How Big Oil And Financial Markets Captured Climate Change: Decades Of Counter-Narrative
By the 1950s, the oil industry knew that burning fossil fuels could potentially lead to adverse global impacts on climate, including rising temperatures and melting ice caps.
It is ironic that Exxon’s own commitment to science would project it to the forefront of the most up to date and accurate climate science. By 1982, Exxon scientists correctly predicted that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 would reach 415 parts per million by 2019.
But, the ideal that a commitment to excellence in science could align the world to a new direction, more in harmony with the planet, was just a wisp of a dream. From the late 1980s, Exxon launched a tectonic shift that for decades, motivated oil and gas industry funded campaigns to discredit, or at least create uncertainty about, climate science. And, when the realities of climate change became impossible to deny, the industry shifted from explicit climate denial to disinformation, propaganda and greenwashing.
Exxon, Shell, BP, and the rest of the oil industry had one objective: to prevent systemic change. They understood that Global Warming translated into an existential threat to the fossil fuel industry.
