July 1977 “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, present thinking 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.” Exxon senior scientist James Black reporting to Exxon’s management committee
InsideClimateNews conducted an eight month long investigation and uncovered the quote above as well as piecing together a devastating story of Exxon deliberately deceiving humanity into a course of creating a catastrophic climate that we may not survive. The must read series reveals what Exxon knew about climate change and when they knew it. The series provides the reader with pdf documents such as “Bad News Letter 1978". It is interesting that they knew about catastrophic climate change in 1977, a full 11 years before climate change even began to become common knowledge. And as is made clear in the quote above, they knew that there was only a small 5 to 10 year window to act in order to prevent calamity to the biosphere.
By 1981, Exxon had already established itself as a leader on the greenhouse effect with many in industry and the government. In early May of that year, Henry Shaw prepared a "brief summary of our current position on the CO2 Greenhouse effect" for Edward E. David, Jr., president of Exxon Research and Engineering, in case the topic came up at an Exxon symposium in San Francisco where David would be speaking.
Based on documentary evidence, it appears the summary went through several drafts and the final version went to David's office on May 15.
The bullet points that Shaw presented to David start with the idea that "there is sufficient time to study the problem before corrective action is required." Shaw based his caution on estimates that higher global temperatures caused by rising CO2 would only be felt around the year 2000, and that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would double in about 100 years. Those gaps, Shaw wrote, permit "time for an orderly transition to non-fossil fuel technologies should restrictions on fossil fuel use be deemed necessary."
The document did not raise doubts about the links between fossil fuel use, higher CO2 concentrations and a warmer planet. Shaw wrote:
• "Atmospheric CO2 will double in 100 years if fossil fuels grow at 1.4%/ a2. • 3oC global average temperature rise and 10oC at poles if CO2 doubles. —Major shifts in rainfall/agriculture —Polar ice may melt"
Eleven other staff and managers at Exxon Research, besides David, were sent the paper with the corporate position on global warming that Shaw had articulated.
By the end of the 1980s, Exxon would publicly pivot away from open consideration of any restrictions on fossil fuel use because
"Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate." Lee Raymond, Exxon Mobil CEO who used his executive chair as a platform for espousing his disbelief in global warming, collected $321 millionClimate change scientist Michael Mann has had a full frontal assault launched at him by infuriated climate deniers including death threats, intimidation and abuse. The Guardian describes the revolting hate campaign against him both personally and professionally. He states "On one occasion, I had to call the FBI after I was sent an envelope with a powder in it," Mann adds. "It turned out to be cornmeal but again the aim was intimidation. I ended up with police security tape all over my office doors and windows. That is the life of a climate scientist today in the US."
Among the tactics used against Mann were the theft and publication, in 2009, of emails he had exchanged with climate scientist Professor Phil Jones of East Anglia University. Selected, distorted versions of these emails were then published on the internet in order to undermine UN climate talks due to begin in Copenhagen a few weeks later. These negotiations ended in failure. The use of those emails to kill off the climate talks was "a crime against humanity, a crime against the planet," says Mann, a scientist at Penn State University.
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Mann became a target of climate deniers' hate because his research revealed there has been a recent increase of almost 1°C across the globe, a rise that was unprecedented "during at least the last 1,000 years" and which has been linked to rising emissions of carbon dioxide from cars, factories and power plants. Many other studies have since supported this finding although climate change deniers still reject his conclusions.
Mann's research particularly infuriated deniers after it was used prominently by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in one of its assessment reports, making him a target of right-wing denial campaigners. But as the 46-year-old scientist told the Observer, he only entered this research field by accident. "I was interested in variations in temperatures of the oceans over the past millennium. But there are no records of these changes so I had to find proxy measures: coral growth, ice cores and tree rings."
He created “a graph that showed small oscillations in temperature over that period until, about 150 years ago, there was a sudden jump, a clear indication that human activities were likely to be involved. A colleague suggested the graph looked like a hockey stick and the name stuck. The results of the study were published in Nature in 1998.”
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"The trouble is that the hockey stick graph become an icon and deniers reckoned if they could smash the icon, the whole concept of global warming would be destroyed with it. Bring down Mike Mann and we can bring down the IPCC, they reckoned. It is a classic technique for the deniers' movement, I have discovered, and I don't mean only those who reject the idea of global warming but those who insist that smoking doesn't cause cancer or that industrial pollution isn't linked to acid rain."
A barrage of intimidation was generated by "a Potemkin village" of policy foundations, as Mann puts it. These groups were set up by privately-funded groups that included Koch Industries and Scaife Foundations and bore names such as the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity and the Heartland Institute. These groups bombarded Mann with freedom of information requests while the scientist was served with a subpoena by Republican congressman Joe Barton to provide access to his correspondence. The purported aim was to clarify issues. The real aim was to intimidate Mann.
