Exxon, played us all on Global Warming, Science Historians Conclude
Every Thursday between 1972 and 2001, the oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil Corp. ran an advertorial in the New York Times.
When these ads — which were aimed at swaying public opinion and appeared in other publications as well — covered the science and policy debate surrounded global warming, they emphasized the uncertainty of the science and the difficulty of solving the problem, if it existed at all.
Yet at the same time, inside the company, Exxon Mobil's own scientists and officials were taking the threat of climate change seriously and viewed it as a potential roadblock to its business.
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A new study published on Wednesday adds to what we know about Exxon Mobil's "say one thing, research another" approach to the climate issue, which has put the company in legal jeopardy.
The first-ever peer-reviewed analysis of Exxon's private and public climate communications, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that Exxon followed a public relations strategy of sowing doubt regarding climate science findings while quietly hewing to mainstream scientific conclusions internally.
The study is the first to classify the positions taken in Exxon's internal documents as well as its public statements on climate change, and it bolsters the recent work of investigative journalists at Inside Climate News, the Columbia Journalism School, and Los Angeles Times.
"Our study is the first peer-reviewed, academic analysis of Exxon’s 40-year history of climate change communications," said co-author Geoffrey Supran, a science history postdoc at Harvard University, in an email.
"Our results show that Exxon has misled the public about climate change. It did so, we have shown, by contributing quietly to climate science and loudly to raising doubts about it."
The research is likely to play into investigations by multiple state attorneys general, aimed at determining whether Exxon Mobil purposefully misled the public and shareholders about the reality and seriousness of global warming. Such activities may have violated multiple statutes.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has initiated a separate but similar investigation regarding the company's disclosure of investment risks. Together, these investigations are known on social media by the hashtag, #ExxonKnew.
The new study, by Supran and the well-known science historian Naomi Oreskes, could bolster the legal cases currently being explored, though it is not explicitly aimed at making any legal judgements, the authors state.
Supran and Oreskes chose to undertake this study in part because of how Exxon Mobil has sought to defend itself from the allegations. The company has published a list of more than 50 peer-reviewed articles on climate research and policy from 1983 to the present day, and denied that it "suppressed climate change research."