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Renewable Energy: An Exxon Investigation Given Second Life as Trump Taps Exec for Cabinet
https://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/renewable-energy-an-exxon-investigation-given-second-life-as-trump-taps-exe[font face=Serif][font size=5]Renewable Energy: An Exxon Investigation Given Second Life as Trump Taps Exec for Cabinet[/font]
by Andrew Revkin
ProPublica, Dec. 23, 2016, 3:57 p.m.
[font size=3]In 2015, Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr., David Hasemyer and Lisa Song of Inside Climate News spent close to a year producing “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” -- a comprehensive portrait of four decades of the oil giant’s relationship with climate science. The reporting showed, among other things, how Exxon lobbied against action on greenhouse gases.
The work won an array of awards and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, and the hard-won reporting has renewed relevance now that Exxon’s chairman and chief executive officer, Rex Tillerson, has been picked by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the State Department.
…
The breakthrough moment in the Exxon investigation:
What happened was that we were talking to people who'd been at a range of companies, BP, Peabody, The American Petroleum Institute, Exxon, Shell. The waterfront at that time was very, very broad. Then one of my colleagues in California, David Hasemyer, spoke to some government scientists who mentioned that Exxon had done peer-reviewed research on climate change, with academics, in the 1980s. All of a sudden, Exxon became more interesting because the clock went back from the middle of the '90s, when we expected, to the middle of the '80s, and that was also before the general public knew about climate change.
From there, we started digging, and we came across a document that talked of this research that had been done on an Exxon tanker measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the oceans. All of a sudden, Exxon, through our research, ended up separating itself from the pack because it was doing its research much earlier, and then all of a sudden we found that it was deploying its own tankers, its own resources, to do very serious in-house empirical research.
…[/font][/font]
by Andrew Revkin
ProPublica, Dec. 23, 2016, 3:57 p.m.
[font size=3]In 2015, Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr., David Hasemyer and Lisa Song of Inside Climate News spent close to a year producing “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” -- a comprehensive portrait of four decades of the oil giant’s relationship with climate science. The reporting showed, among other things, how Exxon lobbied against action on greenhouse gases.
The work won an array of awards and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, and the hard-won reporting has renewed relevance now that Exxon’s chairman and chief executive officer, Rex Tillerson, has been picked by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the State Department.
…
The breakthrough moment in the Exxon investigation:
What happened was that we were talking to people who'd been at a range of companies, BP, Peabody, The American Petroleum Institute, Exxon, Shell. The waterfront at that time was very, very broad. Then one of my colleagues in California, David Hasemyer, spoke to some government scientists who mentioned that Exxon had done peer-reviewed research on climate change, with academics, in the 1980s. All of a sudden, Exxon became more interesting because the clock went back from the middle of the '90s, when we expected, to the middle of the '80s, and that was also before the general public knew about climate change.
From there, we started digging, and we came across a document that talked of this research that had been done on an Exxon tanker measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the oceans. All of a sudden, Exxon, through our research, ended up separating itself from the pack because it was doing its research much earlier, and then all of a sudden we found that it was deploying its own tankers, its own resources, to do very serious in-house empirical research.
…[/font][/font]
