New documents reveal that the Canadian oil company Imperial Oil knew in the 1970s or earlier that burning fossil fuels caused climate change. Similar documents in the U.S. have put Imperial’s parent company, Exxon Mobil, on the defensive, with multiple government investigations launched against the multi-national oil and gas cartel. These latest revelations add to the controversy, as well as giving it a Canadian dimension.
As told in the U.S., this story has been largely about fraud – and fair enough: Exxon has been an active player in spreading climate disinformation. But even more fundamental than the question of knowingly misleading shareholders or the public is the question of whether it’s OK (whether you mislead anyone or not) to sell a product (and to make billions doing so) that you know will harm communities and destroy property. If Exxon has known since the 1970s that its product will (for example) contribute to flooding coastal communities and worsen droughts, shouldn’t it have been hard at work helping us find alternatives? Can they pocket their hundreds of billions of dollars of profits without paying their fair share in preparing for and dealing with climate change impacts? How would the world be different if fossil fuel companies had been paying their fair share since the 1970s?
When did Exxon, and Imperial, know?
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, increasing levels of fossil fuel pollution have been trapping heat in the global atmosphere. But we didn’t know that at first.
Last year, journalists at Inside Climate have uncovered that Exxon knew as early as 1978 that their product was contributing to climate change. Earlier this month (April), the Center for International Environmental Law released a treasure trove of documents from fossil fuel industry associations that indicate that the science of fossil fuels was well understood within the industry even earlier, including a 1968 briefing to the American Petroleum Institute (of which Exxon was a member) which warned:
If the earth's temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur, including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photo-synthesis. ... [T]he abundant pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.
The new revelations from DeSmogBlog show that Imperial Oil, Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, knew, and that this knowledge was not limited to the Exxon parent company, but was spread throughout the Exxon cartel. DeSmogBlog quotes from a 1980 report on Imperial Oil’s activities in 1978-79:
“It is assumed that the major contributors of CO2 are the burning of fossil fuels… There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Technology exists to remove CO2 from stack gases but removal of only 50% of the CO2 would double the cost of power generation.”
DeSmogBlog also identified a 1970s report that listed CO2 as a pollutant, as well as other early statements confirming that the company was well aware of the impacts of climate change.
How about some accountability?
The response from Exxon has been to insist that these type of documents reflected the views of the documents’ authors, rather than agreement by Exxon that fossil fuels would cause climate change. Interestingly, both Exxon and its critics seem to imply that it is remarkable that Exxon’s scientists would have known about climate change as early as the 1970s:
“To suggest that we had reached definitive conclusions, decades before the world’s experts and while climate science was in an early stage of development, is not credible.”
In fact, Exxon’s scientists were not so far ahead as all that. Although scientists first started talking about the role of carbon dioxide (the main chemical resulting from burning fossil fuels) in trapping heat in the atmosphere in 1896, the idea didn’t begin to gain significant scientific credibility until the 1960s. A review of scientific studies published from 1965 to 1979 found that 62% of those studies predicted global warming, 10% predicted global cooling (primarily due to aerosol use), and 28% did not make a prediction about whether the global temperature would rise or fall. In 1965 the U.S. president warned of global warming in a major speech and (later in the same year) received a briefing from the American Association for the Advancement of Science that discussed the risks of climate change.
Indeed, it would be remarkable if Exxon’s scientists were not aware by the 1970s of a growing scientific consensus around climate change.
The point here is not that Exxon was way out in front in terms of scientific knowledge. Rather, the point is that the Exxon Mobil cartel knew exactly what harm its products would cause (and are now causing) – deaths, violations of human rights, destruction of property. Rather than working to make alternative sources of energy available to its customers, the company misled its share-holders, funded public misinformation campaigns and lobbied against real global action on climate change.
In legal language, they did not act like a “reasonable person” that takes responsibility for what (up until then) might have been the unintended results of their actions. (Here’s a post we wrote last year about how a reasonable corporation might act).
The world would be very different if Exxon and the other fossil fuel companies began, in the 1970s, to shift their investments from oil and gas to electrification and renewables, to take cradle-to-grave responsibility for their product, and to ensure that their prices reflected the full costs of their products.
Even now, Exxon is telling its shareholders that it intends to produce oil and gas undeterred, with no expectation that they will need to rein in their production or to pay their fair share of the harm caused.
The legal consequences?
In the U.S. Exxon is already being investigated by four state Attorneys General over the suggestion that the company’s misinformation campaigns amounted to fraud. A total of 17 state Attorneys General have agreed to collaborate in holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for misinformation, and the U.S. Department of Justice has referred the issue to the FBI (after a petition from environmental organization 350.org called for an investigation).
The company has turned over thousands of pages of documents to the New York Attorney General, but is in court trying to block a broader subpoena from the Attorney General of the Virgin Islands. Apparently the investigation has recently expanded to include a public relations firm hired by Exxon.
Here in Canada the reaction has been more modest, and we’ll have to see if there are calls for investigations related to the Imperial Oil revelations. In December, our colleagues at Ecojustice filed a request for an investigation into climate denial organizations under the Competition Act, but that did not target fossil fuel companies. Nonetheless, there is the potential for provincial inquiries, competition investigations or shareholder actions related to Imperial’s actions.
The U.S. investigations against Exxon are an impressive amount of legal action in a very short period of time, and demonstrate, I think, the pent up frustration with the role of Exxon and other fossil fuel companies in blocking real action on climate change. It is clearly significant that the Attorneys General, and, I think, the public, recognize that fossil fuel companies have legal responsibilities in relation to climate change.
For now, however, the focus of that legal responsibility seems to be on what Exxon said and didn’t say.
We’ve argued before that rising harm suffered as a result of climate change will inevitably shift the focus to legal responsibility for what Exxon (and Imperial) did and didn’t do in extracting, processing and marketing fossil fuels, and in making hundreds of billions of dollars of profits from profits that they knew would harm people on a massive scale. As well, we should ask what Exxon and Imperial should do now, if it is to take cradle-to-grave responsibility for its products. These conversations are already occurring in the Philippines, where a human rights complaint names Exxon along with 49 other fossil fuel companies. When will it happen in Canada?
By Andrew Gage, Staff Counsel
Photo from Johnny Silvercloud used under Creative Commons Licence.