Climate self-determination

We’ve all known about the problems of climate change for decades. Will we finally do something about it in our generation?

Oil-and-gas corporations were some of the first to know about the dangers of climate change, from as early as the 1950s. But instead of alerting the public, oil companies led multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns after realizing that climate change had the potential to hurt their profits. In 1988, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development urged Exxon to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.”

“By the time global warming becomes detectable, it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to stabilize the situation.” Shell, in internal documents (1988)

Automobile companies have known about climate change since the 1980s. Despite their findings, industry groups lobbied against emissions standards and even cheated on emissions tests.

Electrical utilities realized the implications of climate change, according to archival documents, as far back as 1977. Despite their findings, many in the industry joined the climate-denial front group known as the Global Climate Coalition, which spent tens of millions of dollars to limit regulation and even pull the United States out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (an international treaty that was essentially the Paris Agreement of the 1990s. That’s right — we’ve pulled out of international…