The essential video above starts with remarks from former Exxon CEO and Trump Secretary of State, and friend of Putin, Rex Tillerson – but includes video of Lee Raymond in classic Climate Denial form.
Raymond passed last weekend, no doubt to a hotter place.
Today, people throw around the “climate change denier” label often enough that it has lost some of its charge. But Raymond was the genuine article, a true villain. It was Raymond who turned ExxonMobil into one of the world’s most important funders of falsehood and denial about fundamental climate science research.
Raymond, an engineer by training, straightforwardly rejected the mainstream scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels cause climate change. Even though Exxon’s in-house climate research arm knew by the late 1970s that “there is no doubt” fossil fuels worsened the “potential problem of CO2 in the atmosphere,” Raymond did everything he could to elevate more industry-friendly perspectives. And he was willing to muddy the truth to win.
Under Raymond’s leadership, Exxon spent millions of dollars funding a shadowy network of think tanks and pseudo-scientific groups who published memos, briefings, and advertisements meant to cast doubt on climate change. As the journalist Steve Coll wrote in his book Private Empire,
Under Lee Raymond, ExxonMobil had persistently funded a public policy campaign in Washington and elsewhere that was transparently designed to raise public skepticism about the science that identified fossil fuels as a cause of global warming. ExxonMobil ran some aspects of its campaign clandestinely; that is, it did not initially disclose the full scope and purpose of contributions it made. […] What distinguished the corporation’s activity during the late 1990s and the first Bush term was the way it crossed into disinformation.
In his capacity as CEO, Raymond made it clear that he personally rejected bedrock science. “Is the Earth really warming? Does burning fossil fuels cause global warming? And do we now have a reasonable scientific basis for predicting future temperature?,” he asked rhetorically during a 1997 meetingof the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing.
He answered all three questions in the negative, concluding, “Let’s agree there’s a lot we really don’t know about how climate will change in the 21st century and beyond.” (In fact, we now know that even ExxonMobil’s primitive in-house climate models, then 20 years old, basically got global warming right.) He also claimed — we now know incorrectly — that any policy passed in the 1990s would be “very unlikely” to affect the future trajectory of mid-21st-century emissions declines.
The campaign worked. Exxon’s activism during this period, conducted suband supra rosa, helped prevent the passage of major global and domestic climate policy in the 1990s; it also kept the United States from developing expertise in the solar, wind, and battery industries that other countries now dominate.
Science – Assessing Exxon Mobil’s Global Warming projections:
For decades, some members of the fossil fuel industry tried to convince the public that a causative link between fossil fuel use and climate warming could not be made because the models used to project warming were too uncertain. Supran et al. show that one of those fossil fuel companies, ExxonMobil, had their own internal models that projected warming trajectories consistent with those forecast by the independent academic and government models. What they understood about climate models thus contradicted what they led the public to believe.
Geoffrey Supran, whose previous research of historical industry documents helped shed light on what Exxon and other oil firms knew, said it was “breathtaking” to see Exxon’s projections line up so closely with what subsequently happened.
“This really does sum up what Exxon knew, years before many of us were born,” said Supran, who led the analysis conducted by researchers from Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “We now have the smoking gun showing that they accurately predicted warming years before they started attacking the science. These graphs confirm the complicity of what Exxon knew and how they misled.”
The research analyzed more than 100 internal documents and peer-reviewed scientific publications either produced in-house by Exxon scientists and managers, or co-authored by Exxon scientists in independent publications between 1977 and 2014.
