The Opinion Pages New York Times
Exxon’s Climate Concealment
By NAOMI ORESKES | OCT. 9, 2015
"The same thing has happened with climate change, as Inside Climate News, a nonprofit news organization, has been reporting in a series of articles based on internal documents from Exxon Mobil dating from the 1970s and interviews with former company scientists and employees.
Had Exxon been upfront at the time about the dangers of the greenhouse gases we were spewing into the atmosphere, we might have begun decades ago to develop a less carbon-intensive energy path to avert the worst impacts of a changing climate. Amazingly, politicians are still debating the reality of this threat, thanks in no small part to industry disinformation.
Government and academic scientists alerted policy makers to the potential threat of human-driven climate change in the 1960s and ’70s, but at that time climate change was still a prediction. By the late 1980s it had become an observed fact. …"
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One comment it received is worth mentioning over here: "Imagine that, pass thousands and thousands of regulations, make it so you have attorneys running the big business and the country. And you have a company that employees thousands of scientists and engineers covering up the truth. What the hell did you expect would happen? The lawyers to tell the truth and do what is morally right?"
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To which I responded:
What about the simple matter of scientists having a right to have their papers and information honestly represented?
My point is, it’s one thing to come up with every conceivable bias driven argument you can dream up to support one’s doubts.
It’s quite another to deliberately and repeatedly LIE about the work and information of bonafide experts
in critically important scientific fields.
