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If only for the sake of history, let’s stand the hell up.
If only for the sake of history, let’s stand the hell up.
Petition to call on the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil.
From Bill McKibben for 350.org
Dear Friends,
Earlier this morning, leaders from a wide variety of environmental and civil rights groups sent a short letter Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking for a federal investigation of the allegations that Exxon knew that climate change was real decades ago and lied about it.
This is rare and powerful unity—I don’t remember a moment like it since the first days of the Keystone fight, when the same wide spectrum of leaders wrote a very similar letter.
But encouraging as it is to see this solidarity, the reason for it makes me bitter. Ever since I read the first exposés of Exxon’s mendacity in Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, they’ve haunted me.
A corporation may never have done anything bigger and badder; just think how much would be different if Exxon had told the truth. We wouldn’t fully have solved global warming but we’d be well on the way—there would have been no 25 year phony pretend debate. There’d be a lot more solar panels, and a lot less carbon in the air. There'd be a lot more green jobs, and a lot fewer communities, most of them low income and communities of color, dealing with the terrible health impacts of pollution. None of you would have had to fight simply to get climate change taken seriously; instead we’d all be hard at work on solutions.1
I think we should be angry. I don’t think we should be cynical and say ‘of course they knew.’ This behavior should shock us—it’s shocking. So can you please join us in asking the federal government to investigate Exxon?
Maybe this will be enough to make sure this industry gets the treatment the tobacco industry got a generation ago. Or maybe Big Oil is so big (Exxon, after all, spent many years as the most profitable company on earth) that it will take more. I’ve already spent an afternoon in jail, charged with “unlawful trespass” at an ExxonMobil station; perhaps, like Keystone, more of us will need to go to jail. (Certainly no responsible person can any longer justify investing in Exxon—this is a potent reminder of why divestment is so key.)
At the very least, please don’t let this story die. If global warming is the biggest thing humans have ever done, then Exxon’s conduct is the single most shameful part of the whole sad story.
Bill McKibben for 350.org
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The American Denial of Global Warming - Perspectives on Ocean Science
Uploaded on Dec 20, 2007 by UCTV / Perspectives on Ocean Science
Polls show that between one-third and one-half of Americans still believe that there is "no solid" evidence of global warming, or that if warming is happening it can be attributed to natural variability. Others believe that scientists are still debating the point. Join scientist and renowned historian Naomi Oreskes as she describes her investigation into the reasons for such widespread mistrust and misunderstanding of scientific consensus and probes the history of organized campaigns designed to create public doubt and confusion about science. Series: "Perspectives on Ocean Science" [12/2007] [Science] [Show ID: 13459]
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Science for the Public: Creating Public Doubt about Science
Published on Nov 25, 2014 by WGBHForum
Science for the Public www.scienceforthepublic.org November 18, 2014
Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University and co-author
(w. Erik M. Conway) of "Merchants of Doubt."
Dr. Oreskes discusses the disinformation campaigns about tobacco and cancer, CFCs and the ozone hole, coal and acid rain, and now climate change. She describes the structure of those disinformation efforts, the ideology that shaped disinformation, and role of conservative think tanks. She discusses how the public can combat the "manufacture of doubt," which is the subject of her best-selling book (with Erik Conway). The documentary of "Merchants of Doubt" will be released March 06, 2015.
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Concerning Our Failure to Appreciate the Weather
By Peter Miesler • 20 October 2015 • The Humanist
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Exxon Secrets
By James Hoggan • Friday, March 26, 2010 The new report succinctly explains how fossil fuel interests used the tobacco industry’s playbook and an extensive arsenal of lobbyists and “experts” for hire in order to manufacture disinformation designed to confuse the public and stifle action to address climate change.
The new report succinctly explains how fossil fuel interests used the tobacco industry’s playbook and an extensive arsenal of lobbyists and “experts” for hire in order to manufacture disinformation designed to confuse the public and stifle action to address climate change.
