ExxonMobil has been fighting tooth and nail to deny any active culpability in climate change. This includes a tidal wave of lawsuits, counter lawsuits, and numerous motions in their attempts to block discovery orders of the big oil company’s internal documentation showing what they did and did not know about human-made greenhouse gas emissions. And while ExxonMobil says they didn’t know much of anything, leaks dating back to the 1970s suggest the opposite. ThinkProgress has done a bit of digging and published the very interesting video from 1998 that shows then Mobil Oil chief executive Lucio Noto speaking in front of other Mobil Oil employees, addressing concerns about fossil fuel emissions and its effects on the environment.
But archival video footage of a Mobil Oil meeting seen by ThinkProgress indicates that 20 years ago, employees were raising concerns about the company’s responsibility for climate change. In response to staff complaints, Noto — the man who would become ExxonMobil’s second in command alongside Lee Raymond — appears to acknowledge the impact the company’s product has on rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Right here:
We are also not prepared to admit that the science is a closed-fact, and that we should take draconian steps tomorrow to reduce CO2 gases. We do think that a prudent company should take steps to do what it can on a win win basis to reduce its own and its customers’ emissions of greenhouse gases, as best it can.
What is Mobil Oil doing? We started an inventory of the greenhouse gases we are responsible for in our facilities; and that’s probably only 5 percent of the issue in Mobil’s case. Our customers, using our products probably account for 95 percent of those emissions.
ThinkProgress spoke with some legal experts that believe this is an important omission about emissions.
The statement is an “implicit, and potentially explicit acknowledgement, that the biggest impact of an oil company on the climate comes from the use of its product,” Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, told ThinkProgress.
And while Noto is placing most of the blame on consumers or “customers,” Muffet argues that this is an acknowledgment that Mobil creates the thing that ends up being the problem.
“This is not Mobil Oil saying we’re responsible for 5 percent of all pollution,” he added. “What he’s saying is, of the hundred percent of global warming that our oil has contributed to, we’re only taking responsibility for 5 percent of that. And yet, he’s explicitly acknowledging that the other 95 percent is out there, and it’s a consequence of Mobil’s product.”
The year after this footage was shot, Mobil Oil would merge with Exxon to become ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil is the company that in recent years has been fined for disregarding US sanctions against Russia in order to make money—so there is a clear modus operandi when it comes to doing what’s “right” for anyone not directly benefiting from ExxonMobil’s bottom line. How much or how little, how “convinced” or not ExxonMobil executives and scientists may or may not have been is all window-dressing. In the end whatever the case is, ExxonMobil spent millions—and likely billions—of dollars over the decade funding and pushing for research that would provide enough of a doubt about the causes of climate change in the mind of the public.