When word leaked in 2014 that Exxon scientists had known about climate change for decades, Exxon denied the stack of documents was actually representative of their results. They accused those who revealed the information of cherry-picking documents that looked bad for the company, even though memos going back to 1982 carried dire warnings.
In a 1982 document marked “not to be distributed externally,” the company’s environmental affairs office wrote that preventing global warming would require sharp cuts in fossil fuel use. Failure to do so, the document said, could result in “some potentially catastrophic events” that “might not be reversible.”
Still, Exxon refused to admit they had done anything wrong or covered anything up. Instead, they challenged scientists to look at their complete set of documents to see that this climate change suff was just a minority opinion. And now they have.
This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past misled the general public about climate change. We present an empirical document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and paid, editorial-style advertisements ('advertorials') in The New York Times.
The paper, from science historians Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, documents a company that was all too aware of the dangers of climate change internally, and all too ready to lie about that knowledge in ads for the general public.
… 83% of peer-reviewed papers and 80% of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81% instead expressing doubt.
The earlier documents made available were not “cherry picked.” They represented the authentic opinion of Exxon’s own scientists and management. They knew that climate change was real, they knew it could be catastrophic, they knew that burning fossil fuels was the primary cause. They even shared much of their information in scientific articles for peer-reviewed journals.
It was only when addressing the general public through press releases and ads that Exxon suddenly introduced a level of doubt about climate change that didn’t appear in their data.
Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.
At the same time that Exxon was internally discussing climate change as a coming catastrophe and admitted the connection between human activity and global warming in scientific papers, it was putting out ads calling climate change “uncertain” both in scope and causes.
Oreskes’ and Supran’s conclusion …
The company's peer-reviewed, non-peer-reviewed, and internal communications consistently tracked evolving climate science: broadly acknowledging that AGW is real, human-caused, serious, and solvable, while identifying reasonable uncertainties that most climate scientists readily acknowledged at that time. In contrast, ExxonMobil's advertorials in the NYT overwhelmingly emphasized only the uncertainties, promoting a narrative inconsistent with the views of most climate scientists, including ExxonMobil's own.
The executive in charge of Exxon for much of this period was current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who took charge of the company in 2006 and was still CEO when Exxon issued its “cherry picking” challenge in 2015.
In 2010, Tillerson said it was not clear how much humans were affecting the climate or what could be done about it. But seven years prior, an internal paper at Exxon calculated the necessary changes in fossil fuel usage to stay below a two-degree change.