In addition, Mann has been attacked by Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican attorney general of Virginia who has campaigned to have the scientist stripped of academic credentials. Several committees of inquiry have investigated Mann's work. All have exonerated him.
Attacks by Republicans on science have only intensified even with all the recent exposure of Exxon’s crimes. Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has declared war on NOAA and EPA climate scientists. NOAA Administrator, Kathryn Sullivan, and other scientists, state that they will not be intimidated by the Republicans in Congress and they want the funding that George W. Bush slashed from NASA’s Earth sciences program restored .
The administrator, appointed by President Obama in 2009, has made Earth science one of NASA’s priorities in recent years. The topic became an especially bright flash point this year after the president requested $1.95 billion for NASA’s Earth science budget in 2016, and congressional appropriators countered with $500 million less than the president’s request. Republican Senator Ted Cruz was a particularly harsh critic, saying the agency’s Earth science budget had increased by 41 percent from 2009 to 2016. NASA, Cruz said, should focus on its “core mission” of exploring space.
However, on Tuesday Bolden countered that he was simply trying to restore NASA’s Earth-study funding to levels that existed under the Reagan administration. “If you look at where we were for Earth science, even back in the Reagan administration, we’re trying to get it back there now,” Bolden said. “A $500 million reduction in Earth science funding interrupts the trajectory of getting the Earth science budget back to where it used to be.”
Many of the cuts to Earth science came during the George W. Bush administration. According to a 2008 report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General, funding for the agency’s Earth sciences program was reduced by 37% percent from 2001 through 2006. In reports since then, such as in the 2007 Earth science decadal survey, scientists have urged NASA to restore those cuts in order to ensure a robust program to observe the planet.
Oil Change International summarizes Exxon’s decades of deceit.
Image credit: Oil Change InternationalExxon’s twenty five years of saying to the world: “Drop Dead”.
Late Eighties: Exxon hires a Harvard astrophysicist named Brian Flannery to examine the mathematical models behind global warming. In the late eighties, Flannery and Exxon give grants to several prestigious American universities, starting with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Flannery was blunt with his message for MIT researchers: “Embrace the uncertainty in all of this,” he told them.
1990: As the IPCC prepares their first summary document on climate change, Flannery asks the meeting how could the scientists justify 60-80 per cent cuts in carbon dioxide, given all the uncertainties?
1992: Exxon is a prominent member of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), the most active fossil fuel front group questioning the science of climate change. In 1992 the GCC begins using well-known climate skeptics like Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling and Fred Singer (all partly funded by Exxon) as “experts”.
April 1992: Flannery is quoted by the World Coal Institute in a briefing for climate negotiators: “because model-based projections are controversial, uncertain, and without confirmation, scientists are divided in their opinion about the likelihood and consequences of climate change.”
October 1997: Lee Raymond devotes 33 paragraphs of a 78 paragraph speech at the 15th World Petroleum Congress in Beijing, arguing that climate change was an “illusion” and that there was no need for cuts in CO2.
He says: “Only four per cent of the carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is due to human activities – 96 per cent comes from nature. Leaping to radically cut this tiny silver of the greenhouse pie on the premise that it will affect climate defies common sense and lacks foundation in our current understanding of the climate system … It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.”
He also warns delegates that “It would be tragic indeed if the people of this region were deprived of the opportunity for continued prosperity by misguided restrictions and regulations.”
One Exxon executive, who had access to Raymond, concedes: “They had come to the conclusion that the whole debate around global warming was kind of a hoax. Nobody inside Exxon dared question that”.
June 1997: Mobil takes out an advert in the US press advocating that “Instead of rigid targets and timetables, governments should consider alternatives… encourage voluntary initiatives.”
1997: Lee Raymond makes a speech: “In the debate over global climate change, one of the most critical facts has become one of the most ignored — the undeniable link between economic vitality and energy use.”
“Achieving economic growth remains one of the world’s critical needs, and with good reason. It creates more and better jobs, improves our quality of life and enables us to safeguard the environment. When economies grow, their energy consumption rises. It’s no accident that nations with the highest standard of living have the highest per-capita use of energy, about 85 percent of which comes from fossil fuels.”
1998: Exxon sets up the “Global Climate Science Team” (GCST). A memo written that year for GSCT said: “victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognise) uncertainties in climate science” and when public “recognition of uncertainty becomes part of ‘convention wisdom’”.
The memo proposes that Exxon and its PR firms “develop and implement a national media relations program to inform the media about the uncertainties in climate science”
Between 1998 and 2005, Exxon donates $16 million to numerous right-wing and libertarian think tanks to manufacture uncertainty about climate change.
