{"id":64134,"date":"2015-09-21T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=64134"},"modified":"2015-09-21T04:34:40","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T03:34:40","slug":"what-exxon-knew-about-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/09\/what-exxon-knew-about-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"What Exxon Knew about Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wednesday morning [16 Sep 2015], journalists at InsideClimate News, a Web site that has won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on oil spills, published the first installment<\/a> of a multi-part expos\u00e9 that will be appearing over the next month. The documents they have compiled and the interviews they have conducted with retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world\u2019s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed\u2014perhaps fatally\u2014the planet\u2019s response to global warming.<\/p>\n

\"Exxon<\/a>

Exxon and Mobil stations, New York, 1979. Two years earlier, according to a new report, Exxon\u2019s scientists told the company that its main products contributed to global warming. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ALPERT \/ KEYSTONE \/ HULTON ARCHIVE \/ GETTY<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s a sense, of course, in which one already assumed that this was the case. Everyone who\u2019s been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn\u2019t just \u201cknow\u201d about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy, even outfitting one of the company\u2019s tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2<\/sub> readings over the ocean.<\/p>\n

By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company\u2019s management committee that there was \u201cgeneral scientific agreement\u201d that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2<\/sub>; a year later, speaking to an even wider\u00a0audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet\u2019s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That\u2019s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. \u201cPresent thinking,\u201d Black wrote in summary, \u201cholds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those numbers were about right, too. It was precisely ten years later\u2014after a decade in which Exxon scientists continued to do systematic climate research that showed, as one internal report put it, that stopping \u201cglobal warming would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion\u201d\u2014that NASA scientist James Hansen took climate change to the broader public, telling a congressional hearing, in June of 1988, that the planet was already warming. And how did Exxon respond? By saying that its own independent research supported Hansen\u2019s findings? By changing the company\u2019s focus to renewable technology?<\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t happen. Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns. (In a blog post<\/a> responding to the I.C.N. report, the company said that the documents were\u00a0\u201ccherry-picked\u201d\u00a0to \u201cdistort our history of pioneering climate science research\u201d and efforts to reduce emissions.) The company worked with veterans of the tobacco industry to try and infuse the climate debate with doubt. Lee Raymond, who became the Exxon C.E.O. in 1993\u2014and was a senior executive throughout the decade that Exxon had studied climate science\u2014gave a key speech to a group of Chinese leaders and oil industry executives in 1997, on the eve of treaty negotiations in Kyoto. He told them that the globe was cooling, and that government action to limit carbon emissions \u201cdefies common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, it\u2019s gotten so hot (InsideClimate\u2019s expos\u00e9 coincided with the release of data showing that this past summer was the United States\u2019 hottest in recorded history) that there\u2019s no use denying it any more; Raymond\u2019s successor, Rex Tillerson, has grudgingly accepted climate change as real, but has referred to it as an \u201cengineering problem.\u201d In May, at a shareholders\u2019 meeting, he mocked renewable energy, and said that \u201cmankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity,\u201d which would stand it in good stead in the case of \u201cinclement weather\u201d that \u201cmay or may not be induced by climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

The influence of the oil industry is essentially undiminished, even now. The Obama Administration may have stood up to Big Coal, but the richer Big Oil got permission this summer to drill in the Arctic; Washington may soon grant the rights for offshore drilling along the Atlantic seaboard, and end a longstanding ban on oil exports. All these measures help drive the flow of carbon into the atmosphere\u2014the flow of carbon that Exxon knew almost forty years ago would likely be disastrous.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve gotten so inured to this kind of corporate power that the report in InsideClimate News received relatively little coverage. The big news of the day on social media came from Irving, Texas, where the police handcuffed a young Muslim boy for taking his homemade alarm clock to school; all day people tweeted #IStandWithAhmed, and rightly so. It\u2019s wondrous to see the power of an Internet-enabled world shining the light on particular (and in this case telling) injustice; there\u2019s a principal and a police chief in Irving that will likely think differently next time. But we badly need the same kind of focus on the long-lasting, underlying abuses of corporate might.\u00a0As it happens, Exxon is based in Irving, Texas too.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Bill McKibben, a former staff writer, is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury college and the founder of 350.org<\/a>, a global grassroots climate campaign.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newyorker.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New documents and interviews show that Exxon, now ExxonMobil, knew its main product would heat up the planet disastrously, but it did not prevent it from spending decades to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed – perhaps fatally – the planet’s response to global warming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}