New docs reveal Exxon "policy" to put profits above the climate [View all]

[Think. Again.]

Sep 14, 2023, Emily Sanders
Full Article: https://www.exxonknews.org/p/breaking-new-docs-reveal-exxon-policy

The Wall Street Journal uncovered damning new evidence of Exxon executives’ ploy to protect fossil fuel profits at all costs.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that it has uncovered even more documents revealing Exxon's intentional efforts to discredit and downplay accepted climate science, with the intention of swelling fossil fuels for as long as possible.

Link to WSJ reporting: https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-climate-change-documents-e2e9e6af

No paywall: https://archive.ph/ifiwm

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Just a few of the most egregious highlights:

After James Hansen gave his congressional testimony on the reality of dangerous anthropogenic climate change in 1988, Frank Sprow, then Exxon’s head of corporate research, sent a memo to colleagues warning that “If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur.... Any additional R&D efforts within Corporate Research on Greenhouse should have two primary purposes: 1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options,” the memo said. In an interview, Sprow, now retired, told the Journal that the plan laid out in his memo became company policy, and Exxon’s corporate research division was instructed to pivot from internal climate research to funding “science to support our business.”

In 2012, following a major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) outlining the worst-case scenario for climate change if carbon emissions continued to rise unchecked, then-CEO Rex Tillerson told a top Exxon researcher that company scientists should work to “to influence [the group], in addition to gathering info.”

Four years prior, while Exxon was publicly pledging to stop funding climate denial through think tanks and front groups, a manager of global regulatory affairs and research planning wrote in an email that Exxon should send a scientist to help the American Petroleum Institute (the world’s largest oil and gas trade association) write a paper undermining the certainty of climate science. “I support [Exxon] co-authoring a paper on uncertainty in measuring GHGs,” wrote the manager, Gene Tunison.

In 2015, Tillerson also told Exxon’s board of directors that keeping global warming within 2 degrees was “something magical” (scientists have made clear that crossing the threshold of 1.5 degrees will bring about catastrophic climate impacts). “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough,” said Tillerson, adding that it would be “very expensive” to reach a 2 degree target, according to a summary of the meeting reviewed by the Journal. In August of this year, Exxon “predicted” the world would not meet that goal by 2050.

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Full Article: https://www.exxonknews.org/p/breaking-new-docs-reveal-exxon-policy

Link to WSJ reporting: https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-climate-change-documents-e2e9e6af

No paywall: https://archive.ph/ifiwm