{"id":68152,"date":"2015-12-28T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=68152"},"modified":"2015-12-27T17:29:26","modified_gmt":"2015-12-27T17:29:26","slug":"it-wasnt-only-exxon-that-knew-about-global-warming-since-the-1970s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/12\/it-wasnt-only-exxon-that-knew-about-global-warming-since-the-1970s\/","title":{"rendered":"It Wasn\u2019t only Exxon That Knew about Global Warming since the 1970s"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost All<\/em><\/strong> Major Oil Companies Have Known About Global Warming Since the 1970s<\/em><\/p>\n

24 Dec 2015 – <\/em>It wasn\u2019t just Exxon<\/a> that knew fossil fuels were cooking the planet. New investigative reporting<\/a> by Neela Banerjee with Inside Climate News revealed on Tuesday [22 Dec 2015] that scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company may have for decades known about the impacts of carbon emissions on the climate.<\/p>\n

\"Felipe<\/a>

Felipe Sasso \/ Albert Mock \/ Mike Mozart \/ Kristian Bjonard<\/p><\/div>\n

Between 1979 and 1983, the American Petroleum Institute (API), the industry\u2019s most powerful lobby group, ran a task force for fossil fuel companies to \u201cmonitor and share climate research,\u201d according to internal documents obtained by Inside Climate News.<\/p>\n

According to the reporting:<\/p>\n

Like Exxon, the companies also expressed a willingness to understand the links between their product, greater CO2 concentrations and the climate, the papers reveal. Some corporations ran their own research units as well, although they were smaller and less ambitious than Exxon\u2019s and focused on climate modeling, said James J. Nelson, the former director of the task force.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a fact-finding task force,\u201d Nelson said in an interview. \u201cWe wanted to look at emerging science, the implications of it and where improvements could be made, if possible, to reduce emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cCO2 and Climate Task Force,\u201d which changed in 1980 its name to the \u201cClimate and Energy Task Force,\u201d included researchers from Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco and Sohio, among others.<\/p>\n

One memo by an Exxon task force representative pointed to 1979 \u201cbackground paper on CO2,\u201d which \u201cpredicted when the first clear effects of climate change<\/a> might be felt,\u201d noting that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rising steadily.<\/p>\n

And at a February 1980 meeting in New York, the task force invited Professor John A. Laurmann of Stanford University to brief members about climate science.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn his conclusions section, Laurmann estimated that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would double in 2038, which he said would likely lead to a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures with \u2018major economic consequences,’\u201d Banerjee reports. He then told the task force that models showed a 5 degrees Celsius rise by 2067, with \u2018globally catastrophic effects<\/a>,’\u201d Banerjee reports.<\/p>\n

The documents show that API members, at one point, considered an alternative path in the face of these dire predictions:<\/p>\n

Bruce S. Bailey of Texaco offered \u201cfor consideration\u201d the idea that \u201can overall goal of the Task Force should be to help develop ground rules for energy release of fuels and the cleanup of fuels as they relate to CO2 creation,\u201d according to the minutes of a meeting on Feb. 29, 1980.<\/p>\n

The minutes also show that the task force discussed a \u201cpotential area\u201d for research and development that called for it to \u201c\u2018Investigate the Market Penetration Requirements of Introducing a New Energy Source into World Wide Use.\u2019 This would include the technical implications of energy source changeover, research timing and requirements.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYet,\u201d Banerjee notes, \u201cby the 1990s, it was clear that API had opted for a markedly different approach to the threat of climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lobby group teamed up with Exxon and others to form the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), which successfully lobbied the U.S. to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.<\/p>\n

The damning revelations are the latest in an ongoing\u00a0investigation<\/a> into what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change and then suppressed <\/a>for decades\u2014all while continuing to profit from the planet\u2019s destruction.<\/p>\n

Reports that Exxon, specifically, lied about climate change were published early October in the Los Angeles Times<\/a>, mirroring a separate but similar investigation by Inside Climate News<\/a>\u00a0in September. Those findings set off a storm<\/a> of outrage, including a probe<\/a>\u00a0by the New York Attorney General.<\/p>\n

Nelson, a former head of the API task force, told Banerjee that with the growing powers of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early 1980\u2019s, API decided to shift gears.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey took the environmental unit and put it into the political department, which was primarily lobbyists,\u201d he said. \u201cThey weren\u2019t focused on doing research or on improving the oil industry\u2019s impact on pollution. They were less interested in pushing the envelope of science and more interested in how to make it more advantageous politically or economically for the oil industry. That\u2019s not meant as a criticism. It\u2019s just a fact of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

New investigative reporting by Neela Banerjee with Inside Climate News revealed on Tuesday [22 Dec 2015] that scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company may have for decades known about the impacts of carbon emissions on the climate.<\/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-68152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68152","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=68152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}