Why I’m Angry at Fossil Fuel Companies and ExxonMobil in Particular

July 30, 2015 – One of my readers who follows my blog through LinkedIn admonished me a couple of weeks ago for being too critical of the fossil fuel industry. My response at the time was to point out the ongoing disinformation campaign run by a number of energy companies and the foundations they fund like the Heartland Institute.

If you are a regular subscriber then you know about Heartland and about the postings I have written regarding ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP and Canada’s Suncor describing their indifference to the issue of global warming, their defense of continued fossil fuel exploration and expansion, and their financial and political pursuits. You have also read my coverage on Canada’s oil sands and the implications for the globe of ongoing develpment of this greenhouse gas intensive fossil fuel resource. You have also learned about the Canadian federal government’s climate change stance and its efforts to stifle researchers on government payrolls from offering evidence that runs counter to stated policy. I have also written about the on and off commitment from fossil fuel companies to carbon capture utilization and sequestration (CCS and CCUS) projects, and about the number of projects of this type that have been mothballed or cancelled at the first sign of any fossil fuel economic hiccough.

So it was no surprise to me, but clearly it was to at least one reader, to find out about internal emails from an ExxonMobil engineer that date back to 1981 and expose that the company knew about anthropogenic climate change and its correlation to the extraction, processing and burning of fossil fuels.

Who was the engineer? His name is Lenny Bernstein and back in 1981 he wrote an internal memo about a field off Indonesia that Exxon wanted to develop. The study of the resource showed it contained 7o% carbon dioxide (CO2) and if developed was described as a “carbon bomb” that would become the largest point source of CO2 emissions on the planet.

Why did Bernstein write the memo?

Because he was responding to a question from someone within the company related to business ethics. Bernstein later wrote a follow up to his 1981 memo in which he stated:

“Having spent twenty years working for Exxon and ten working for Mobil, I know that……ethical behavior comes from a business calculation that it is cheaper in the long run to be ethical than unethical. Safety is the clearest example of this. ExxonMobil knows all too well the cost of poor safety practices.”

In that last remark he is referring to the Exxon Valdez. Bernstein is no saint when it comes to arguing for climate change consideration in business decision making. In the 1990s he served on an advisory committee to the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group that espoused skepticism about anthropogenic climate change.

But at the time of the first memo the scientific research on climate change was already 85 years old. In 1896 Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, published On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, establishing the link between warming and CO2 and showing that the Industrial Revolution was adding to the atmospheric greenhouse effect. Surely someone at ExxonMobil other than Bernstein must have read Arrhenius’ paper or some of the many others that followed on this subject.

Yet in the public forum ExxonMobil acted prior to and after 1981 as if climate change and atmospheric carbon-producing fossil fuels were not linked. The facts show the company not only ignored the implications of fossil fuel burning but also provided money to organizations such as the Heartland Institute, (more than $600,000 between 1998 and 2006) to discredit the science and deny that fossil fuel burning was contributing to global warming. One of the scientists on the take, Dr. Willie Soon, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recently outed for publishing junk science on climate and the atmosphere, received $1.5 million US for his “research.” Some of that money came from ExxonMobil.

Here is a revealing excerpt from a Bernstein memo related to ethical corporate behavior:

“Corporations are interested in environmental impacts only to the extent that they affect profits, either current or future.”

See if Bernstein’s above comment relates to ExxonMobil’s corporate positioning. Well back in May I wrote about the company’s recent annual shareholders’ meeting during which CEO, Rex Tillerson, stated that climate models “just aren’t that good.” Really, it’s about the models? It’s not about the observational science?

At that same meeting when Tillerson was asked to consider adding a climate change expert to the corporate board he remarked, “to set aside one seat for an environmental specialist or for any single attribute or area of expertise would, in our view, not be in the best interests of the company or its shareholders because it would dilute the breadth needed by all directors to make informed decisions for the company.”

I guess being informed about climate change by a subject expert not named Willie Soon would throw a spanner into the works.

Related articles across the web

• World’s Leading Skeptics of Man-Caused Global Warming Gathering in Washington, DC
• Global Warming: A Theory that Predicts Nothing, Explains Everything
• The most influential climate change papers of all time