Tuesday, December 22, 2015
More Than Exxon: Big Oil
Companies for Years Shared Damning Climate Research
New investigative reporting exposes a task
force headed by the American Petroleum Institute also knew about global warming
since the 1970's
Between 1979 and 1983, the American Petroleum
Institute (API), the industry's most powerful lobby group, ran a task force for
fossil fuel companies to "monitor and share climate research."
(Photos: Felipe Sasso/Albert Mock/Mike Mozart/Kristian Bjonard/cc/flickr)
It wasn't just Exxon that knew fossil fuels
were cooking the planet.
New investigative reporting by
Neela Banerjee with Inside Climate News revealed on Tuesday
that scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational
oil and gas company may have for decades known about the impacts of carbon
emissions on the climate.
Between 1979 and 1983, the American Petroleum
Institute (API), the industry's most powerful lobby group, ran a task force for
fossil fuel companies to "monitor and share climate research,"
according to internal documents obtained by Inside Climate News.
According to the reporting:
Like
Exxon, the companies also expressed a willingness to understand the links
between their product, greater CO2 concentrations and the climate, the papers
reveal. Some corporations ran their own research units as well, although they
were smaller and less ambitious than Exxon's and focused on climate modeling,
said James J. Nelson, the former director of the task force.
"It
was a fact-finding task force," Nelson said in an interview. "We
wanted to look at emerging science, the implications of it and where
improvements could be made, if possible, to reduce emissions."
The 'CO2 and Climate Task Force,' which
changed in 1980 its name to the 'Climate and Energy Task Force,' included
researchers from Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco,
and Sohio, among others.
One memo by an Exxon task force
representative pointed to 1979 "background paper on CO2," which
"predicted when the first clear effects of climate change might be
felt," noting that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
was rising steadily.
And at a February 1980 meeting in New York,
the task force invited Professor John A. Laurmann of Stanford University to
brief members about climate science.
In his conclusions section, Laurmann
estimated that the amount of CO2 in
the atmosphere would double in 2038, which he said would likely lead to a 2.5
degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures with 'major economic
consequences,'" Banerjee reports. He then told the task force that models
showed a 5 degrees Celsius rise by 2067, with 'globally catastrophic
effects,'" Banerjee reports.
The documents show that API members, at one
point, considered an alternative path in the face of these dire predictions:
Bruce S.
Bailey of Texaco offered "for consideration" the idea that "an
overall goal of the Task Force should be to help develop ground rules for
energy release of fuels and the cleanup of fuels as they relate to CO2
creation," according to the minutes of a meeting on Feb. 29, 1980.
The
minutes also show that the task force discussed a "potential area"
for research and development that called for it to "'Investigate the
Market Penetration Requirements of Introducing a New Energy Source into World
Wide Use.' This would include the technical implications of energy source
changeover, research timing and requirements."
"Yet," Banerjee notes, "by the
1990s, it was clear that API had opted for a markedly different approach to the
threat of climate change."
The lobby group teamed up with Exxon and
others to form the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), which successfully lobbied
the U.S. to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.
The damning revelations are the latest in an
ongoing investigation into
what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change and then suppressed for
decades —all while continuing to profit from the planet's destruction.
Reports that Exxon, specifically,
lied about climate change were published early October in the Los Angeles Times, mirroring a separate but
similar investigation by Inside Climate News in
September. Those findings set off a storm of
outrage, including a probe by the
New York Attorney General.
Nelson, a former head of the API task force,
told Banerjee that with the growing powers of the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) in the early 1980's, API decided to shift gears.
"They took the environmental unit and
put it into the political department, which was primarily lobbyists," he
said. "They weren't focused on doing research or on improving the oil
industry's impact on pollution. They were less interested in pushing the
envelope of science and more interested in how to make it more advantageous
politically or economically for the oil industry. That's not meant as a
criticism. It's just a fact of life."
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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