Just one question for the sanctimonious. Who used all the gas and oil Exxon drilled and refined? Did they force feed people gasoline? Don't think so. Demand for fossil fuels seems to be on the increase, as are emissions globally (not here in he US though). Consumers are the critical factor here. No one wants to live in the horse and buggy days. People want modern conveniences that fossil fuels are necessary for. Don't try and assuage your guilt by blaming Exxon.
Oh, by the way, you shouldn't feel guilty. The world and the human race aren't coming to an end because of "climate change."
16
@Ralphie Regarding your last assertion, our current path will push many country’s governments to the breaking point.
11
If Exxon had paid the cost of oil production and not left it for taxpayers then and in the future, consumers would have found alternatives or used less.
23
@Ralphie
Well it did not help that these oil company lobbied against better fuel economy for our cars or against public transport and rail to have money put in highways.
We have the "choice" to pay very high rent and live close to work or commute 3h using a train or spending an 1h plus in a car [in North California].
13
Greta Thunberg said she refuses to believe that these people are evil. I'm hard put to think of a better word.
We call Hitler evil, yet he only killed 11 million (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/). These criminals will be responsible for billions, not counting the extinction of thousands of species. So why not evil?
They have children and grandchildren whose lives they're gambling away on this losing bet.
Why not public trials so they're held to account? Public trials would be key to informing the world's citizens of what's happened to them.
5
Modern society is replete with similar situations. Pesticide and chemical fertilizer manufacturers know well the harm that their products do. So do plastic manufacturers and meat producers. They all promote their products as though they are essential to human happiness and prosperity while casting doubt about their harmful impacts. Scientific knowledge is available for all to see. No one can claim ignorance. Industries that continue to produce destructive products should all be sued to recapture the cost of the harm they have done.
85
exactly
3
We need to send oil executives to jail/
6
They should be tried for crimes against humanity.
5
I just read "Blowout". Exxon is truly Satan incarnate. I hope they have to pay every nickel they ever earned. And all of it to be spent on undoing their damage.
6
Isn't it ironic that this article was written by the head of a foundation that owes its existence to the Rockefeller fortune which was created by Big Oil?
3
Aside from this being tantamount to an emissary of Bill and Melinda’s great-grandchildren saying we should revert to SCM portables for business correspondence – or Mark’s and Priscilla’s saying we should use tin cans and strings for personal communication...
What do you propose – other than tapping EM’s bottomless reserves to slake some thirst of your own...
Things have gotten so crazy that here in NYS, we’re about to go down a path akin to PG&E’s walk in the woods – with 24/7 NYC MTA service likely to be one of the first casualties, once Indian Point goes down for the count...
What do you propose – even setting aside nuclear energy, and the $1T business SMRs will become, within ten years...
Do you realize how ridiculous it looks – the cartwheels and contortions US utility companies are doing, to distract people from municipal-level and residential-level gas-fired co-generation (aka CHP)...
In California, as in Hoboken, it’s the sheer at-scale ineptitude of the e-companies that’s made this a fait accompli...
Just go off the electric grid – as every mega-scale project in NYC would do, if their shoulder-sockets hadn’t been popped by some arm-twisting...
PS
https://nypost.com/2019/10/11/cuomo-administration-orders-national-grid-to-let-gas-flow-in-brooklyn/
“...The Cuomo administration is ordering National Grid to provide natural gas hookups to over 1,100 previously denied Brooklyn-based customers...
What’ll be next – ordering the sun to shine more hours each day...
3
Utter waste of taxpayer resources. This case should have been thrown out long ago.
7
This article is clearly misleading. Yes, apparently Exxon spent over $30M lobbying, but the assertion that it was "to confuse the public about climate science" is untruthful and not supported by the list of recipients in the cited source. Many are right wing, but not necessarily climate change deniers, including e.g., the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
7
Deceitful hypocrisy and immense greed are at the basis of this conclamate climate change .
Profit comes before health, exploitation of Mother Earth treasures until they run out, oblivion to the catastrophic demographic increase due to ignorance of many politicians and religious zealots, who consider educating women in the third world a waste of time and money etc etc.