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By Ross Gelbspan • Thursday, May 17, 2007 - Desmog Blog.com
According to the report, Exxon provided $2.1 million in 2006 to 41 “think” tanks and associations that actively sow doubt about the realities of climate change. Since 1998, ExxonMobil has spent a staggering $23 million on this climate disinformation. ...
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Cindy Baxter | 17 September 2015
Exxon's response to news the US would dump the Kyoto Protocol, 2001.
This week, Inside Climate News has published some new revelations about one of the world’s biggest oil companies: that scientists working for Exxon knew about climate change as early as 1977.
Exxon’s own scientists conducted an extensive research program on climate change and "The Greenhouse Effect", running complex CO2 monitoring experiments and publishing peer-reviewed papers, because the company was deeply interested in this emerging threat to its core business, oil, and ultimately the company's survival. There is now no doubt that Exxon has known about the science and the risks of global warming for decades.
The news will perhaps be of great interest to those lawyers who successfully prosecuted the tobacco industry, which hid its knowledge of the science around tobacco’s addiction, and the impact of second hand smoke.
Exxon Advertising Fully Contradicted Exxon Scientists
Because, despite having this breadth of knowledge within its walls, and for many years after these climate science programs were run at Exxon, the company has spent years and millings of dollars funding climate deniers and think tanks who attack the scientific consensus, spreading doubt and uncertainty. Greenpeace has collected data on Exxon's campaign of climate denial for decades. Our ExxonSecrets project and database now shows that has spent nearly $31 million since 1998 funding think tanks and campaigns against the climate science consensus and climate policy progress.
For decades, Mobil ran a weekly “advertorial” or "op-ad" on the opinion pages of the New York Times and other papers, ads that continued after Mobil merged with Exxon in 1999. The story of how Mobil managed to secure advertising space on the editorial page of the New York Times and why they did so is another story.
We at PolluterWatch have collected an archive of these ads from the 1970's to 2004. In light of the recent revelations about the company’s early understanding of the issue, they’re worth re-examining. The ads on global warming in particular set out the history of the companies’ campaign against both climate action and the science.
THE MOBIL ADS
In the lead up to the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, Mobil, a prominent member of the Global Climate Coalition, was leading the charge on the “it’s not global” message calling for developing countries to be included in emissions reduction targets.
Mobil focused on all the arguments against action on climate change that we still hear today. It claimed that developing country emissions were not addressed (the “blame China” argument). It said the climate models can’t be trusted. It called for more research. And it questioned the veracity of climate science. This argument later became the mantra of Republicans and industry opponents of international climate action, turning into a “blame China” campaign that stalled international action for years.
THE EXXONMOBIL ADS
On December 2 1999, the first of the newly-merged ExxonMobil company ads appeared in the New York Times, announcing the merger.
And just one week later, on December 9, 1999, the merged ExxonMobil picked up the decades-long New York Times ad campaign with an ad titled: “Tomorrow’s energy needs”, emphasizing of course the plentiful global supply of fossil fuels, ExxonMobil’s preferred energy source. ExxonMobil is still running this argument today, using outdated, business as usual IEA scenarios to emphasize its point, and ignoring any of the IEA's “new policy” scenarios. Interestingly, the new revelations by Inside Climate News show that in the 1970s, Exxon was thinking well beyond oil for a spell, doing advanced research in solar power for example.
The Chairman and CEO of the merged giant ExxonMobil was Lee Raymond, who had worked for Exxon since the 1960s. Raymond in fact chaired the American Petroleum Institute’s climate change committee, and twice chaired the API itself. Raymond was a hardened climate science denier, and his views were strongly reflected in a new turn in the company’s ads. Whereas Mobil had called for more research, and put the blame on developing countries, ExxonMobil embraced those arguments, but turned to outright denial.
On March 16, 2000, ExxonMobil’s ads continued the onslaught against the Kyoto Protocol and climate science with “Do no harm” that argued a similar line to the “coal will solve poverty” pitch we hear from Peabody Energy today: ...
{The despicable details go on and on.}
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