More than a million for #klimaatscepsis - Yes. For a long time it was thought that, unlike in the US, Dutch climate sceptics did not receive funding from the oil, gas or steel industry. Primary sources show that chemistry professor Frits Böttcher received more than one million guilders in the 1990s from a group of Dutch multinationals. The explicit goal: to raise doubts about human causes of climate change. The main sponsor of the so-called 'CO2 project' was Royal Dutch Shell.

Between 1989 and 1998, Dutch multinationals paid more than one million guilders to prominent climate sceptic Frits Böttcher (1915-2008). The explicit goal: to raise doubts about climate change and the role of man in it.
With the money, Böttcher is setting up an international network of climate sceptics. He also produces multiple reports, books and opinion articles. He writes, for example, that the greenhouse effect does not exist, and that CO2 is not dangerous, but rather 'good for plants'.
Doubt-making helps to ensure that, in the 1990s, there is little political support for compelling measures to reduce CO2.

In 1998, financing for Böttcher's 'CO2 project' was drying up. Sponsors are afraid of public opinion and the climate-sceptic lobby is unable to prevent the signing of the Kyoto Treaty in 1997.



Dutch business sector financed a climate sceptic