Greedy profit is causing this mess, I am afraid it is too late to reverse it .
But never give up hope , even being an old senior citizen I still have faith in younger generations worldwide .
"This activity has released an immense amount of greenhouse gas into the Earth’s atmosphere, changing its climate and leading to all kinds of displacement, death (extinctions, even), and destruction. What is more, defendants understood the consequences of their activity decades ago, when transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy would have saved a world of trouble. But instead of sounding the alarm, defendants went out of their way to becloud the emerging scientific consensus and further delay changes — however existentially necessary — that would in any way interfere with their multibillion-dollar profits. All while quietly readying their capital for the coming fallout."
-United States District Court in Rhode Island, William E. Smith, a George W. Bush appointee
"That’s the case against Big Oil in a nutshell."
That's also the case against allowing capitalism to operate without sensible regulations or government-imposed "encouragements" to behave in ways that provide greater benefit than harm to the public interest other than by solely increasing shareholder value.
The general tendency of Republican policies is to let the free market ensure a benefit to the public interest, but the details of how that occurs are rarely if ever honestly presented because the bottom line is always profits and shareholder value.
The country and world would have been much better off to have started the transition to a green economy long ago.
We were warned.
96
If only a majority of Americans weren't so scientifically ignorant, illiterate and stupid about the science of climate change they wouldn't be so easily deceived and fooled.
If only a majority of Americans were more humble humane and empathetic towards their fellow human beings they would be ready to make the necessary steps to delay and/or defeat negative evolutionary fit natural selection by climate change.
There is only one biological DNA race aka human that began in Africa 300,000 years ago. There is only one human national origin aka Earth.
The purpose of a for-profit public or private corporation is to enhance the return of it's shareholder owners. Being a good citizen environmental steward isn't necessary for that task. Private corporations are obligated to disclose material matters to a reasonable investor.
What is legal in America is what should embarrass and shame Americans.
3
Wrong, they spent 30 million to confuse the easily confused. The US is packed full of know nothing fools and Exxon knows it.
CEO’s who lie to the detriment of the public deserve jail time just like the guy on the street selling cigarettes .......
the hydrocarbon folks are protecting their position. like it or not the world runs on oil, the whole world!!.....and in 3rd world areas...which is where the growth is and will be for the next generation......is going to do it with oil. all the harping about climate fall on NO ears in the developing areas...which is over 4 billion people...so even if the US and europe disappeared....global oil consumption will still rise.....this is a WORLD issue...and until the WORLD is moved off oil....hydrocarbons will dominate. .....terrapower reactors and the hydrogen cycle are the only way out....so get moving!
Exxon's deception was outrageous. Still, if you're a lawyer, you know this case is a loser. Proving Exxon's outrageous conduct is only half the battle. You also have to prove damages to Exxon and its shareholders. But there are no damages. Exxon lies through its teeth and Trump's EPA is supportive. Nobody penalizes Exxon for this outrage. Exxon can do as it pleases and it suffers no harm.
1
Also, US taxpayers pay billions every year in fossil fuel company subsidies. Those need to end, now.
168
@lzolatrov
Could not agree more.
Any government tax incentivizing currently directed at fossil fuel industries should be redirected ro renewable energy technologies.
7
I blame Congress for allowing big money in all areas to control legislation. The fossil fuel companies will do and say anything to make a buck. Elected representatives should formulate policy that is in the best interest of their constituents. They have failed miserably due to greed and the need for power.
Until we get money out of politics and enact term limits, we will continue down the road of corruption and ultimately, extinction.
8
We desperately need a new legal standard, one built on the necessity for the preservation of the human species on this planet. It must provide definition that says any and all behavior that furthers the continuance of the human species on Planet Earth is ethical and legal. Then it must go the next step by saying that any and all behavior that does not further the continuance of the human species on Planet Earth is illegal and unethical.
www.InquiryAbraham.com
1
The persons responsible at Exxon, or any other ethically challenged fossil fuel company, should be held criminally responsible. When a crime is committed against a scapegoat population we call it genocide or racial cleansing.
What would you call a crime against our species on a global scale? I'd say "crimes against humanity". Hanging is to good for such actions.
