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NASA
What did Exxon know about the Earth's melting Arctic and climate change?
In recent weeks it's been discovered that EXXON, who has always been one of the worst bad actors in the corporate world (they still haven't paid the fines for the EXXON Valdez disaster), has not only known for decades that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, but has purposely created marketing schemes and business plans to deceive the public about it and profit from it. These facts have been confirmed by two separate investigations.
This worldwide scale of purposeful deception and marketing misdirection by EXXON rivals the worse tactics ever employed by tobacco companies, but its impacts are far greater.
As recently reported in the Guardian, "In the last three weeks, two separate teams of journalists — the Pulitzer-prize winning reporters at the website Inside Climate News and another crew composed of Los Angeles Times veterans and up-and-comers at the Columbia Journalism School — have begun publishing the results of a pair of independent investigations into ExxonMobil.
"Though they draw on completely different archives, leaked documents, and interviews with ex-employees, they reach the same damning conclusion: Exxon knew all that there was to know about climate change decades ago, and instead of alerting the rest of us denied the science and obstructed the politics of global warming.
"They helped organize campaigns designed to instill doubt, borrowing tactics and personnel from the tobacco industry’s similar fight. They funded “institutes” devoted to outright climate denial."
According to Mother Jones magazine, "Taxpayers currently subsidize the oil industry by as much as $4.8 billion a year, with about half of that going to the big five oil companies—ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips"
Yet as the age of "corporate socialism" rumbles along toward its inevitable outcomes, the inner workings of multi-national corporations, to achieve ever increasing profits at any cost, have never been more opaque.
In a comprehensive report recently published in the The LA Times reports it states that as far back as 1991, EXXON's own studies led Ken Croasdale, senior ice researcher for Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, to say, “Certainly any major development with a life span of say 30-40 years will need to assess the impacts of potential global warming.” Croasdale told an engineering conference audience in 1991, “This is particularly true of Arctic and offshore projects in Canada, where warming will clearly affect sea ice, icebergs, permafrost and sea levels.” But this apparently wasn't bad news, according to EXXON. In 1992 Croasdale told an audience of academics and government researchers that “global warming can only help lower [our] exploration and development costs.”
In a recent Global Trends Survey by the British survey company Ipsos Mori, they found that 52% of Americans still deny that climate change, if they even acknowledge it, can be caused by human activities.
From my view, the thing about oil is very simple. It's amazing stuff but it should never, ever be burned or used as a fuel. Period.
We know how to build cars that run on alternative fuels. We know how to generate abundant energy using alternative methods. And we know how to build buildings that are heated and cooled by other methods. Yes, they won't be the same old high density, "bricks and sticks" boxes we've been building for the past 100 years, but we can do it.
At this point, what is it going to take?