Who is?

Exxon.

Isn’t that a really large oil company?

The very same. ExxonMobil, as the Texas-based company is now known, is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. An investigation by news website InsideClimate News revealed that the company was aware that burning fossil fuels caused climate change as far back as 1977, 11 years before climate change awareness was accepted as fact by the public.

That’s not really a crime. They also spent decades denying climate change — as do many politicians funded by oil and gas companies — and funded research that spread misinformation.

This sounds like the cigarette companies denying smoking causes cancer. And Big Tobacco continues with that lie.

What else does the report say? The investigation, back in 1977, came to the same conclusions that scientists and world leaders have finally agreed on today. For instance, Exxon knew that global climate is influenced by carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels. Exxon’s in-house scientists knew that the doubling of CO 2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees and that mankind had very little time to reduce its CO 2 emissions. Exxon decided to keep mum and protect its business interests instead.

So they benefited from keeping all this a secret? Or actively denying it when scientists brought it up. For instance, InsideClimate News found that when the Bush-Cheney government came to power in the US, Exxon’s chief lobbyist wrote to the White House asking for the government’s chief scientist in global warming research, Michael MacCracken, to be removed. MacCracken opposed ExxonMobil’s climate change denial techniques. The report also says that Exxon attacked other officials in the US government, and at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, interfered with their work behind the scenes and distorted it in public.

Don’t oil companies say climate change science is still uncertain? Exactly this “scientific uncertainty” has long been a shield against getting laws passed against polluting industries. Exxon successfully got the Bush administration to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, wholly on the uncertainty idea. It then help set up the Global Climate Coalition, a lobbying partnership of leading oil and automobile manufacturers.

But we know better now! Besides, aren’t we running out of crude oil? Not if you believe what BP, another major global crude oil and natural gas major, has to say. According to the company’s latest outlook, emerging technologies could nearly double the world’s proved oil and gas reserves, surpassing the projected energy demand through 2050 and beyond.

Oh, that’s not good news. It is, if you’re an oil company. According to Bob Dudley, CEO of BP, the world can increase its proved oil and gas reserves from 2.9 trillion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) to 4.8 trillion barrels.

So what happens with Exxon? In the US, there are calls, including one from former vice-president Al Gore, for an official investigation into Exxon deliberately suppressing research that misled the world on climate change for four whole decades. It may not come to much, but at least now the world knows that climate change is real and here to stay.

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