A new investigation into how the Oil Industry changed its infrastructure designs to accommodate rising sea levels and increasing wave heights caused by Climate Change, at a time when its considerable public relations and lobbying arms were vigorously spreading doubt about the scientific consensus, and it continued to fund denier front groups.
Big Oil braced for global warming while it fought regulations
By AMY LIEBERMAN AND SUSANNE RUST
A few weeks before seminal climate change talks in Kyoto back in 1997, Mobil Oil took out a bluntly worded advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post.
“Let’s face it: The science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil,” the ad said. “Scientists cannot predict with certainty if temperatures will increase, by how much and where changes will occur.”
One year earlier, though, engineers at Mobil Oil were concerned enough about climate change to design and build a collection of exploration and production facilities along the Nova Scotia coast that made structural allowances for rising temperatures and sea levels.
A joint investigation by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Energy and Environmental Reporting Project and the Los Angeles Times earlier detailed how one company, Exxon, made a strategic decision in the late 1980s to publicly emphasize doubt and uncertainty regarding climate change science even as its internal research embraced the growing scientific consensus.
An examination of oil industry records and interviews with current and former executives shows that Exxon’s two-pronged strategy was widespread within the industry during the 1990s and early 2000s.
As many of the world’s major oil companies — including Exxon, Mobil and Shell — joined a multimillion-dollar industry effort to stave off new regulations to address climate change, they were quietly safeguarding billion-dollar infrastructure projects from rising sea levels, warming temperatures and increasing storm severity.
From the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic, the companies were raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.
Oil Company executives thought it was prudent for their precious corporation to plan for the effects of Climate Change, but cynically tried to portray intragovernmental efforts to limit GHG releases to protect the whole planet from those climate driven changes as imprudent. Those public claims were fraudulent and to my mind monstrously criminal.
The industry contends that the difference between its public relations effort and its internal decision-making was not a contradiction, but a strategy to protect its business from misguided federal regulations while taking into account the possibility that the climate change predictions were valid.
The Industry thought what was prudent for them would make bad public policy? That simply is a disingenuous argument. These corporate boards put short term profits for their rapacious investors ahead of the welfare of the very industrial civilization of they are a part, not to mention public safety. These people are Judas Goats on a planetary scale. These corporate oligarchs need to be held accountable for the long term repercussions from their short sighted self centered decisions.