Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.
Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.
In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” In other words, Exxon needed to act.
But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”
One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,” Oreskes says.
But experts are still piecing together Exxon’s misconception puzzle. Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf). “We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt,” says union president Kenneth Kimmel. “There’s even a quote in it that says something like ‘Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.’ So it’s pretty stark.”
Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.”
Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon’s deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. “I think there are a lot of parallels,” Kimmell says. Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is global in its reach,” Kimmel says.
To prove this, Bob Ward—who on behalf of the U.K.’s Royal Academy sent a letter to Exxon in 2006 claiming its science was “inaccurate and misleading”—thinks a thorough investigation is necessary. “Because frankly the episode with tobacco was probably the most disgraceful episode one could ever imagine,” Ward says. Kimmell agrees. These reasons “really highlight the responsibility that these companies have to come clean, acknowledge this, and work with everyone else to cut out emissions and pay for some of the cost we’re going to bear as soon as possible,” Kimmell says.
It doesn’t appear, however, that Kimmell will get his retribution. Jeffers claims the investigation’s finds are “just patently untrue, misleading, and we reject them completely”—words that match Ward’s claims against them nearly a decade ago.
Tobbaco Company Threatens Countries Citing Out of Context Bad Faith Misrepresentations
13:12
actually reached out to Togo and ask to
see their correspondence with the
tobacco companies and they gave us this
letter
EMI we had to translate it from French
but it was worth it because this thing
is almost comically appalled appalling
it informs Togo that plain packaging
laws would result in an incalculable
amount of international trade litigation
suggesting Togo would lose any legal
challenge by citing among other things
an Australian High Court decision which
they write concluded that plain
packaging constitutes a substantial
privation of property rights now the
court case they’re referring to is the
one from earlier you remember the one
tobacco companies lost so badly they had
to cover the court costs and yet they
quote the one judge in that case who
ruled in favor of tobacco ignoring the
other six who called their case if you
remember delusive unreal and synthetic
and saying it had fatal defects that’s
like when a shitty movie engineers a
good review out of a bad one like
Mordecai is a pile of dot dot dot great
bits letter is bullshit and yet Togo
justifiably terrified by threats of
billion dollar settlements backed down
from a public health law that many
people wanted and it’s not just Togo
British American Tobacco sent a similar
letter to Namibia and one of their
subsidiaries sent one to the Solomon
Islands a country with a population of
600,000 at this point it’s safe to say
if you live in an apartment with at
least two other people and you asked one
of them to please smoke outside you can
look forward to a letter from a tobacco
company very soon
14:55
look I could get angry and I could call
14:58
tobacco companies assholes or monsters
15:00
or open sores on Satan’s dick but
15:03
instead instead instead let’s rise above
15:06
it and let’s try and broker peace
15:08
because it’s clear what each side wants
15:10
countries want to warn their citizens
15:13
about the health dangers of smoking
15:15
tobacco tobacco companies want to be
15:18
able to present branded images that they
15:20
have spent time and money to cultivate
15:22
so may I suggest a compromise I present
15:25
to you the new face of Marlboro Jeff the
15:28
diseased lung in a cowboy hat
15:30
we are offering two F to you Philip
15:33
Morris International to use as you wish
15:35
put him on your billboards put him on
15:37
some ads in fact and don’t be mad we’ve
15:42
we’ve already started doing that for you
15:45
this is an actual billboards that is in
15:54
Montevideo right now and people seem to
15:58
like it there because they like it
16:01
of course they look everyone loves Jeff
16:03
the diseased lung in a cowboy hat oh one
16:06
more thing
16:07
um to be completely honest we didn’t
16:10
just do it in Uruguay because we also
16:12
and don’t be mad we made some Jeff
16:16
branded t-shirts and we ship them to
16:17
Togo yesterday where they’ve been quite
16:20
a hit and if you don’t believe me check
16:22
this out
16:38
Jeff’s already out there you just need
16:41
to claim him
16:42
our lawyers unlike yours will not sue
16:44
and and I know our viewers would love to
16:48
help you get the message out there in
16:50
fact you can tweet about Jeff using the
16:52
hashtag Jeff we can to get in trending
16:55
worldwide and get pmos attention post
16:58
Jeff’s photo on Google+ and tag him Mull
17:00
bruh which might push him to the top of
17:03
Marlboros Google Image Search we can do
17:05
this everyone don’t be a maybe about
17:08
this
17:10
[Applause]
17:27
because he’s definitely suffering from
17:29
emphysema on your stress enough you do
17:39
not market to children kids love Jeff
17:41
don’t you kids
17:44
[Applause]
17:50
[Applause]
18:01
[Applause]
18:09
you