Industrial climate denial
What Exxon Mobil knew about likely climate change from its emissions, and how it sought to conceal it
The sorry history of how fossil fuel companies, like big tobacco before them, have sought to conceal and confuse the science around climate change is now extremely well-chronicled, but still little appreciated by the wider public. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said:
For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies. They exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.
Here’s just one example of that sorry history: Exxon Mobil itself predicted current climate trends with startling accuracy in internal company studies 40 years ago, yet later still sought to cast doubt on the science its own experts had so masterfully laid out.
In 1982, Exxon predicted that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere would reach 420 ppm around 2030 (in fact, they first hit that level in June 2021), corresponding to a 1.2C average global temperature increase, almost exactly what has in fact been observed.
Yet in an ad published in the New York Times in 1993, Mobil (Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999), stated that ‘[Controversy arises] when climate prediction models are used to conclude Earth’s temperature will climb drastically in the next century’.
As the Guardian relates:
“Exxon’s position”, instructed internal strategy memos from 1988-89, was to “extend the science” and “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” about the climate crisis. Or as a 1998 “Action Plan” by Exxon, Chevron, API, utilities companies and others declared: “Victory will be achieved when average citizens” and the “media ‘understands’ (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science”.
Making up for its own dreadful history (George Monbiot: ‘How the BBC let climate deniers walk all over it’) of misreporting climate change, the BBC has in recent years produced some excellent journalism chronicling the full extent of fossil fuel industry propaganda and denial, such as this report from September 2020, ‘How the oil industry made us doubt climate change’.
The fossil fuel industry continues to be far better represented in global climate negotiations than many of the countries worst affected by its activities. Now the industry claims to recognise the climate crisis – but its actions belie its claims: in 2001, six years after the Paris climate agreement, fossil fuel industry plans far exceed the emissions reductions required by Paris:
Governments’ production plans and projections would lead to about 240% more coal, 57% more oil, and 71% more gas in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.