Conversation

What #BigOil knew about #ClimateChange, in its own words

by Benjamin Franta, October 28, 2021

"Back in 1979, #Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding #GlobalWarming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from #FossilFuels and instead focused on #renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major #ClimateCrisis could be avoided.

"But the industry didn't pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute #ClimateScience, block fossil fuel controls and keep their products flowing.

"We know about it through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now beginning to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called the Global Climate Coalition—but it wasn't an environmental group like the name suggests; instead, it worked to sow doubt about climate change and lobbied lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s.

"For example, in 1997, the Global Climate Coalition's chairman, William O'Keefe, who was also an executive vice president for the American Petroleum Institute, wrote in the Washington Post that 'Climate scientists don't say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth,' contradicting what the industry had known for decades. The fossil fuel industry also funded think tanks and biased studies that helped slow progress to a crawl."

Read more:
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-big-oil-knew-climate-words.html

#ExxonKnew #BigOilKnew #BigOilAndGas #Climate #ClimateEmergency