31 May 2000: Lee Raymond backs a petition signed by anti-IPCC scientists saying that “There is no convincing scientific that any release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate.”
Raymond says:“What I am saying is there is a substantial difference of view in the scientific community as to what exactly is going on … We’re not going to follow what is politically correct”.
He also shows shareholders a chart of temperature data from satellites and stated that “if you just eyeball that, you could make a case statistically that, in fact, the temperature is going down.”
Exxon’s position “Science is not now able to confirm that fossil fuel use has led to any significant global warming.”
2000: Brian Flannery says: “ExxonMobil is firmly against the Kyoto Protocol… it achieves very little and costs too much.” He also claimed that emissions reductions were unfeasible: “You are going to need to expand the supply to meet the pressing future needs for energy, for things like the modern internet, the ‘e’ economy.”
May 2001: Lee Raymond says: “We see the Kyoto Protocol as unworkable, unfair, ineffective and potentially damaging to other vital economic and national interests. The debate over Kyoto has distracted policymakers for too long. I am encouraged to see more constructive discussions focusing on more realistic approaches … We think the best path forward is through attention to longer-range technological approaches and economically justified voluntary actions, as well as a strong program of climate science.”
September 2001: The IPCC meets in London to reach agreement on its Third Assessment Report on climate change. The IPCC’s draft final report contains the following line: “The Earth’s climate system has demonstrably changed on both global and regional scales since the pre-industrial era, with some of these changes attributable to human activities.”
ExxonMobil suggests an amendment deleting the text: “with some of these changes attributable to human activities.”
2002: ExxonMobil has “become increasingly convinced that the only sensible approach is to take a longer term perspective,” adding that “if warming turns out to be a real problem, will we be willing to shut down the economies of the industrialized world…?”
11 March 2002: Lee Raymond, says that the corporation intends to “stay the course” with its skepticism regarding climate change “until someone comes along with new information.”
March 2002: Bob B. Peterson, Chairman and CEO of Imperial Oil (the ExxonMobil subsidiary in Canada) tells the Canadian Press: “Kyoto is an economic entity. It has nothing to do with the environment. It has to do with world trade. This is a wealth-transfer scheme between developed and developing nations. And it’s been couched and clothed in some kind of environmental movement. That’s the dumbest-assed thing I’ve heard in a long time.”
Jan 2004: Exxon places an advert in the New York Times: “Scientific uncertainties continue to limit our ability to make objective, quantitative determinations regarding the human role in recent climate change or the degree and consequences of future change.”
2005: ExxonMobil says on its website: “While assessments such as those of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] have expressed growing confidence that recent warming can be attributed to increases in greenhouse gases, these conclusions rely on expert judgment rather than objective, reproducible statistical methods. Taken together, gaps in the scientific basis for theoretical climate models and the interplay of significant natural variability make it very difficult to determine objectively the extent to which recent climate changes might be the result of human actions.”
2005-2010: ExxonMobil funds one of the world’s leading climate skeptics Dr. Willie Soon in at least four grants totaling $335,000.
2006: The British Royal Society writes to Exxon asking the company to stop funding organisations which feature information “on their websites that misrepresented the science of climate change, by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge or by conveying a misleading impression of the potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change”.
January 2007: Exxon states that, on climate change,“We know enough now – or society knows enough now – that the risk is serious and action should be taken”.
February 2007: Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil’s CEO highlights the uncertainties in the science on climate change at a speech at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ annual conference in Houston. “While our understanding of the science continues to evolve and improve, there is still much that we do not know and cannot fully recognize in efforts to model and predict future climate behaviour,” he said.
2008: Exxon faces a shareholder revolt due to its stance on climate change. One of those calling for change, F&C Asset Management’s director of governance and sustainable investment, Kevin Litvack, says “Despite top-notch individual directors, the company’s record over the last decade, particularly regarding climate change, demonstrates that debate has been lacking.”
May 2008: Exxon publishes the following statement: “In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups, whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in a responsible manner”.
2009: Despite promising to end funding climate denial, Exxon gives approximately $1.3 million to climate denial organizations this year.
June 2012: In a major speech at the Council On Foreign Relations, ExxonMobil chief executive, Rex Tillerson, argues that fears about climate change are overblown. Although he acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels are causing climate change, he argued that society would be able to adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling can be mitigated, he told the audience. “We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt. It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution,” he said.
May 2013: At the company AGM, Rex Tillerson tells the audience that an economy that runs on oil is here to stay and cutting carbon emissions would do no good. He asks? “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”
x YouTube VideoAction: Climate Hawks-Prosecute Exxon For Deliberate Climate Denial