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It's hard to put a human face on something as all-encompassing and absolute as the complete and irreversible destruction of the natural environment. When we think about climate change, we don't think about it as a crime or act committed by a single individual. After all, we ultimately--the collective "we"--you, me, every one who's ever driven a car or taken a flight are the ultimate cause of climate change. It's our innate greed and unquenchable thirst for convenience and comfort that created this problem. That's one way to view it.
But the catastrophic consequences of unchecked man-made climate distortion--whose terrible effects we are now beginning to truly appreciate-- represents something that takes us out of the realm of mere collective guilt. We are facing the sudden, totally new, unexpected, and permanent obliteration of everything we and everyone from our generation onward had a right to expect at birth. Global warming amounts to the purposeful eradication of a pleasant future for our children. It's a relentless, remorseless, self-imposed debilitation, in slow motion, of the human race. When you consider the (for all intents and purposes) eternal effects of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere it's impossible to avoid considering certain individuals and the deliberate decisions they made that led us to this place. The magnitude of the catastrophe before us begs the question of whether it could have been avoided if certain people had acted differently than they did.
Lee Raymond is the former CEO and Chairman of Exxon Corporation. In addition to his staggering compensation in this capacity he was awarded a retirement package from Exxon worth approximately 400 million dollars. Practically speaking, this means that Raymond's descendants for the next thousand years or so will live in unimaginable luxury. Work for them will be a hobby to be indulged if the spirit moves them. They will have the finest education, living space, and housing the human race can offer. They will have others wait on them hand and foot their entire lives.
For example, Lee Raymond's son, John T. Raymond, has followed in his father's footsteps, John T. Raymond is currently director of American Energy Ohio Holdings, LLC, Ferus Inc., Ferus Natural Gas Fuels Inc., Iron Ore Holdings, Lighthouse Oil & Gas GP, LLC, MarkWest Utica EMG, LLC, Medallion Midstream, LLC, Plains All American GP LLC and Tallgrass MLP GP LLC. Like his father, he is also wealthy beyond most Americans' imagination, as will be his children, their children, and their grandchildren.
InsideClimateNews is made up of journalists who don't have anything remotely comparable to the vast wealth of the Raymonds. In 2013 it won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, an award previously bestowed only two times on a web-based news service. This past Wednesday ICN unveiled the first of a multi-part expose which reveals the extraordinary depth of Exxon Corporation's knowledge about the impact of the oil industry on climate change and the successful efforts of Exxon, and in particular Lee Raymond, to cover up that knowledge. In preparing its report, ICN spent eight months interviewing former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials, and combing through hundreds of thousands of internal company documents archived at the the University of Texas in Austin and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others.
The interviews they have conducted with retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming.
The research effort conducted by Exxon was led by senior company scientist James Black. Here is Black addressing Exxon's Management Committee in July, 1977:
"In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon's Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.
Just one year later Black was speaking in very specific terms about the impact of global warming on the planet:
A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.
"Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed," Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.
Sound familiar? Except this was nearly 40 years ago.
According to the report, Exxon initially responded swiftly and launched an ambitious and far-reaching research effort into the warming effects of CO2 emissions caused by fossil fuel consumption, performing detailed sampling and expensive climate modeling in an effort to fully understand what was clearly an existential threat to the nature of their business:
Exxon's early determination to understand rising carbon dioxide levels grew out of a corporate culture of farsightedness, former employees said. They described a company that continuously examined risks to its bottom line, including environmental factors. In the 1970s, Exxon modeled its research division after Bell Labs, staffing it with highly accomplished scientists and engineers.
Their research over ten years was extremely thorough and involved coordination with the Federal government:
It turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy...[.]
By 1982 even internal memoranda distributed on an "eyes only" basis to Exxon management clearly confirmed the looming danger of man-made climate change:
Exxon's research laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs office. Marked "not to be distributed externally," it contained information that "has been given wide circulation to Exxon management." In it, the company recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global warming "would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion." Unless that happened, "there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered," the primer said, citing independent experts. "Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible."
Armed with all this research-based expertise, and given the seriousness of the threat to the human population, one might expect that Exxon would have led the effort to inform the public of its established conclusions once global warming began to surface as an urgent public issue with the
Congressional testimony of James Hansen and others in 1988. Instead, Exxon, seeing a potentially mortal threat to its enormous profits approaching on the horizon, did an abrupt about-face and channeled its efforts into sowing doubts about the relationship between fossil fuel use and climate change.
With alarm bells suddenly ringing, Exxon started financing efforts to amplify doubt about the state of climate science.
Exxon helped to found and lead the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of some of the world's largest companies seeking to halt government efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. Exxon used the American Petroleum Institute, right-wing think tanks, campaign contributions and its own lobbying to push a narrative that climate science was too uncertain to necessitate cuts in fossil fuel emissions.
As the international community moved in 1997 to take a first step in curbing emissions with the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon's chairman and CEO Lee Raymond argued to stop it.
Along with spending
at least 30 million dollars to support climate-change denialists, the Exxon corporation enlisted the help of the tobacco industry, also expert at the science of fostering denial, in its efforts to mold the debate about climate change. Raymond, a senior executive throughout the entire time frame, gave a speech in 1997 in which he asserted that the globe was, in fact, cooling and that government action to curtail carbon emissions defied "common sense."
As the New Yorker article acknowledges, the report by Inside Climate News generated only a smattering of interest this week, in the face of the media's wall-to-wall coverage of the utterances of Donald Trump. And in many ways we have become inured to this type of corporate behavior to the point where we cynically view it as a fact of life. Most of us know intuitively now that a corporation will rarely if ever act in the public interest in the face of an existential threat to its bottom line. Exxon simply proved that this will be the case even if that threat involves the potential destruction of the human race.
But the corporate fiction doesn't erase the responsibility of certain individuals. As the ICN report shows, many of the scientists enlisted by Exxon to create an environment of denial were the same internal company scientists who brought the issue to the corporation's attention to begin with. People like Lee Raymond and the rest of senior management at Exxon knew full well the consequences of what they were doing when they encouraged the rest of the world to doubt what science has unquestionably established. They deliberately chose to put their own interests and greed over the fate of the planet we all live on.
Few people in human history have had the capacity to ruin all life on Earth for the rest of us through their actions or inactions. When given the opportunity, as the ICN report shows, the people that ran Exxon corporation didn't hesitate to sell us out.
Lee Raymond, former CEO and Chair, Exxon Corporation
Also reported by Jen Hayden here and ClimateDenierRoundup here.