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What Exxon Knew About Climate Change
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-exxon-knew-about-climate-changeBy Bill McKibben
Wednesday morning, journalists at InsideClimate News, a Web site that has won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on oil spills, published the first installment of a multi-part exposé 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 worlds 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 slowedperhaps fatallythe planets response to global warming.
Theres a sense, of course, in which one already assumed that this was the case. Everyone whos been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didnt just know 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 companys tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2 readings over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the companys management committee that there was general scientific agreement that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planets atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. Thats just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. Present thinking, Black wrote in summary, holds 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.
Those numbers were about right, too. It was precisely ten years laterafter a decade in which Exxon scientists continued to do systematic climate research that showed, as one internal report put it, that stopping global warming would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustionthat 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 Hansens findings? By changing the companys focus to renewable technology?
That didnt happen. Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns. (In a blog post responding to the I.C.N. report, the company said that the documents were cherry-picked to distort our history of pioneering climate science research 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 1993and was a senior executive throughout the decade that Exxon had studied climate sciencegave 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 defies common sense. In recent years, its gotten so hot (InsideClimates exposé coincided with the release of data showing that this past summer was the United States hottest in recorded history) that theres no use denying it any more; Raymonds successor, 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.
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What Exxon Knew About Climate Change (Original Post)
swag
Sep 2015
OP
Uncle Joe
(58,355 posts)1. Kicked and recommended.
Thanks for the thread, swag.
burrowowl
(17,641 posts)2. K&R!!!!!!