DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Exxon Knew About Climate Change

Let's not devolve this discussion into Liberal vs Conservative. Stick to the facts, okay?



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So an oil companies own scientist knew that man made climate change was real.

It'll be interesting reading people on the board (read: Erik and Arch) attempt to spin this one.

Sounds a lot like the tobacco companies before the big exposé on them, and also the same thing with lead based paint; learned about the lead thing from Cosmos.

I was genuinely interested in this before I saw the "source" was the Guardian- likely the most bias enviro-rag that has ever been printed. They cherry pick quotes, don;t cite sources properly and sometimes just outright lie.

While I'd be interested in the actual case, I take anything printed from the Guardian with a grain of salt. I'll do a little googling on this for sure and try to find info presented from a less bias outlet.

*Sigh*

Scientific studies by Exxon, an actual huge oil company, projected what is now happening.

it pretty much boils down to this.

companies know the real, but it's about the bottom line. people so concerned with jobs, but don't even realize there won't be anything to work for if we keep going down this path of destroying our environment. instead of transitioning people into new jobs for alternative energy, so there's minimum to no job loss, they instead just whine about the job loss as if there's no alternatives out there. at all. none.

we fight wars over oil. we enter religious wars over the thought of getting more oil.

cause you know. jobs. sorry dude i'm baked, just ranting.

Here's a more balanced piece. Still slams Exxon pretty good but from a far more objective outlet.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.

But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”

One thing is certain: in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional hearing that the planet was already warming, Exxon remained publicly convinced that the science was still controversial. Furthermore, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in campaigns of confusion. By 1989 the company had helped create the Global Climate Coalition (disbanded in 2002) to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change. It also helped to prevent the U.S. from signing the international treaty on climate known as the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 to control greenhouse gases. Exxon’s tactic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped other countries, such as China and India, from signing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unraveled,” Oreskes says.

But experts are still piecing together Exxon’s misconception puzzle. Last summer the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by InsideClimate News, known as the Climate Deception Dossiers (pdf). “We included a memo of a coalition of fossil-fuel companies where they pledge basically to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt,” says union president Kenneth Kimmel. “There’s even a quote in it that says something like ‘Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science.’ So it’s pretty stark.”
see also:

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Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial, according to Greenpeace. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon’s misinformation has caused, “one thing for certain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kimmell says. Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fossil-fuel companies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon’s deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. “I think there are a lot of parallels,” Kimmell says. Both sowed doubt about the science for their own means, and both worked with the same consultants to help develop a communications strategy. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threatened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is global in its reach,” Kimmel says.

To prove this, Bob Ward—who on behalf of the U.K.’s Royal Academy sent a letter to Exxon in 2006 claiming its science was “inaccurate and misleading”—thinks a thorough investigation is necessary. “Because frankly the episode with tobacco was probably the most disgraceful episode one could ever imagine,” Ward says. Kimmell agrees. These reasons “really highlight the responsibility that these companies have to come clean, acknowledge this, and work with everyone else to cut out emissions and pay for some of the cost we're going to bear as soon as possible,” Kimmell says.

It doesn’t appear, however, that Kimmell will get his retribution. Jeffers claims the investigation’s finds are “just patently untrue, misleading, and we reject them completely”—words that match Ward’s claims against them nearly a decade ago.

the classic line.

here's two more sources:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-exxon-knew-about-climate-change

I posted the scientific american article. Not sure what you mean by "classic line"

How does this article address the fact that, according to science, the earth has warmed and cooled constantly over the millions of years? Oh - it doesn't address that.

The first paragraph says it all. Let me highlight the key: " and the falling cost of solar".

I'll have to look into solar energy again. Last time I did, the payback period was about what wind power was: Never.

lol see what i mean? dude tried spinning this so hard.

we already know the earth has cool and heated millions of years ago. you're not enlightening anybody, you're stating the obvious.

but you're pretty much going "eh, it's already happening so we might as well make it worse"

"girl is already drunk, might as well bring her back to my place"
"everybody jumped off the bridge, i might as well too"
"already got flashed by the cam, might as well keep speeding past the next one".

you understand how ridiculous your argument is, right?

I'm not saying that oil companies haven't potentially acted unethically. I'm just saying that the Guardian is so rampantly bias that I never depend on them as sole source.

Oil companies (and more importantly their products) emit a load of CO2....makes sense that they'd study the levels of it. Now the question is do they have a moral obligation to tell people that CO2 may contribute to global warming? I'm not really sure....I could definitely say that the data available in the 80s was nowhere as near as advanced as it is now. But could Exxon have made an impact by advancing an environmental argument 10 to 15 years before it really started to land on the radar. Absolutely. They are certainly not our enviro-knights in white armor.

