There are numerous climate change-related lawsuits playing out in the judicial system of our country. These lawsuits take fossil fuel companies to task for what they knew about climate change, when they knew it and how they proceeded to promote misinformation to the public in order to stifle that important knowledge about their product from being acted on. The Republican Party, funded by the fossil fuel industry, has spent the better part of the last few decades working vociferously to support the continuing poisoning of our air and waterways. They have done this while pushing the fossil-fuel industry propaganda that while it may turn out (it already has turned out) that manmade climate change is a real thing, directly related to our production and consumption of fossil fuels, no one could have foreseen this decades ago, and therefore no one can be blamed—financially—for the problems our planet now faces as a result of the manufactured increase in our changing climate. Inside Climate News is reporting on a European investigation that has uncovered decades old internal documents from Shell Oil showing that the oil and gas giant had a profound understanding of the destructive capacity that their industry had on the world’s environmental health.
They show that as the company pondered its responsibility to act, Shell's scientists urged it to heed the early warnings, even if, as they said, it might take until the 2000s for the mounting evidence to prove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were causing unnatural climate change.
"With the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything," company researchers wrote in a 1988 report based on studies completed in 1986. "The potential implications for the world are, however, so large that policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part."
Otherwise, a team of Shell experts said, "it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation."
That’s damning. This is yet another damning piece of information that shows that companies like Shell were incredibly aware of the part they were playing in our planet’s warming. As the science becomes more and more obvious to even the most business positive conservatives, Republicans and other apologists for the fossil fuel industry have begun to rely more and more on religion. Republicans like the EPA’s Scott Pruitt say they believe that God has told them to fight against the environment. Pruitt and other conservative pseudo-Christians are just the most recent, and depressingly trite, example of a morally bankrupt group of people who are using a religion to sustain their craven scams of greed on the population.