Good luck suing for shareholder losses when the shareholders had no losses!
Vote with your wallets. Don’t buy stock in Exxon. Don’t buy fuel from Exxon.
1
Makes perfect sense.
Will anyone go to jail?
How about not just fines but justice?
Is driving the price of oil up by disrupting the Mideast another part of Putins' work that Trump is doing?
Maybe ‘Big Oil’ should be forced to put stickers on our energy appliances, like warnings on boxes of cigarettes. ‘WARNING: filling your car with this gas will cause irreversible damage to the environment’. ‘WARNING: By using this energy you agree to indemnify Big Oil against costs incurred when the sea washes over your front door and your insurance company is bankrupt’. ‘WARNING: Big Oil has spent millions of dollars lobbying but will spend billions more defending your right to buy our products and destroy the world.’
Remember that time BP spilled over 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico because they were cheap and lazy? Remember how that destroyed the Gulf fisheries for decades to come and cost the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people?
They still make over $300 billion in revenue every year. And they get about $7 billion per year in tax subsidies courtesy of us, the American taxpayers.
Sue the oil and gas polluters out of existence.
Once commenter said that "We (the people) happily participate in this deceit too" and to an extent this is a more or less correct statement. But, many years ago, we were convinced to "Zee the USA in your Chevrolet. America's inviting you to all"> Remember that jingle back in the 1950s. And going back a few years earlier was "Get your kicks on route sixty-six". Most of you won't remember that one. But the people have been brainwashed by the oil companies, by the automakers, but the plastic bottle makers (who wants to return a glass bottle of soda for a refund?). Yeah, we participate, and willingly so. And, yeah, we did not want to hear the crazy scientists. And, yeah, we still don't want to hear the crazy scientists -- you know, those goons who look like mad scientist Einstein and besides were are so uneducated that we cannot understand what they are telling us -- and unwilling. So the education system has also failed us. There were a lot of things that have caused us to be part of the problem. But now, when even a 16-year old can figure it out, we have no excuse. We now are solidly the problem because look who we voted into office?
What would Exxon stock be worth if we paid attention to climate science and left much of the discovered fossil fuels in the ground?
And we should, because burning just those fossil fuels would melt all the ice on the planet, raising sea levels 65 meters and rendering much of the surface of the planet uninhabitable by humans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/science/climate-study-predicts-huge-sea-level-rise-if-all-fossil-fuels-are-burned.html
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha06610d.html
1
Truly heinous behavior by Exxon-Mobil that had lasting effects on some.
Humans accelerating climate change is real as a majority of Americans understand and 97% of science has demonstrated.
Boycott Exxon-Mobil. Hit them where it hurts for spreading lies.
Sure sounds like an ongoing criminal racketeering fraud that fits under RICO so as to get at the ill gotten wealth of senior executives.
Solutions, that's what we should be pushing, not for us, but for those living after we're gone. Cars pollute, big time but what about other combustible platforms, like trains, planes, ships, etc. Gov'ts' are imposing regulations to reduce emissions, why because like Trump gov't is corrupt, easily bought out. We know what our problem is but we fail to act, and that is why we are failing ourselves, our planet. Suing Exxon may lower oil production, but another company continues and increases their production to offset Exxon's lose. We know fines are worthless. The problem is us, it is capitalism. It has always driven greed. Any bets we are going to change that? I have a feeling we have lost. No change means someday people will be sitting on top of a mountain in the Appalachian Mts pointing into the distance and saying, "over there once was a city they called New York City, but......!!!!
If you can't understand the fundamental foundation of the oil industry, how can you ever expect or even dream of managing it?
The sheer size, scope and power of these companies has always intimidated it's fans and critics.
Is this any different than the Boeing scandals that are finally finding their way into honest journalistic investigation?
The history of this country was grounded in carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs, scoundrels, thieves and corrupt practices. Today it is no different. Never was and never will be.
If corporations were poor people, they would have been arrested, charged and convicted already.
