“At [Oil Company], we are committed to fulfilling our environmental responsibilities to society, to being part of the solution.”
Is this a quote from one of the ads the American Petroleum Institute is running these days, claiming that the industry is “part of the solution”? Or one of the ads from BP that’s being challenged as misleading? Or from Shell’s social influencer program?
Nope! It’s from an Imperial Oil discussion paper-- written in 1990!
That’s just one of the many documents released last week as part of a collaboration so big it needs three introductions, one each from DeSmogblog, ClimateFiles, and Climate Investigations.
The decades of documents are from Imperial Oil, a former Canadian subsidiary of Exxon, and show that like others in the industry, Imperial Oil closely watched as the climate change consensus emerged in the ‘80s and embraced it in the ‘90s, until shifting its PR strategy to denial as the decade ended.
One of the key details emerging from the repository, reported on at HuffPo and ClimateLiability, is that in the early ‘90s, Imperial Oil hired a consultant to see what price on carbon would be required to meet the emission reduction targets being considered in Canada at the time.
The price came out to be roughly $41 per ton in 1991, or $78 in 2019 dollars (American.) For reference, the carbon tax Exxon came out in support of last year calls for a starting price of $40- which would have been perfect, had they embraced it in 1991.
There’s plenty more yet to be found though, so drill down into the archive and see what sort of information you can extract!
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