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As early as 1977, one of Exxon’s senior scientists warned a gathering of oilmen of a “general scientific agreement” that the burning of fossil fuels … - Naomi Oreskes
" "As early as 1977, one of Exxon’s senior scientists warned a gathering of oilmen of a “general scientific agreement” that the burning of fossil fuels was influencing the climate. A year later, he had updated his assessment, warning that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”...
Exxon chose the path of disinformation, denial and delay. More damagingly, the company set a model for the rest of the industry. More than 30 years ago, Exxon scientists acknowledged in internal company memos that climate change could be catastrophic. Today, scientists who say the exact same thing are ridiculed in the business community and on the editorial page of w:The Wall Street Journal.
We have lost precious time as a result: decades during which we could have built a smart electricity grid, fostered efficiency and renewables and generated thousands of jobs in a cleaner, greener economy. There is still time to prevent the worst disruptions of human-driven climate change, but the challenge is now much greater than it needed to be, in no small part because of the choices that Exxon Mobil made.
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About Naomi Oreskes
(born November 25, 1958) is an American . She became professor at in 2013, after 15 years as professor at the . She has worked on studies of , environmental issues such as , and the . In 2010, Oreskes co-authored which identified parallels between the and earlier public controversies including tobacco smoking.
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N. Oreskes
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Oreskes, N.
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Oreskes, Naomi
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Additional quotes by Naomi Oreskes
This message of scientific uncertainty has been reinforced by the public relations campaigns of certain corporations with a large stake in the issue. The most well known example is ExxonMobil, which in 2004 ran a highly visible advertising campaign on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Its carefully worded advertisements—written and formatted to look like newspaper columns and called op-ed pieces by ExxonMobil—suggested that climate science was far too uncertain to warrant action on it. One advertisement concluded that the uncertainties and complexities of climate and weather means that "there is an ongoing need to support scientific research to inform decisions and guide policies". Not many would argue with this commonsense conclusion. But our scientists have concluded that existing research warrants that decisions and policies be made today.
The merchants of doubt adopted the tobacco strategy and applied it to a variety of domains, including climate change. In our work, we showed that the primary motivation for their activities was not so much financial as ideological. These men were market fundamentalists. By that, we mean that they believed that nearly all problems were best addressed not by government, but by the marketplace. They believed this not so much for economic reasons as for political ones:they believed that government action in the marketplace—even to address a threat as serious as tobacco use, which killed (and still does kill) millions of people every year, or the destruction of stratospheric ozone, which threatened the very existence of life on Earth—that such action was a threat to freedom, as it served as a step on a slippery slope towards tyranny.
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Documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate ... the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. ... The same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.
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