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| 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. Credit: Getty Images/MARS |
The sobering realization is I was in high school when this was known. The meek due to "inherit the Earth" - children K-12 - are in school now. What world will we give them? 1
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. [2]
1. Nature - Climate Change:
Future temperature in southwest Asia projected to exceed a threshold for human adaptability
Jeremy S. Pal & Elfatih A. B. Eltahir
2. Scientific American: Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago
Shannon Hall
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