ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest international oil and gas companies, accurately predicted rising global temperatures but downplayed climate change for decades, new research shows.
If ExxonMobil was honest about what it knew then governments could have done more, sooner, to reverse the devastating effects of climate change, experts say.
From the late 1970s until the early 2000s, up to 83 per cent of the climate projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists were accurate in predicting global warming.
They echoed predictions made by independent academics and government projections published during the same period.
These findings come from a study published in the journal Science on Friday, which analysed all known global warming projections documented by Exxon and ExxonMobil Corporation scientists between 1977 and 2003.
While ExxonMobil scientists told the corporation about the severity of climate change and the extent to which fossil fuels contributed to global warming, ExxonMobil publicly dismissed climate change concerns.
Although multiple internal reports and a peer-reviewed publication between 1979 and 1985 predicted when human-caused global warming would be noticeable, ExxonMobil publicly stated that the science was too uncertain to know when or if human-caused global warming might be measurable.
For example, in 2004, the company stated: “Scientific uncertainties continue to limit our ability to make objective, quantitative determinations regarding the human role in recent climate change.”
This claim contradicted the findings of ExxonMobil’s scientists.
“What’s pretty shocking is the accuracy and skill of their insights. They didn’t just vaguely know something about global warming … They knew as much as academic researchers,” Geoffrey Supran, lead author of the new paper, told The Verge.
“Arguably, they knew all they needed to know to begin to take action and warn the public. But, of course, they didn’t.”
The latest revelations in Science comes after investigative journalists found in 2015 that ExxonMobil had known since the late 1970s its fossil fuel products could lead to global warming with “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050”.
What could have been
Monash Energy Institute director Ariel Liebman told TND the recent findings detailing ExxonMobil’s hidden knowledge about the likely effects of the fossil fuel industry would have on climate change were not surprising.
Support for climate change predictions from the fossil fuel industry would have made big differences to governments’ approach to climate change, and the effects being felt now, he said.
“We know that once governments did start to incentivise wind and solar in the mid-2000s around the world, these things got down in cost very quickly,” Dr Liebman said.
“We really had a strict timeframe, and therefore, it could have made the difference between us probably missing the [international global warming] 1.5 degree target.
“At the moment … even some of the best policy scenarios have some horrendous consequences; things like several metre sea level rises, which I don’t know if some social and economic frameworks can really adapt to. We’re looking at risks to modern civilisation that could have been managed a lot more securely.”
Governments’ short-term focus
Alison Reeve, program director of the Grattan Institute, said governments would still have had a hard time making policy changes even if fossil fuel industry findings were made public because the consequences were too far in the future.
“For politicians, it’s all about, ‘Can I win today’s 24-hour media cycle? Can I win this parliamentary term? Can I win the next election?'” she said.
“If Exxon were making the predictions in the ’70s about the year 2000, I think most politicians would have just … thought, ‘No, this is not something that I need to deal with’.”
But Ms Reeve said ExxonMobil coming forward might have made more difference in terms of public awareness, and therefore public pressure.
No repercussions on the horizon
Ms Reeve said while companies specialising in products such as pharmaceuticals could face major losses from class actions if it was found their products caused harm, the effects of fossil fuels on the climate are a lot harder to link to specific entities.
“It’s not like, ‘You put a dangerous drug on the market and my child died’,” she said.
“We can’t link [natural disasters] to one specific company, you can’t link them to one specific set of actions and [you have to find out] how much of [a natural disaster] would have happened anyway, and how much is it that bit worse due to climate change?
“How do you figure out how much of the house would have burned down anyway, and how much of it burned down because of climate change? You can’t.”
Dr Liebman doubts ExxonMobil will face any repercussions following the recent revelations about its knowledge of global warming, but he said the findings offer some vindication against climate change deniers.
“The stuff that the climate deniers keep saying is that all the climate science comes out of a group think of climate scientists who somehow are in cahoots, because they are being funded by research bodies that will only fund research that proves climate science is real,” he said.
“This just shows that those incentives … if they do exist, that certainly didn’t apply in [ExxonMobil’s] case.”
