Exxon's Lie

By Earthscope Media Reporter Adam Vogel

A recently published investigative series from Inside Climate News suggests that Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded international oil and gas company, knew about the dangers of climate change as far back as the 1970’s. The corporation became aware of rising levels of Carbon Dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, even before members of the public and the government. The investigation also suggests that all of the major oil providers, not just Exxon Mobil, were aware of the ramifications of non-renewable energy usage. And yet, almost all of these companies continued to spend millions of dollars over the next decades in an effort to sway public opinion by discrediting the science that acknowledged climate change.

Exxon scientists had been warning executives of the dangers of climate change as early as the late 1970s. In July of 1977, Exxon’s senior scientist James Black warned Exxon’s management committee of the possible future ramifications of fossil fuel use. Other Exxon scientists even continued to model a projection of the earth’s climate in the 1980’s, predicting that the earth’s temperature would increase as a result of the oil industry’s fossil fuel dependence. The predictions espoused in these models have for the most part come true as of today.

In addition to Exxon’s own scientific investigations, the American Petroleum Institute alongside the nation’s largest oil companies began a task force that conducted new research on the effects of fossil fuels on the climate. The investigation ran between 1979 and 1983, and gave the oil industry irrefutable truth that climate change was occurring, and posed an immediate danger for the earth and its inhabitants. It was from this program that Exxon, along with the rest of the oil industry, first became aware of the dangers their industry posed for the earth’s climate.

Exxon management did not completely ignore the data presented to them; at first, they actually depended on it and used it to adjust their own environmental practices . They used the same climate data from their climate models in an effort to slow the melting of the Arctic ice cap, so as to mitigate the global perception that the earth’s climate might have been warming. Behind the scenes, Exxon was fully aware of the effect their greenhouse emissions were having on the atmosphere. When addressing the public however, Exxon seemed to blow off new studies that pointed towards a rising global temperature. Instead of admitting what they already knew to be true, they spent millions of dollars (Greenpeace estimates the number to be around 30 million dollars) in an effort to convince the public that climate change was not occurring. They even went so far as to create the Global Climate Coalition, a program whose sole purpose it was to discredit scientific research that called for action against climate change. By the 1990’s, Exxon spearheaded a new movement within the oil industry built around planting misinformation about climate change. Exxon’s efforts paid off; in 1998 the United States along with China and India refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, much at the urging of the oil industry.

Dr. James Powell, a respected geologist and environmentalist, views corporate cover-ups like these as a major obstacle preventing Washington from taking action on climate change. Powell claims that most right wing politicians 15 years ago would not have attempted to discredit climate change, as they do today. In a recent interview with Earthscope Media, Powell says that over the last 15 years there has been “A campaign of doubt, deceit, misinformation, lies, by a group of so called ‘think-tanks’... funded by Exxon Mobil and private right wing foundations. And they have won so far… they have managed to sway public opinion, and they have really turned man-made global warming from a scientific into a political issue.”