Exxon did its own research into anthropogenic climate change way back in 1982, at the very birth of the science. Their conclusions? That fossil fuel use and the CO2 greenhouse effect that burning them causes, would lead to man-made climate change. That such climate change would have significant implications for the future of humanity and the planet, including sea level rise, extreme weather and huge problems for agriculture. Comfortingly they did not foresee that this would be as bad as global nuclear war.
Here is the copy of the original Exxon document obtained from
Inside Climate News. Shell produced a similar report in 1988. These documents deserve to be shared widely.
What really infuriates me is, what they and other oil and fossil fuel companies did with this knowledge. If we had started down the path of decarbonisation, gradually, forty years ago, we could have completely averted the current crisis. Instead of this, the industry set about a cynical process of deliberate misinformation and lies. They funded organisations like the Heartland Institute along with many others. Prior to the fossil fuel industry, the Heartland institute’s previous large source of funding was the Tobacco industry and for many years they argued that tobacco smoke did not cause cancer.
Pseudoscience institutions and think tanks like these are directly responsible for the massive amount of climate change denial amongst the general population and legislators that we see today. They are or have been, directly funded by the fossil fuel industry. An industry, that it has now been shown, knew all along the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. Quite honestly companies that have been proven to behave like this should be sued out of existence for the massive harm they have done.
Maybe there is hope that will happen.