ExxonMobil Knew About Climate Change

ExxonMobil Knew About Climate Change – How? You’ll be Shocked!

21 September 2015

Shame on you, Big Oil!

As early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew for sure that their main product would cause disastrous climate change.

But what is so horrific is that Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change.

Exxon conducted some of the original research that proved it!

Isn’t that incredible?

ExxonMobil Knew About Climate Change Before We Did!

Here’s what they did.

• Exxon employed top scientists who worked with university researchers and the Department of Energy in the 1970s and 1980s.
• In 1977, Exxon senior scientist James Black told the Exxon management committee that there was scientific agreement that climate change (it was then called the greenhouse effect) was caused by man-made carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
• In 1978, Black showed that if we double the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in Earth’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius.  (That’s about where the scientific consensus lies to this day).

For the next 10 years, Exxon continued to do systematic climate research.

That research kept showing that, to quote one internal report, slowing global warming or climate change “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion”.

ExxonMobil Knew About Climate Change – And Wanted to Help

This could have had such a different ending!

You see, many Exxon executives, middle managers and scientists had a sense of urgency and mission.

Harold N. Weinberg, a manager at Exxon Research, wrote an internal company memorandum in March 1978 that read: “This may be the kind of opportunity that we are looking for to have Exxon technology, management and leadership resources put into the context of a project aimed at benefitting mankind”.

In other words, many Exxon staffers wanted to do the right thing.

ExxonMobil Knew About Climate Change – And Denied It

In June 1988 climate change became more open to the public – NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming.

At this point, Exxon could easily have said that its own independent research supported Hansen’s findings.

They could have changed the company’s focus to renewable technology.

But they didn’t.

Instead, Exxon deliberately helped to organize the disinformation and denial campaigns that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming / climate change.

They 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—and was a senior executive throughout the decade that Exxon had studied climate science—spoke to 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 “defies common sense”.

ExxonMobil Knew About Climate Change – And Still Deny It

Current CEO Rex Tillerson has grudgingly accepted climate change as real, but has referred to it as an “engineering problem”.

In May, at a shareholders’ meeting, he mocked renewable energy, and said that “mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity,” which would stand it in good stead in the case of “inclement weather” that “may or may not be induced by climate change.”

ExxonMobil Knew About Climate Change – And Make It Even Worse

The larges oil companies all know that their product is making climate change worse. On a broader scale, the oil industry continues to dominate:

• Big Oil will drill in the Arctic
• Washington may soon grant the rights for offshore drilling along the Atlantic seaboard
• A longstanding ban on US oil exports will probably end soon.

All these measures help drive the flow of carbon into the atmosphere—the flow of carbon that Exxon knew almost forty years ago would be disastrous.

How Do We Know ExxonMobil Knew About Climate Change?

This untold chapter in Exxon’s history, when one of the world’s largest energy companies worked to understand the damage caused by fossil fuels, stems from an eight-month investigation by Inside Climate News,  published on September 16th.

Reporters interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists, and federal officials, and consulted internal Exxon documents and thousands of archive documents.

The Sad Part

And do you know the really sad part about all of this?

Four decades ago, Exxon was moving in the right direction. Employees were motivated to benefit humankind. Then it all changed.

And now today, we have evidence of this change – and yet the exposé received very little general media attention.

Are we all so inured to this kind of corporate power that we don’t even notice it any more?

Further reading:  The full report at Inside Climate News            Bill McKibben’s article for the New Yorker 

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