ExxonMobil and climate crises – redux

 

The Earth’s climate and inhabitants are suffering more than usual this summer, and the immediate future might worsen. As of July 2023, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project has published findings highlighting the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. Studies conducted by WWA indicate that human-induced climate change has substantially increased the likelihood and severity of extreme weather phenomena across the globe. Findings suggest that heat waves have become more frequent and intense due to anthropogenic factors, leading to adverse effects on human health, agriculture, and ecosystems. The WWA identified a clear link between climate change and the intensification of tropical storms, resulting in more powerful hurricanes and typhoons with devastating consequences for coastal regions.

WWA’s research indicates a connection between global warming and prolonged droughts and heavy rainfall events, contributing to water scarcity and flooding in different regions. These findings underscore the urgent need for global action on climate and extreme weather.

Here comes El Niño!

Along with the steadily increasing effects of global warming, Earth is now experiencing an El Niño. El Niño is a climate phenomenon characterized by the periodic warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. During El Niño events, the increased ocean temperatures release significant amounts of heat into the atmosphere, intensifying the greenhouse effect. This extra heat alters weather patterns worldwide, causing more frequent and extreme weather events like droughts, floods, and storms. El Niño can disrupt natural climate cycles, impacting ecosystems, agriculture, and global temperatures.

Given current events and the press coverage, I thought reposting my 2016 blog on ExxonMobil’s research done decades ago that alerted insiders to this coming climate crisis would be helpful. I have no unique insight into what that company has done since 2016, but the global use of fossil fuels has not reversed. For current news in the ExxonMobil climate research issue, search “Exxon knew about global warming in 1977,” and you can read articles for 2023 published in Science, New York Times, The Guardian, and more. NPR, PBS, and BBC also produced pieces listed under that search.

Let’s remember that continuing a business depends on customer demand. We are all in this together.

 

Below is my ExxonMobil post from November 2016

(some updated links and grammatical polish have been applied to the original post!)

The New York Review of Books published an essay this week¹ (the first of two parts) authored by two members of the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF). The essay charges that ExxonMobil (Exxon) scientists knew about the rising threat of climate change and warned senior management that the company needed to heed these warnings. Instead, ExxonMobil buried the findings under artificial argument, casting doubt on the science behind the findings – by their own scientists.

The RFF commissioned a group at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to look into the public record of what Exxon knew and when and what they then did. The Columbia group found that Exxon scientists first reported the threat of climate change to their business and our planet in 1977. Several other Exxon studies and reports reinforcing these findings followed through the decades. The article gives some powerful quotes from these scientists that show they found and understood the threats and passed them on to Exxon executives. A 1982 internal report by Marvin Glaser specifically warned of the melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in the twenty-first century.

While the Columbia group worked on this, Inside Climate News studied Exxon documents and came to the same conclusions. What did Exxon’s management do? They concluded that their fossil fuel business would soon be under threat, and they needed to prepare for pressure from environmental groups, scientists, citizens, and the government—pressure to regulate and even penalize them.

What Exxon did

In 1989 Exxon’s managers, while recognizing the threat uncovered by its own scientists and others, determined to meet the business challenge by employing the Tobacco Strategy—the fake conflict designed by the tobacco industry to delay any action on the deadly effects of tobacco for four decades, in the process generating an enormous profit and killing many thousands of our citizens. This strategy is thoroughly documented in the recent book Merchants of Doubt.² It was employed for tobacco, acid rain, ozone, and other global environmental and public health problems.

The key step is to manufacture uncertainty around the edges of the problem while casting these remaining questions as central flaws or making up new ones. Exxon knew better.

The main steps were:

1. Create and emphasize uncertainty in the science while urging more research before action is taken. Science always has unanswered questions around the main findings. This is the easiest step. The result—delay.
2. Fund front groups “think tanks” to create propaganda about the manufactured uncertainties (Heartland Institute is one, and the websites Watts Up With That? and Climate Depot, among others). In this manner, they manufactured an artificial debate.
3. Engage the press to take the manufactured debate as an objective issue that needs balanced reporting, thereby giving voice to the centers of disinformation and the public access to their falsehoods.

This strategy is, of course, fraudulent. The tobacco industry paid dearly for it in the 1990s. New York, California, and several other states are now investigating ExxonMobil for fraud—deceiving their investors, not to mention ruining our planet on purpose.

What happened to prominent scientists

In parallel with the tobacco strategy, Exxon, their front groups, and their lobbyists engaged in harassment and character assassinations of prominent scientists who challenged them—James Hansen and Michael Mann, for example. The tobacco industry did exactly the same.

This campaign against climate change science seems to have worked so far. Here we are with U.S. leaders buying into disinformation and outright propaganda. But will ExxonMobil prevail?

Not with the Rockefeller Family Fund. The RFF is in the process of divesting from all of its fossil fuel investments. The irony of this can’t be understated. The Rockefeller family founded Standard Oil, the parent company of ExxonMobil. The divestment process is underway and will take time, but the RFF singled out ExxonMobil for immediate divestment because of its “morally reprehensible conduct.”

What Exxon got right to start with

After reading this article and the three reports by Columbia published in the LA Times in 2015, I’m happy to conclude that Exxon scientists, arguably the best in their business, acted ethically. They created climate change science along with university and government scientists. They identified the threats. Then their own company turned on them. Exxon executives squandered their own considerable scientific resources. Exxon could have led the renewable energy world. This might be the final irony.

Where is ExxonMobil now? To quote the RFF article:

“ExxonMobil and its allies are still standing in the way of effective action to address climate change…”

In the meantime, profits roll in while our planet is deconstructed.

———-

1. David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman. The Rockefeller Family Fund vs. Exxon; DECEMBER 8, 2016 ISSUE; New York Review of Books
2. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.