I am shocked and deeply saddened by the naysayers in these comments. If it is even possible, even if you think it is of the slightest of possibilities, fossil fuel extraction and distribution are causing the planet to become even incrementally uninhabitable, why would anyone not want to stop and say, hmm, maybe we should look at that? Instead of the knee-jerk reaction that it is some sort of wacko, partisan conspiracy? I mean, you live here, too, right?
Our kids are completely ruined. The earth will survive us. We will not.
1
It's a grab for the money in the deep pockets of Exxon Mobil, that's all. But expected from a state who won't allow any fossil fuels to be extracted in New York but wants to blame someone for their own backward decisions. Karma baby.
1
Talk about hypocrisy! Wasserman heads the Rockefeller Family Fund. The source of the Rockefeller fortune was STANDARD OIL, S - O, which became ESSO, which became EXXON!
1
"Mr. Wasserman is the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund."
Oh, the irony.
1
"The companies know the planet is headed toward a climate catastrophe" says the author. The studies used to support these type of claims often lack any error analysis and when included, as in the recent retraction in Nature, we see there was no "increased acceleration". The oceans are rising at 1/6 of an inch per year (not feet or yards), so they say, as "measured from space". They have risen 400 feet since the last Ice Age.
1
It is ironic that the author works for the Rockefeller Fund which was founded by the founder of Exxon, Chevron, etc.
Big oil still gets billions of tax deductions too and buys half of Congress.
This information needs to be spread far and wide. These people KNEW the damage they were causing half a century ago and went ahead anyway. That is sociopathic behaviour of the highest order and people should be made aware that burning fossil fuels is not a benign activity. It has very real and lasting consequences and we are now beginning to reap what we have sown these last 50 years. The problem is, we are STILL burning hydrocarbons like there's no tomorrow. We are addicted and this addiction will eventually kill us.
8
$30 million is pocket change for a company with revenues the size of ExxonMobil It doesn’t seem like it was a serious effort to fool me. And it didn’t.
Next time don’t insult me with a $30 million campaign. Spend some real money. Find me a few credible not on the fossil fuel industry payroll climatologists that don’t think climate change is a serious threat and that our activity is a substantial cause.
The science behind climate change dates back 120 years and in 1938 Guy S. Callendar published “The Artifical Production of Carbon Dioxide and It’s Influence on Temperature” in the Royal Meteorological Society journal. My oceanography class in California in 1974 talked about global cooling and the coming ice age. We as consumers didn’t buy into the XOM story we bought into cheap hydrocarbons, cheap products made from plastics and virtually everything else that is made from or powered by fossil fuels. We humans are consumers. Especially Americans.
To say that ExxonMobil single handedly swayed the population of the US, and by extension the world, to consume oil and gas is disingenuous. As the the federal judge in the City of Oakland, California v. BP, Chevron, Conoco, XOM and Shell case noted (order dated June 25, 2018) “In sum, ....both sides accept the science behind global warming” further that “... those (climate change) dangers are worldwide. Their causes are worldwide. The benefits are worldwide”.
What we need is critical thinking to find transitional solutions to take us from primarily fossil fuels to primarily renewables. We have one atmosphere. It’s not the US atmosphere. Globally taxing fossil fuel consumption would be a start but look what happened in Ecuador when gasoline subsidies were removed. Riots in the street. Unless you want to condemn billions of people to absolute poverty or death we need to develop reality based solutions.
1
Fun fact. The same graphic design studio that did Mobil Exxon also did logo and branding for the EPA
Bankers make the financial crisis, then lie and keep it going till it crashes so they can make more money. The drug companies make the opioid crisis, then lie and keeps it going even though people are dying so they can make more money. Exxon and other oil companies make the environment crisis, then lie and keeps going even though people are dying so they can make more money. And you wonder why more and more people are hating capitalism
13
Exxon has been known to be deceitful for years. But it's hypocritical for us, as consumers, to point fingers at the companies whose profits we have enabled in our insatiable lust for bigger & faster cars, plastics, bigger houses, all the other stuff. Where's the vast public outcry demanding higher taxes on oil companies and realistic gas prices? We have some fingers pointing back at us.
9
The attorney general should be praised in the highest, but unless a candidate, and it seems it would only be a Democrat at this point, comes out with the strongest climate change platform possible, the planet is in total peril.
