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.  

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.

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. 

Read the story from ScientificAmerican by Shanon Hall - “Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago.”

Plunge in global mining stocks kind to climate change activists

The $1.4 trillion lost in global mining stocks since 2011 exceeds the total market value of Apple Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Google’s parent Alphabet Inc.

When you’ve spent a decade building new mines from the Andean mountains to the West African jungle, it’s bad news when a downturn in China, your biggest customer, shows no signs of stopping. Investors have been unforgiving and concerns that it will only get worse pushed the Bloomberg World Mining Index to an 11-year low.

Read the Bloomberg Business story - “Mining's $1.4 Trillion Plunge Like Losing Apple, Google, Exxon.”

(Extraction, mining by another name, is a significant contributor to climate change and so if we are serious about mitigating the effects of our seriously disrupted climate system, it’s imperative that we, in some way, limit or control our mining affairs. Climate change will not be resolved without some pain and so this restructuring of the world’s mining stocks is just one of the many aches we will have to deal with – Robert McLean.)