer and Böttcher had become acquainted when the chemistry professor acted as one of the permanent advisors of Shell’s research department.

To the general public, Böttcher was primarily known as the co-founder and former chair of the Dutch branch of the Club of Rome. This informal association, founded in 1968 by political, academic and business leaders, had issued a resounding alarm about unbridled economic and population growth, as well as the finite nature of fossil fuels in its 1971 report The Limits to Growth.

But according to Böttcher, the Club of Rome’s worrying conclusions didn’t mean that the whole system had to be upended. On the contrary: he disagreed with the call from left-wing environmental movements for far-reaching government intervention. For example, in the autumn of 1989, he published two opinion pieces in NRC Handelsblad [a Dutch broadsheet], in which he resisted the ‘witch hunt’ on CO2 – a chemical ‘the entire food chain on the planet is based upon’. The title of his first piece: ‘Our planet is not a greenhouse’. [Continue reading…]