- Research published on January 12 by Science shows that the giant oil company ExxonMobil already knew in the 1980s that its activity would lead to a climate emergency.
It is not something new, but we have one more test to confirm the scandal: the powerful in the fuel sector know that climate change has been taking place since the 1970s. In the report "In the midst of the climate emergency, instead of changing the business model, Total prefers to open and question", written in September last year by Nicolas Goñi in ARGIA, one can read the following: "The communication strategies that many companies with great responsibilities in energy and greenhouse gas emissions have developed for a long time [since the 1970s] to generate doubts about their effects and their diffusion."
This is what is happening in the documents of the time when a warming of 0.2 degrees per decade was expected.
The publication of Science magazine this January 12 is yet another test. Journalists have analyzed the work and data of the oil company's researchers ExxonMobil, comparing them with the official data released by scientists from different times. Journalists highlight the "astonishing accuracy" of ExxonMobile's data. Between 1972 and 2002, 32 internal documents of the multinational were analyzed and 72 scientific publications published between 1982 and 2014 with other structures. On average, documents from the time when 0.2 degrees Celsius was expected to be heating throughout the decade are being produced. "They knew as much as independent scientists and government scientists, and probably enough to take action and get people's attention," he says. However, the leaders of the group closed their eyes and spread another message, keeping what was coming. Suppose in 2000, ExxonMobile director Lee Raymond said, "We don't have enough scientific understanding of climate change to make reasonable predictions."
The Union of Concerned Scientists structure already demonstrated in 2015 the ambulation of ExxonMobil. No matter, it goes on with the same logic, channeling carbon pumps around the world. This widespread trend among the powerful in the fuel sector that we gave at the end of December last year was announced in the following report: Previously, 425 ‘carbon pumps’, without taking into account that five climate tipping points have been introduced into an irreversible change.