World’s Biggest Oil Company Knew Of Climate Change In 1977 – Yet It Spent Millions To Fund Deniers

Exxon (now ExxonMobil), the world’s biggest oil company, was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue. According to a recent investigation by InsideClimate News, a website that has won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on oil spills, despite this knowledge, the firm spent millions over the next 31 years refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate denial and misinformation.

The Guardian reported in July 2015 that Exxon’s own scientists were aware as early as 1981 that climate change could spell trouble for the oil business – years before global warming become a broad public concern. The investigation by InsideClimate News pushed the clock on Exxon’s knowledge of climate change back even further to the 1970s.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black told Exxon’s Management Committee: “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.” In 1978, Black warned Exxon that doubling CO₂ gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees.

In 1979, Exxon budgeted more than $1 million over three years for a research project aboard the company’s Esso Atlantic supertanker. The project’s mission was to sample CO₂ in the air and ocean along a route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf, and measure how quickly the oceans were taking in CO₂.

Between 1986 and 1992, Ken Croasdale, senior ice researcher for Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, led a Calgary-based team of researchers and engineers to determine how global warming could affect Exxon’s Arctic operations and its bottom line.

“Certainly any major development with a life span of say 30-40 years will need to assess the impacts of potential global warming. This is particularly true of Arctic and offshore projects in Canada, where warming will clearly affect sea ice, icebergs, permafrost and sea levels,” Croasdale told an engineering conference in 1991.

He told an audience of academics and government researchers in 1992 that potential global warming posed hazards, including higher sea levels and bigger waves, which could damage the company’s existing and future coastal and offshore infrastructure, including drilling platforms, artificial islands, processing plants and pump stations. And a thawing earth could be troublesome for those facilities as well as pipelines.

Exxon knew about #climatechange way before you did. Here’s what it did next https://t.co/ciyM8sx6wL #ExxonKnew pic.twitter.com/rtmiDah4LA

— Greenpeace (@Greenpeace) November 28, 2015

Despite this, the company for years continued to cast doubt on whether climate change was occurring or was caused by the burning of fossil fuels. (An investigation by Greenpeace found Exxon spent more than $30 million spreading confusion about climate science before making a public commitment to end funding such front groups in 2008.)

By 1989, the company helped to found and lead the Global Climate Coalition to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. The Global Climate Coalition, disbanded in 2002, was an alliance of some of the world’s largest companies seeking to halt government efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. Exxon used the American Petroleum Institute, right-wing think tanks, campaign contributions and its own lobbying to push a narrative that climate science was too uncertain to necessitate cuts in fossil fuel emissions.

As the international community moved in 1997 to take a first step in curbing emissions with the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon’s chairman and CEO Lee Raymond argued to stop it. The company also helped prevent the United States and other countries, such as China and India, from signing the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty on climate, in 1998 to control greenhouse gases.

“Let’s agree there’s a lot we really don’t know about how climate will change in the 21st century and beyond. We need to understand the issue better, and fortunately, we have time. It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now,” Raymond said in his speech before the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing in October 1997.

In early November 2015, the attorney general of New York State Eric T. Schneiderman subpoenaed Exxon for four decades of documents related to its climate research and messaging. The move was part of an ongoing investigation into whether the oil giant lied to shareholders, federal financial regulators, and the public on the facts about global warming, as well as the risks it might pose to the corporation’s operations and value.

According to The New York Times, the inquiry would include a period of at least a decade during which Exxon Mobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science, even as its in-house scientists were outlining the potential consequences — and uncertainties — to company executives.

The oil company denied the allegations, and said it had been forthcoming about the business risks of climate change in its shareholder and other reports.

“We unequivocally reject allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research contained in media reports that are inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s nearly 40-year history of climate research that was conducted publicly in conjunction with the Department of Energy, academics and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” Richard Keil, a spokesman, said in an emailed statement.

Nonetheless, baffled with the allegations and investigation, the oil giant, which gave more than $200,000 to Columbia University in 2014, went on the offensive in a November 20 letter accusing the Columbia postgraduate students and their adviser, Susanne Rust (whose reporting helped stoke calls for federal probe) of potentially violating the university’s policy on research misconduct.

Exxon seems to threaten to pull funding from Columbia after journalism students expose their climate change cover-up https://t.co/7nQQGZDuyA

— Freedom of the Press (@FreedomofPress) December 1, 2015

Exxon Vice President for Public and Government Affairs Kenneth P. Cohen accused Rust of having “cherry-picked — and distorted — statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions about the risk of climate change were reached decades ago by company researchers”.

It is proved that Exxon’s scientists did discover evidence that man-made emissions were damaging the climate as far back as 1977. However, it is yet to be seen whether Exxon will be taken to task for a truly serious scandal?

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