The NY Times has a responsibility to pressure the candidates, the DNC, the UN, and anyone who will listen so that President Trump won’t be able to have a second term even though he has all the money the fossil fuel industries are willing to give him to win. And this is without the huge fossil fuel industries in Russia and the Middle East that are giving Trump everything he needs to win the electoral college again.
The majority of voters against climate change deniers must be so large that gaming our democratic system again with the help of foreign countries just won’t work. To protect the planet, there needs to be a landslide in favor of renewable energy solutions.
5
We (the people) happily participate in this deceit too. Everyone is too happy to get in their car, use their plastic, fly to whereever, etc. We are eager to fight wars over the stuff. We built our lives utterly dependent on fossil fuel.
So the hard lesson from all of this is: suing Exxon, while important (they are liable), is not going to stop the world from burning oil and thus inducing more climate change impacts. That's only going to stop when we (the people) wake up to what we are doing to ourselves, and stop creating the reason to extract oil from the ground to be burned by deciding to get from point A to B via a non carbon powered solution. Or simply reducing mobility.
I don't see a lot of my fellow people, who are no longer confused by the issue, trying re-orient their lives around this concept. It takes two to tango. it takes honesty and work too.
8
You really missed the boat on who is responsible for pushing all these petrochemical consumer products.
The necessary changes needed in consumption patterns in the U.S. are so "radical" that there is no way for those changes to be realized in time to save the world from the global warming crisis. Literally billions of people in China, India, Malaysia, and other densely populated areas now aspire to American-style consumption, so there is no end in sight. The government of Brazil is letting ranchers burn up the Amazon rainforest for room to raise more livestock. Any significant reduction in the use of fossil-fuels is likely more than 20 years away, perhaps 40 years--time we simply don't have. Therefore, more resources will be spent to moderate and adapt to the warming climate, rather than a full court press on stabilizing and then reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. So there will be no excuse as the air, the land and the oceans are degraded by our dependence on heavy consumption to drive the world economy. Valiant efforts are being made on these problems, but on no where near the scale needed to effect any improvement. It is deeply discouraging.
6
It costs me nothing to maintain my lifestyle right now. Gas is cheaper than it”s been in years, in general. Local officials have decided that creating parking lots is an effective method of controlling urban decay. Our entire suburban ecosystem relies on private transportation as its circulatory system.
Effectively ending this self perpetuating network will require reworking the physical fabric of the country to reinvent how we conceive of housing, work and movement. As we move forward we will find that it will be due to a concerted effort involving industry, government policy, private home ownership and media that this change may be possible.
6
Wouldn't it be grand if we could charge the men on the board of Exxon with criminal charges. Knowing that heating up the planet would cause global destruction of homes but most of all the death of the people on Puerto Rico. These men knew that the temperature would rise and the velocity of the wind would increase by half. Going after the money is a wonderful goal, but if you really want to stop them, sentence them to jail time.
9
@John Metz Clark
I have often wondered whether executives and board members could be charged with a crime if they knowingly covered up the extent of the damage caused in pursuit of profit, To that end read this excerpt from the International Criminal Law page of the Encyclopedia Britannica -
"The term also has a broader use in condemning other acts that, in a phrase often used, “shock the conscience of mankind.” World poverty, human-made environmental disasters, and terrorist attacks have thus been described as crimes against humanity. The broader use of the term may be intended only to register the highest possible level of moral outrage, or the intention may be to suggest that such offenses be recognized, formally, as legal offenses."
3
This doesn’t begin to address the damage wrought by big oil.
In an inadvertent “gaffe” (or accidental honesty) an oil industry exec told me that the first thing they do in a new “community in which they operate” (think new oil field or fraking site) is visit the local fire department which are usually small, rural, sometimes volunteer and underfunded. They make a donation (large to the little fire department but comically small to the oil behemoth) to the fire house to curry favor/ buy loyalty.
The new equipment the fire company buys impresses the locals with big oil’s generosity and ensures the firemen and women will become unwitting ambassadors for the brand.
