Exxon knew of climate change and its effects since the 1980s but denied it, new evidence shows. Two separate teams of investigative journalists have been working to uncover the truth about the company’s knowledge on the matter.
ExxonMobil is the world’s biggest and most powerful oil company and has been investigated by both the Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times. The journalists have been following two separate traces of evidence and documents only to reach the same conclusion: the company had known everything there was to know about climate change since the mid-1980s but had since then continuously lied about the facts and funded climate denial campaigns.
While the Inside Climate News is soon to publish a book on the matter, composed of six different pieces based on the topic, the LA Times team have a lot more information to be shared. Members of congress and presidential candidates have already urged the Department of Justice to investigate the matter, as the issue is gaining much interest online, even garnering the hash-tag #exxonknew.
The ICN report shows that scientists working for Exxon had been telling company executives about the dangers of climate change and the cause of it, which was the very product they were selling, since the late 1970s and that by the 1980s their projections of global temperature rise were accurate and have predicted the course climate change has been on since.
The LA Times research further shows that Exxon believed in their climate models, the ones predicting the global temperature pattern, and used them to conduct their activity.
Although it is now known that the company had extensive knowledge of the issues concerning climate change, it pretended to be ignorant of them in public. In fact, the company has even fought the concept of climate change with CEO Lee Raymond even publicly stating his belief that the projections made were based on unproven climate models and that they are sometimes nothing more than speculation.
Exxon has been known to support climate denial in the past and has even donated money to climate change denial groups. While they have since acknowledged that climate change does exist and have claimed to conduct scientific research in order to investigate the effects of this issue, senators have now addressed the way that this research occurs, and Exxon statements that research was being conducted in a transparent and open fashion.
Now that it is clear that Exxon had prior knowledge of the ill effects of climate change, it only remains to be seen in the government and public opinion will manage to hold them accountable for withholding the truth for so long.
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