Exxon: . . lied about climate-change risks???
Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 4:57 pmExxon Mobil and the G.O.P.: Fossil Fools
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/opini ... =eta1&_r=0 ]
NOV. 5, 2015 by Timothy Egan
Well before one hottest-year-ever was followed by yet another record-breaker, before Arctic ice vanished in real time and Pope Francis made a plea to save our troubled home, the world’s largest private oil company discovered that its chief product could cause global havoc. [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/busi ... classifier ]
As an accidental public service, this deed was little known until recently, when a trove of documents unearthed by several news organizations showed What Exxon Knew and When It Knew It. And it was reported Thursday that the New York attorney general is starting an investigation [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/scien ... 81&ref=cta ] to determine whether the company lied about the risks of climate change. [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/scie ... classifier ]
It’s not surprising, given its army of first-rate scientists and engineers, that Exxon was aware as far back as the 1970s that carbon dioxide from oil and gas burning could have dire effects on the earth. Nor is it surprising that Exxon would later try to cast doubt on what its experts knew to be true, to inject informational pollution into the river of knowledge about climate change.
But what is startling is how a deliberate campaign of misinformation — now disavowed by even Exxon Mobil itself — has found its way into the minds of the leading Republican presidential candidates.
You can see the origin of this web of duplicity in stories done by the Pulitzer Prize-winning InsideClimate News [ http://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092 ... al-warming ] and The Los Angeles Times. [ http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-research/ ] Kudos to both. They found that Exxon’s board of directors was fully briefed by its own scientists, decades ago, on the emerging consensus that burning oil and gas may cause sea levels to rise, glacial ice to melt and a host of other “generally negative consequences.” Their reaction was to fund the kind of counter-information campaigns that Soviet-era propagandists would be proud of.
So, even as one in-house memo stated that “fossil fuels contribute most of the CO2” that was turning the earth into an overheated greenhouse, another memo showed that the company would seek to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.”
MORE:
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/opini ... =eta1&_r=0 ]
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/opini ... =eta1&_r=0 ]
NOV. 5, 2015 by Timothy Egan
Well before one hottest-year-ever was followed by yet another record-breaker, before Arctic ice vanished in real time and Pope Francis made a plea to save our troubled home, the world’s largest private oil company discovered that its chief product could cause global havoc. [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/busi ... classifier ]
As an accidental public service, this deed was little known until recently, when a trove of documents unearthed by several news organizations showed What Exxon Knew and When It Knew It. And it was reported Thursday that the New York attorney general is starting an investigation [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/scien ... 81&ref=cta ] to determine whether the company lied about the risks of climate change. [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/scie ... classifier ]
It’s not surprising, given its army of first-rate scientists and engineers, that Exxon was aware as far back as the 1970s that carbon dioxide from oil and gas burning could have dire effects on the earth. Nor is it surprising that Exxon would later try to cast doubt on what its experts knew to be true, to inject informational pollution into the river of knowledge about climate change.
But what is startling is how a deliberate campaign of misinformation — now disavowed by even Exxon Mobil itself — has found its way into the minds of the leading Republican presidential candidates.
You can see the origin of this web of duplicity in stories done by the Pulitzer Prize-winning InsideClimate News [ http://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092 ... al-warming ] and The Los Angeles Times. [ http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-research/ ] Kudos to both. They found that Exxon’s board of directors was fully briefed by its own scientists, decades ago, on the emerging consensus that burning oil and gas may cause sea levels to rise, glacial ice to melt and a host of other “generally negative consequences.” Their reaction was to fund the kind of counter-information campaigns that Soviet-era propagandists would be proud of.
So, even as one in-house memo stated that “fossil fuels contribute most of the CO2” that was turning the earth into an overheated greenhouse, another memo showed that the company would seek to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.”
MORE:
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/opini ... =eta1&_r=0 ]