Exxon scientists flat out said "this rate of drilling and using petroleum products could rise the global temperature". Lo and behold what they predicted, based on forecast predictions of petroleum use and drilling, actually happened.

What you're saying Arch is kind of like Tobacco companies saying "We've always had cancer. Our products, despite a prevalent use over the past decades, by no way shape or form contribute to growing cancer rates."

People impact the environment through burning fossil fuels. No doubt about that.

However, if we're looking to blame people, let's blame ourselves first and foremost. We're the ones looking for cheap energy and consumer goods and global trade etc etc etc.

By the by, using solar as an argument against oil is ridiculous. Solar is used almost exclusively for power generation whereas oil's primary purpose is transportation fuels. Solar advancements don't do a freaking lick of good when talking about oil dependency.

This is an interesting piece on it as well. Talking about where the government could legally go after Exxon. Super interesting.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-investigation-exxonmobil-20151015-story.html

Members of Congress are asking for a federal investigation into Exxon Mobil.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Los Angeles) and Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Walnut Creek) wrote a letter Wednesday to Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch asking the Department of Justice whether the company violated the law by “failing to disclose truthful information” regarding climate change.

The letter cites recent investigations by the Los Angeles Times, Columbia University’s Energy and Environmental Reporting Project, and Inside Climate News, which showed the company incorporated climate change research into its operations while publicly casting doubt on that very same science.

“When I read the Times investigation it occurred to me that it is very similar to what the tobacco companies were doing decades ago,” Lieu said. “Evidence showed that what they were saying was incorrect and they kept spreading this disinformation campaign.”

“We unequivocally reject allegations contained in the letter to Atty. Gen. Lynch from Reps. Lieu and DeSaulnier,” said Richard Keil, a spokesman for Exxon. “Suggestions that ExxonMobil suppressed its climate research are completely without merit.”
What Exxon knew about global warming's impact on the Arctic
What Exxon knew about global warming's impact on the Arctic

The congressmen are asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Exxon violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, as well as consumer protection, truth in advertising, public health, shareholder protection or other laws.

RICO was the same law used to prosecute tobacco companies, which allows a company’s higher-ups to be held responsible for the actions of those they supervise.

“Exxon’s situation is even worse,” said Lieu, comparing the company’s behavior with the tobacco industry. “It was taking advantage of the science … while denying the facts to the public.”
See the most-read stories this hour >>

David Levy, a management and marketing professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, agreed. “What has come out now is the clear evidence that they [Exxon] knew about it.”

“If these allegations against Exxon are true, then Exxon’s actions were immoral,” Lieu and DeSaulnier wrote in the letter. “We request the [Department of Justice] investigate whether ExxonMobil’s actions were also illegal.”

Representatives for the Department of Justice could not be reached for comment.

they should. and that's my problem when it comes to politics. we act like companies shouldn't be regulated, but this one of the top damning reasons for regulation.

companies should have a moral obligation to release information that can impact humanity greatly. the fact that this should even be a question shows how pathetic our ethics are as a nation.

and what's worse, any company that broke this news first, then tried to be the white knight and be the leader in alternative energy could've potentially make billions more than what they're doing now, as they would have a lock down on both sides of energy sources.

but it's all about the status quo. nobody wants to be innovative anymore.

i agree. everybody is at fault here. companies provide what the consumer demands. its a vicious circle.

but like anything else, eventually the new tech and different companies would've found a way to make the equipment cheaper.

look at Tesla. The electric cars weren't really affordable when they first dropped. now, it's cheaper because they've been in the game a while to figure out how to get cheaper cost without sacrificing performance.

No, I don't understand, nor do I think my statements are ridiculous. If you feel that way, get off the internet until you have your own power production system in place.

Turn your a/c off. Deal with the heat. Turn your heat off, deal with the cold.

Yeah, like I said, and you agreed - the earth has warmed and cooled over millions of years. What we are doing is not affecting other than a minor percentage.

I'm not saying "waste", but I damn sure am saying we don't (humans) affect the global warming OR cooling like some people think.

I eagerly await Tesla's dominance over the auto industry.

we shouldn't be affecting it at all. that's kinda the entire point, Arch.

but continue on with your extreme post.

