New Yorker article: What Exxon Knew About Climate Change

[davidm]

What Exxon Knew About Climate Change

Everyone who’s been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn’t 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 company’s 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 company’s 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 planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius.
…
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 1993—and was a senior executive throughout the decade that Exxon had studied climate science—gave 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.”

I was aware, of course, of Exxon’s involvement in climate-denial campaigns. What I wasn’t aware of was their involvement in some of the original research. They haven’t been deluding themselves with their denial campaigns. They knew full well what the science said and they pushed their lies anyway.

[Wile_E]

I thought this information came out a while ago and was maybe just picking up steam now.

I would like to see it come up in presidential debates. When there is proof that Big Oil not only knew about climate change 35 years ago but also went to great efforts to cover it up, it’s really hard to keep denying it. But I am sure they will still find a way.

[Machine_Elf]

There is a book out there called Merchants of Doubt, that discusses this in detail. I recently watched the movie of the same name, and it was disturbing and depressing, saying much the same thing as your New Yorker article said: the tobacco industry had become masters at casting doubt on the evidence against their product and diverting the blame to other things (couch catching fire when you smoke? It’s the couch’s fault!) - and the energy industry has harnessed that expertise to do the same for climate change. Makes you wonder where they’re living that they think climate change won’t ever affect them or their descendants.

If you’re a movie-watcher, I recommend the movie. If you’re a bookworm, well, I suspect the book is probably worthwhile too.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@Machine_Elf

Makes you wonder where they’re living that they think climate change won’t ever affect them or their descendants.

They figure that it won’t be too much bother to a very rich person in the next 20 years or so. And they don’t give a damn about their descendents or yours.

They are selfish, self-centered, shallow people, focused on short term acquisition of wealth.

[Wile_E]

@Euphonious_Polemic

They figure that it won’t be too much bother to a very rich person in the next 20 years or so. And they don’t give a damn about their descendents or yours.

They are selfish, self-centered, shallow people, focused on short term acquisition of wealth.

Exactly, they will just use their huge profits to make themselves comfortable and a howdy fuck you to everyone else.

[GIGObuster]

I remember how many critics of the deniers, contrarians and skeptics made the point that the fossil fuel industry would had spend billions to find and promote the evidence that debunked the idea that CO2 and other global warming gases were going to be a problem. If the evidence existed.

As it turns out just like the tobacco industry they found early on what was likely to happen and instead of looking to help to control emissions they decided to support the forces of FUD.

Work of prominent climate change denier was funded by energy industry

A prominent academic and climate change denier’s work was funded almost entirely by the energy industry, receiving more than $1.2m from companies, lobby groups and oil billionaires over more than a decade, newly released documents show.

Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, received a total of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, the documents obtained by Greenpeace through freedom of information filings show.

According to the documents, the biggest single funder was Southern Company, one of the country’s biggest electricity providers that relies heavily on coal.

The documents draw new attention to the industry’s efforts to block action against climate change – including President Barack Obama’s power-plant rules.

[Wile_E]

I was reading some of Fiorina’s comments on climate change and it seems the other Republican approach is not to deny climate change but to deny that there is anything we can do about it because if just the U.S. changed it wouldn’t make that big of a difference. So apparently that makes it okay to keep polluting like we don’t give a damn about future generations let alone our own.

Not being able to make any difference is just a load of hooey because other countries are making efforts to decrease carbon emissions and if we don’t also make an effort it makes us look like the big old selfish douche-bags the rest if the world already thinks we are. Not to mention that the scientists that talked about climate change, which the moderates are now not denying, are the same ones that say there are things we can do to at least not make things worse.