By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

The rubes are still telling each other thigh-slappers about “shoveling climate change” off their driveways last winter. They’ve been reciting climate-denial idiocies crafted by fossil-fuel companies for a dozen years.

Now we learn that for three times that long, the largest of those companies knew that climate change is real and the product of its product. They knew its potentially catastrophic consequences. But Exxon led the campaign to deny global warning’s existence.

This fascinating story of greed displacing integrity comes from Pulitzer-Prize-winning InsideClimate News. The organization spent eight months interviewing former Exxon employees and reviewing Exxon documents, but the mainstream media have been slow to pick up the story.

Back in 1977 most of us had never heard the term “climate change.” In July of that year, Exxon scientist James F. Black made a presentation to his company’s management committee. He told them that carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuel would warm the planet, potentially endangering humanity. The committee consisted of the chairman, president, and all senior vice presidents.

The next year he told a broader gathering of managers that, “Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Exxon launched a massive research effort. It assembled a team of outstanding scientists to measure oceanic and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) increases and to rigorously model future increases and their impacts. The following year Exxon outfitted a supertanker with custom-made instruments and sampled sea and air CO₂ from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf.

Richard Werthamer oversaw the project. In a Frontline documentary produced in collaboration with InsideClimate News, he explains that ,“The implications of increasing carbon dioxide were…significant because they implied dramatic changes in climate, and that could provoke very substantial legislative consequences that would impact Exxon’s business.”

Nevertheless, senior Exxon scientists were sincere in wanting to get to the truth. They imagined that their company could be a leader on the issue, finding solutions and diversifying into other forms of energy production. They cooperated with governmental and academic scientists and coauthored articles in three peer-reviewed journals.

In an August 1981 internal memo, Roger Cohen, Director of Exxon’s Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Laboratory, wrote that it was “distinctly possible” that by 2030 the warming trend that his staff had projected “will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).” He understood that even if observable effects were modest in 2030, by then it would be too late to prevent irreversible catastrophes in the following decades.

Memos and letters between Exxon scientists and managers discussed how rising atmospheric CO₂ levels could

• Melt ice caps, raising sea levels;
• Bring droughts and floods, changing local climates;
• Destroy agriculture in some areas, causing famines;
• Force mass migrations;
• Increase pests and weeds; and
• Directly affect human health.

Their work on climate modeling came to fruition in 1982. It revealed that global warming would be even worse than James Black had warned.

That year, Exxon’s Environmental Affairs Office prepared a 42-page primer on the “CO₂ ‘Greenhouse’ effect” and distributed it to management throughout the company, warning that it was “not to be distributed externally.” It stated that, despite many remaining uncertainties, preventing global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”

Unless that happened, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.” And, “Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” Shortly thereafter, massive layoffs decimated Exxon’s science staff, ostensibly in response to an oil glut that reduced company revenues.

By 1988, effects were beginning to be measurable. NASA’s James Hansen testified to them, provoking a New York Times headline that proclaimed, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells the Senate.” Climate change became a public discussion topic.

Exxon began investing tens of millions in a campaign to deny climate change’s existence. A 2007 Union of Concerned Scientists report documents how the company adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics. In addition to funding propaganda and lobbyists, it financed 43 organizations whose mission was to confuse the public and their elected representatives on global warming science.

In 2008, Exxon pledged to stop funding “public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.” But the Guardian reports that the company has continued to fund denial politicians and organizations.

Back in 1997, former Chairman and CEO Lee Raymond personally worked to prevent adoption of the Kyoto Protocol. In a Beijing speech, he mocked climate models, stating that, “They are notoriously inaccurate.”

In fact, Exxon’s own 1982 model has proven to be incredibly accurate, and consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s exhaustive research and modeling, published in 2013.

Howard Baker (R-Tennessee) was the ranking minority member of the Senate committee that investigated the Watergate scandal. He became famous for repeatedly asking, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

We now know what Exon knew and when it knew it. And we know that over the 33 ensuing years, we could have done much to prevent catastrophic climate change while launching new industries and creating thousand of jobs. Exxon could have been a leader in that effort.

Those challenges and opportunities remain before us. The denier politicians will continue to obey their owners. But we cannot be deterred.