Love what Tesla is doing but the tech still isn't there to be affordable by many. Just looked on the Tesla site and the Model S- which looks to be their new sedan model- comes in a 93K (granted thats Canadian- so more like 70K US). Not many folks can afford that easily.

More concerning is that lack of infrastructure available to support it. Anyone have a fast charging station near them? Anyone?

It's the way of the future but the world still needs to run in the meantime.

How exactly are we affecting it? Every doom and gloom global warming alarmist prediction has never happened.

Humans will always affect things. There is no action without reaction.

did you not read the article. like...at all?

electric pumps are being built more and more. hell even Walmart has them here in clevland (South Euclid suburb)

stuff like this takes time. people wanna complain about this generation wanting instant gratification, yet somehow expect this stuff to be instant.

sure, we affect things, but a 2-3C swing is ridiculous.

Their new consumer model will be 32k with a write off that will bring it down to around 25-29k. That should come out around 2018.

Exactly the point dear Swisher.... we need to realize that the switch away from carbon based fuels will NOT be instant. So let's put some equal energy into making carbon based energy LESS impactful while also driving towards making renewable energies more efficient.

thats cool. i guess my point is bro is that...if we started 40 years ago when we knew about it, i wonder where we would be right now.

My "extreme" post. ??? Really?

Good to know and I'd certainly be interested. But still unattainable for many. It will be a generation before we get rid of gasoline for private vehicles and even more before we do away with diesel and other fuels for commerical and industrial transport.

Impossible to know....although I'd like to think that legislation in different countries would at least be a little farther along.

40 years ago this year, catalytic converters were made mandatory on all cars. They were designed to reduce pollution, acid rain, and improve air quality, while reducing threats to the ozone layer.

This resulted in a reduction in CO, VOCs, and NOx, but caused an increase in CO2 and H2O. (each now determined to be a greenhouse gas)

We are going to perpetually have to balance the needs of people against environmental concerns for as long as we generate power and operate transportation. Everything has a cost as well as a benefit. Wind turbines kill tons of birds. Solar panels have huge environmental concerns as far as their manufacture and transportation. Batteries used in electric vehicles have disposal concerns. We use compact fluorescent bulbs, and they contain mercury and much never be thrown into the trash. All advances have concerns that go along with them.We need to balance the cost/benefit, and also continue to look for new solution as we find problems with the current and developing technologies.

Unfortunately, many time a solution that looks perfectly fine on a limited deployment winds up causing unforeseen damages to the environment when rolled out in massive numbers.

I have often wondered why, if H2O is such a huge concern with regards to automobiles, why we cannot capture that water vapor and simply pour it down the drain instead of allowing it to escape into the atmosphere. Why can't we find an extra catalyst that breaks CO2 into carbon and O2, that could safely be released into the atmosphere along with nitrogen. Must not be a big enough market for it, even with billions of cars on roads worldwide.

No need to spin, as I have history on my side. Climate change has happened since the earth was formed. The 'man made' part is complete conjecture, as climate science is relatively new.

The satellite that measures sea ice has only been in orbit for 35 years. Sea ice has been growing since 2012, and will continue for many years.
Arctic ice

The Antarctic ice sheet reached all time highs, since we started recording it, this year.
Antarctic ice

All of the AGW 'scientists' will tell you that glaciers are shrinking all over the world, but here's a site that lists those that are growing.
Glaciers

Temperatures have been warmer in the past 10,000 years than today.


Let's also not forget that during the last warm period, about 1100AD, exploration of the world increased, Vikings were able to farm in Greenland (hence the green name), and populations grew the world over. In the 1300s, when the world got colder, there were great pestilences like the Black Death and Plague, crops failed, and war became more frequent.

I'd rater have warm. People thrive in warmth and die in cold. History shows that time and time again.

The other thing to think about is if we stop drilling for oil, what will we use to replace everything that is made of plastic?

We should be growing hemp.

Hemp can be made into plastic? Will I fail a drug test if my PS3 controller is made of it?

Bingo!!!

People want to blame oil companies, and other sources, but never want to look at themselves and realize THEY are the reason those companies exist.

So what if Exxon knew. We've all known for years, yet most of us continue doing the same thing we always have, using the same energy, buying the same oil based products we always have.

yup...

What does that even mean?

Most of those kayakers probably brought them to the demonstration in their trucks and SUVs.

Really? My hope was that you made this comment in jest.
Yes. Hemp oil can be used to make plastics. It can also be used as cooking oil. Hemp can be made into cosmetics, clothing, paper, and other useful products. And no none of it will get you high. Nor could the hemp plant itself.