Big Coal Trashed the Climate and Got Away With It
We have wasted so much time. Despite decades of urgent warnings from scientists about a looming climate crisis, global carbon emissions have continued to climb year after year, amplifying and compounding the challenge the world faces to avert catastrophe. A new UN report reveals that global temperatures are now on track to rise by 3.9 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. To avert climate chaos, the report suggests, global emissions need to fall by 7.6 percent each year beginning in 2020. That is to say, by next year, carbon pollution needs to start falling five times faster than it has been rising. Possible? Yes. But about as likely as reversing gravity.
Why have we waited so long to deal with this crisis? Lots of reasons, from the sheer scale and inertia of our energy systems to the psychology of denial. But the fossil fuel mafia played a big part in it. Thanks in part to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting a few years ago by InsideClimate News, we now know that ExxonMobil and Shell and other Big Oil companies knowingly misled the public and their shareholders about the risk that climate change poses to their assets, as well as to the habitability of the planet. In internal memos dating back to the 1970s, Exxon predicted that the effects of fossil fuel pollution could “indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the world’s population).” In 1982, it estimated that the atmosphere would contain 415 parts per million of carbon dioxide in 2019 – a stunningly accurate prediction. As a recent New York Times editorial pointed out, “The parade of horribles foreseen by the company — sea level rise, more intense rain and snow, inundation, hotter temperatures, desertification, agricultural disruption — are now regular features of the nightly news. And it will only get worse.”
But rather than warn the public, Exxon spent over $30 million on climate-denying think tanks and shady researchers to confuse people about the risks of climate change, while doubling down on its mission to pump as much oil out of the ground as quickly as it could. The New York Attorney General sued Exxon Mobil for securities fraud; if the company is found guilty, it could be on the hook for $1.6 billion in damages (closing arguments concluded a few weeks ago). Other lawsuits are piling up, including one by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey accusing Exxon Mobil of “systematically and intentionally” misleading “Massachusetts investors and consumers about climate change.” Again, billions of dollars in damages are on the line.
But it wasn’t just Big Oil who understood the risks of climate change to its business. Big Coal knew too. Last week, Huffington Post published a story citing an article in a coal industry trade publication from 1966 that proved that climate change was no secret to people in the coal industry either. “There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote a coal industry executive named James R. Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/big-coal-trashed-the-climate-and-got-away-with-it-918567/
