2274. Documents Dating to 1957 Suggest Exxon Knew of Climate Peril as Industry Organized to Block Regulation

By John Schwartz, The New York Times, April 14, 2016

An aerial view of Exxon Mobil’s refineries in Torrance, Calif. State attorneys general are inquiring the company over its climate claims. Photo: Jeffrey Milstein/REX, via Associated Press.

Pressure on Exxon Mobil and the energy industry increased on Wednesday with the release of a new cache of decades-old industry documents about climate change, even as Exxon pushed back against efforts to investigate the company over its climate claims through the years.

The new documents were released by an activist research organization, the Center for International Environmental Law, which published the project on its website.

The documents, according to the environmental law center’s director, Carroll Muffett, suggest that the industry had the underlying knowledge of climate change even 60 years ago.

“From 1957 onward, there is no doubt that Humble Oil, which is now Exxon, was clearly on notice” about rising CO₂ in the atmosphere and the prospect that it was likely to cause global warming, he said.

What’s more, he said, the documents show the industry was beginning to organize against regulation of air pollution.

The American Petroleum Institute, energy companies and other organizations had created a group, the Smoke and Fumes Committee, to monitor and conduct pollution research, and to “use science and public skepticism to prevent environmental regulations they deemed hasty, costly and unnecessary,” according to the center’s description of the documents on its website.

Those actions, Mr. Muffett suggested, would be echoed in later efforts to undermine climate science.

The center’s work was first reported by Inside Climate News, which has published stories, as did The Los Angeles Times, suggesting that Exxon Mobil understood the risks of climate change from its own research, which it used to plan activities such as drilling in the Arctic, while it funded groups into the mid-2000s that denied serious climate risks.

Those earlier investigations led to a surge in activism against the company and the energy industry, using the hashtag #exxonknew. The investigations also have been cited by attorneys general, including Eric T. Schneiderman of New York, who have demanded information from Exxon about its internal research and its funding of climate denial.

Inside Climate News announced that Wednesday’s article is the first of a series based on the work of the environmental law center and documents it has amassed on its own.

Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, called the new allegations absurd.

“To suggest that we had definitive knowledge about human-induced climate change before the world’s scientists is not a credible thesis,” he said.

Four attorneys general are investigating Exxon Mobil’s public statements and private scientific knowledge over the years, and the company struck back on Wednesday in a filing in Texas against Claude Earl Walker, the attorney general of the United States Virgin Islands, and a private law firm working with his office on the investigation.

The filing called Mr. Walker’s actions a “flagrant misuse of law enforcement power” that “violate Exxon Mobil’s constitutionally protected rights of freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and due process of law and constitute the common law tort of abuse of process.”

The company, it noted, has no “physical presence” in the Virgin Islands, and its courts have no jurisdiction over the company.

In addition, the company stated, it has “widely and publicly confirmed” that it recognizes “that the risk of climate change and its potential impacts on society and ecosystems may prove to be significant.”

Kert Davies, the director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change, said Mr. Muffett’s project “has pulled back the curtain on any plausible deniability that Big Oil might have pretended they had on the dangers of climate change.” And, he added, “the naked truth is pretty ugly.”

But Michael B. Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said that the early stirrings of climate science have already been well documented.

“It has been known for years that scientists in that era were talking about climate change,” he said.

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1930. Exxon Knew About Climate Change In 1981 – And Covered It Up

By Caroline Reid, IFLScience!, July 10, 2015

It has recently come to light, thanks to one of Exxon's own climate experts, Lenny Bernstein, that this company knew about the connection between fossil fuels and climate change over 30 years ago. That's seven years before the dangers of climate change became a public issue. This shocking revelation came from an email sent by L. Bernstein to Alyssa Bernstein from Ohio University (no relation to Lenny Bernstein), and was reported in the Guardian.

L. Bernstein has been in the oil industry for 30 years, which included time as Exxon's in-house climate expert. He claimed that the possible effects that the company could have on climate change were first brought to their attention in 1981, when the company was debating whether to start farming Southeast Asia's largest gas field. The site, known as Natuna, included natural gas but also a large quantity of carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a significant contributor of climate change. “Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia,” L. Bernstein wrote in his email to A. Bernstein.

“When I first learned about the project in 1989, the projections were that if Natuna were developed and its CO2 vented to the atmosphere, it would be the largest point source of CO2 in the world and account for about 1% of projected global CO2 emissions.”

L. Bernstein suggests that Exxon did not push ahead and mine the Natuna site, in order to limit the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. ExxonMobile, however, has said that there could have been a “huge range of reasons” why they didn't pursue the site.

This means that Exxon could have known that humankind was having an impact on climate change a full 8 years before climate change was brought to the public eye. The first public announcement referencing climate change was in 1988, when a climate scientist called James Hansen announced to Congress that climate change was being caused by a build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“What it shows is that Exxon knew years earlier than James Hansen’s testimony to Congress that climate change was a reality; that it accepted the reality, instead of denying the reality as they have done publicly, and to such an extent that it took it into account in their decision making, in making their economic calculation,” Alyssa Bernstein, the recipient of L. Bernstein's email, told the Guardian.

Federal Department of Justice lawyer Sharon Eubanks, who led a successful lawsuit against tobacco companies, noted the similarities between Exxon denying climate change and tobacco companies denying that smoking causes lung cancer. In both situations, the denial was opposed head-on with evidence to the contrary. Exxon's long history of publicly denying the links between climate change and human influence increases the company's liability for damage to the climate. 

“It starts to look like a much longer conspiracy. It's like what we discovered with tobacco – the more you push back the date of knowledge of the harm, the more you delay any remediation, the more people are affected. So your liability can grow exponentially as the timeline gets longer,” she said.

Exxon's denial of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change didn't stop at just brushing off a couple of claims. The company has spent millions on research that actively promotes climate change denial. 

“Instead of taking responsibility, they have either directly – or indirectly through trade and industry groups – sown doubt about the science of climate change and fought efforts to cut emissions,” wrote L. Bernstein.