newyorker | Wednesday morning,
journalists at InsideClimate News, a Web site that has won the Pulitzer
Prize for its reporting on oil spills, published the first installment
of a multi-part exposé that will be appearing over the next month. The
documents they have compiled and the interviews they have conducted with
retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now
ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its
main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent
the company from then spending decades helping to organize the
campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps
fatally—the planet’s response to global warming.
There’s
a sense, of course, in which one already assumed that this was the
case. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known about climate
change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about
climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the
nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who
worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of
Energy, even outfitting one of the company’s tankers with special
sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2 readings
over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black
was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management
committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was
then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2;
a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he
said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon
dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two
to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific
consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary,
“holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need
for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become
critical.”
