By 1978 Exxon’s senior scientists were telling top management that climate change was real, caused by man, and would raise global temperatures by 2-3C.
Photograph: Pat Sullivan/AP
I’m
well aware that with Paris looming it’s time to be hopeful, and I’m
willing to try. Even amid the record heat and flooding of the present,
there are good signs for the future in the rising climate movement and
the falling cost of solar.
But
before we get to past and present there’s some past to be reckoned
with, and before we get to hope there’s some deep, blood-red anger.
In the last three weeks, two separate teams of journalists — the Pulitzer-prize winning reporters at the website Inside Climate News and another crew composed of Los Angeles Times veterans and up-and-comers at the Columbia Journalism School — have begun publishing the results of a pair of independent investigations into ExxonMobil.
Though
they draw on completely different archives, leaked documents, and
interviews with ex-employees, they reach the same damning conclusion:
Exxon knew all that there was to know about climate change decades ago,
and instead of alerting the rest of us denied the science and obstructed
the politics of global warming.
To be specific:
- - By 1978 Exxon’s senior scientists were telling top management that climate change was real, caused by man, and would raise global temperatures by 2-3C this century, which was pretty much spot-on.
- - By the early 1980s they’d validated these findings with shipborne measurements of CO2 (they outfitted a giant tanker with carbon sensors for a research voyage) and with computer models that showed precisely what was coming. As the head of one key lab at Exxon Research wrote to his superiors, there was “unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere”.
- - And by the early 1990s their researchers studying the possibility for new exploration in the Arctic were well aware that human-induced climate change was melting the poles. Indeed, they used that knowledge to plan their strategy, reporting that soon the Beaufort Sea would be ice-free as much as five months a year instead of the historic two. Greenhouse gases are rising “due to the burning of fossil fuels,” a key Exxon researcher told an audience of engineers at a conference in 1991. “Nobody disputes this fact.”
But
of course Exxon did dispute that fact. Not inside the company, where
they used their knowledge to buy oil leases in the areas they knew would
melt, but outside, where they used their political and financial might
to make sure no one took climate change seriously.
They
helped organise campaigns designed to instil doubt, borrowing tactics
and personnel from the tobacco industry’s similar fight. They funded
“institutes” devoted to outright climate denial. And at the highest
levels they did all they could to spread their lies.
To
understand the treachery – the sheer, profound, and I think
unparalleled evil – of Exxon, one must remember the timing. Global
warming became a public topic in 1988, thanks to Nasa scientist James
Hansen – it’s taken a quarter-century and counting for the world to take
effective action. If at any point in that journey Exxon – largest oil
company on Earth, most profitable enterprise in human history – had
said: “Our own research shows that these scientists are right and that
we are in a dangerous place,” the faux debate would effectively have
ended. That’s all it would have taken; stripped of the cover provided by
doubt, humanity would have gotten to work.
Instead,
knowingly, they helped organise the most consequential lie in human
history, and kept that lie going past the point where we can protect the
poles, prevent the acidification of the oceans, or slow sea level rise
enough to save the most vulnerable regions and cultures. Businesses
misbehave all the time, but VW is the flea to Exxon’s elephant. No
corporation has ever done anything this big and this bad.
I’m
aware that anger at this point does little good. I’m aware that all
clever people will say “of course they did” or “we all use fossil
fuels”, as if either claim is meaningful. I’m aware that nothing much
will happen to Exxon – I doubt they’ll be tried in court, or their
executives sent to jail.
But
nonetheless it seems crucial simply to say, for the record, the truth:
this company had the singular capacity to change the course of world
history for the better and instead it changed that course for the
infinitely worse. In its greed Exxon helped — more than any other
institution — to kill our planet.
Please go here for the original article: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/exxons-climate-lie-change-global-warming
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