A researcher went through the archives of oil companies and their union - the Oil Institute and discovered amazing documents that revealed exactly what the oil companies knew. The predictions turned out to be accurate. Also according to them, if nothing is done the temperature will rise by 5 degrees and the coastal cities will drown. As you remember, the world leaders gathering at the climate conference in Glasgow need to commit to the steps they will take to curb the warming by a degree and a half
By Benjamin Ferrante PhD student in history, Stanford University.
Four years ago I traveled across America. I visited historical archives and looked for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change - and in particular I wanted to investigate when the big coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the phenomenon and what they knew about it.
I checked boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I started recognizing typewriter fonts from the 60s and 70s and marveled at the legibility of things written in the past. What these papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. The words of the industry itself, as that the study found mine, shows that companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world.
How climate change became a crisis
On October 28, 2021 my friends investigated Senior Congressional Subcommittee From the companies of Chevron, Exxon and their joint lobby organization "American Petroleum Institute" for the industry's efforts to downplay the role of fossil fuels in climate change. Exxon CEO Darren Woods told lawmakers that his company's public statements "are true and have always been true" and that the company "does not spread disinformation about climate change."
(Editor's note, many investigations published over the years, including in the recent period leading up to the Glasgow conference showed that the oil company executives were not just neutral, but invested billions of dollars in lobbying, turned the Republican Party into an anti-science, helped bring Trump to the White House so that he could be used to do their bidding, Ricks Tillerson jumped from the position of CEO of Exxon directly to the position of Secretary of State and more. An example in this article that was published in "Haaretz" last week.
Here is what the corporate documents from the last six decades show.
Surprising discoveries - Edward Teller warned them
In an old gunpowder factory in Delaware - now a museum and archive - I found a transcript of an oil conference from 1959 called Symposium "Energy and Man" , held at Columbia University in New York. As I was browsing, I saw a speech by a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning industry executives and others of global warming.
"Every time you burn a conventional," He explained Teller, "You create carbon dioxide. ... Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect." If the world continues to use fossil fuels, the ice caps will start to melt, the sea level will rise and eventually, "all the coastal cities will be covered", he warned.
In Wyoming, I found another speech in the Bellamy University Archives from 1965. That same year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization and lobby of the American oil industry, the president of the group, Frank Ikard, mentioned a report called " Restoration of our environment ” which was published just a few days before. by President Lyndon Johnson's staff of scientific advisers.
"The essence of the report", said Icard to the industry audience , "He that there is still time to save the peoples of the world from the catastrophic consequences of the pollution, but time is running out." He continued that "one of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is added to the Earth's atmosphere by burning coal, oil and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be different, and this will cause significant changes in the climate."
Ikard noted that the report found that "a non-polluting means of driving cars, buses and trucks may become a national necessity".
When I reviewed the findings upon my return to California, I realized that before San Francisco's summer of love, before Woodstock, the height of the 60s counterculture, and all that stuff that seemed to me to be ancient history, the oil industry bosses had been privy to the fact that their products would ultimately change the climate. the entire planet, and this will have dangerous consequences.
A secret study revealed the dangers ahead
At the same time, other researchers uncovered documents that were in some ways even more shocking.
In the late 70s, the American Petroleum Institute established a secret committee called " The CO2 and Climate Task Force ", which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.
In 1980, members of the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University named John Luhrman to brief them on the state of climate science. We have A copy of Luhrmann's presentation , which warned that if fossil fuels continue to be used, global warming will be "barely noticeable" by 2005, but by the 60st century there will be "catastrophic global effects". That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, and insisted that there would be no negative consequences Despite what they knew inside.
Exxon also had a secret research program. In 1981, one of its managers, Roger Cohen, sent Internal memo And in it he noted that the company's long-term business plans may "produce effects that will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a significant part of the Earth's population)."
The following year Exxon completed Internal report A 40-page comprehensive on climate change, which predicted almost exactly the rate of global warming we have seen, and phenomena such as sea level rise, drought, and more. According to the first page of the report, it was "widely distributed among Exxon management" but "was not supposed to be distributed externally".
And Exxon did keep it a secret: we know about the existence of the report only because that journalists investigate In Inside Climate News They revealed The same in 2015.
In the company of predict that there will be climate migration
Other oil companies knew the effects their products had on the planet as well. In 1986 the Dutch oil company Shell graduated Internal report Nearly 100 pages long, he predicted that global warming as a result of the use of fossil fuels would cause changes that would be "the greatest in recorded history," including "devastating floods," the abandonment of entire countries, and even forced migration around the world. This report was defined as "confidential and revealed only in 2018 by the Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers.
In October 2021, I and two French colleagues published another study that shows through documents and interviews how the oil company also Total The famous one in Paris was aware to the catastrophic potential of global warming already in the 70s. Despite this awareness, we discovered that Total then worked with Exxon to spread doubt about climate change.
The public relations axis of the major oil companies
These companies had a choice.
back in 1979, Exxon was privately exploring options to avoid global warming.
The report's findings specifically state that immediate action is required and if the industry moves away from fossil fuels and instead focuses on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could begin to decline in the 90s and a major climate crisis could be averted.
But the industry did not continue on this path. Instead, my colleagues and I recently discovered that in the late 80s, Exxon and Co oil Others Coordinate a global effort Disagree on climate science, block fossil fuel regulation and maintain free marketing of their products.
We know about this through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now starting to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called Global Climate Coalition – but this was not an environmental group as the name suggests; Instead, she is acted to sow doubt on climate change and pressured lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate change throughout the 90s.
For example, in 1997, the chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, William O'Keefe, who was also senior vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, Wrote in the Washington Post that "climate scientists do not say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the planet", contrary to For what the industry has known for decades . The fossil fuel industry financed it think tanks ו Studies are biased which helped the progress to be slow to a crawl.
Today, most oil companies shy away from denying climate science outright, but they continue Fight fossil fuel regulation and promote themselves as clean energy leaders even though they are still invest the vast majority of their fossil fuel investments. As I write this, climate legislation Blocked again in Congress by an owner legislator Close ties to the fossil fuel industry .
People around the world, meanwhile, are experiencing the effects of global warming: Weird weather , Seasons changeand, extreme heat waves And even forest fires like they have never seen before.
Will the world experience the global disaster that the oil companies predicted years before I was born? It depends on what we do now, with the historical knowledge.
The study, published in Sectin the journal Science, is supported by the Stanford University Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, the Social Science Network for Climate Science, and the Center on Climate Violence.
For an article in The Conversation
More of the topic in Hayadan:
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I wish every religion had evidence like the climate religion.
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The climate believers are promoting and developing a new and very dangerous religion under the guise of science.
And like any religion - now they also have an inquisition to investigate those whose views are free from it. delusional