Of course any fire or spill will be catastrophically larger and more complex than they can handle well but it will be the responsibility of the FD and the EPA-not the company. When the oil and gas fields are no longer productive they leave taking the jobs and leaving behind ecological disaster.
When this company had a devastating explosion and fire in PA they gave members of the local community 1,000 free pizzas and a 2 liter bottle of coke “for the inconvenience”. Jon Oliver did a biting piece on the absurdity of it.
7
Isn't it time we also stopped subsidizing the fossil fuel industry with our tax dollars?
16
The actual case being brought against Exxon is rather thin and technical. It is about internal and external estimates of carbon taxes and how those might have impacted shareholders.
Climate change is a real and present danger. But this trial is not a significant step towards addressing that danger. This falls closer to grandstanding than ground-breaking.
11
@Mike
No, It sets an important precedent. Business leaders who knowingly do public harm for personal enrichment and who misrepresent that reality are criminals and should forfeit the wealth they extracted under false pretenses even as they forfeit their freedom. They there are the abettors . . .
1
If, as it seems almost undeniably true, Exxon-Mobil intentionally deceived the governments and the public about the impact of carbon on the environment, then Exxon-Mobil should be sanctioned.
But, if New York City, Baltimore and Rhode Island want help paying for the cost of addressing the damage caused by burning carbon, why haven't they imposed a significant tax on carbon?
And why just Exxon-Mobil (and any other oil and gas company)? Most of us may not have understood the negative impact of burning fossil fuels on climate in the 1970s, but we have to have been intentionally ignorant to deny knowledge for the past 10-20 years. I still drive a car. Fuel efficiency standards are still too low. Investment in public transport is inadequate. Candidate Trump campaigned on "bringing coal back" and the Trump Administration pulled out of Paris Climate Accord while working to expand access to new areas for oil exploration.
Exxon-Mobil actively hide what it knew about climate science and actively worked to make us doubt climate science but we, collectively, have resisted increases taxes on carbon (generally or at the pump), have resisted investment in public transportation and the development of renewable, non-carbon energy, and continue with other environmentally unsound behaviors like relying on a meat-heavy diet.
Punish Exxon-Mobil. Make it pay. But don't let the rest of us off the hook when we are equally responsible for what is happening to our planet.
13
@Douglas Weil you might want to look at the significant investment that automobile and tire manufacturers made in lobbying to hobble mass transit in the 50s and 60s. As a result, many communities tore out light-rail tracks and car culture took over. Here in New Jersey, trolley lines stretched across the most densely populated part of the state, offering an efficient way to get from town to town. Now we're stuck in constant congestion and relegated to allotting a half hour to reach a destination five miles away.
There's a reason why so much federal and state money was spent on highways as opposed to rail and mass transit in the mid-20th century. Americans wanted to be more mobile, yes, but we were also trained to want to drive our cars to work rather than taking a bus or trolley. That has left us, in many cases, in a situation where we couldn't take mass transit if we wanted to.
Privatized profits, public-borne costs. It’s the American Way; the Invisible Hand of the Free Market strikes again. Ayn Rand acolytes rejoice!
Is this a great country, or what? We’ll soon find out.
18
Will we continue the fiction that wild, unrestrained capitalism, which answers to no one, not even shareholders, is good for the world? With wreckage everywhere, most recently the Bahamas, with Miami a certain target?
12
@H Smith Will we continue to engage in simplistic analysis of everything? Unrestrained capitalism exists nowhere. Nowhere. The question is how much restraint and of what sort. Black and white thinkers do almost as much damage as climate change because they obstruct problem-solving with their nonsense.
@H Smith
You got it! Libertarian capitalism is like the bull in the China shop--it is going to kill us and the planet.
Only a measly $30 million to blind us, or is it to easy to look the other way?
6
...and Donald Trump just collected ten times the amount in three months to confuse us on many fronts.
Money in politics is the root of all evil. Those who have been hurt by Republican policies yet support the selection of the conservative Supreme Court that equates money as speech and corporations as people are getting exactly what they deserve. Trump, McConnell and the rest of the corrupted elected federal officials should be booted out of office next year.
"We’re victims of a small group of gargantuan companies that recklessly and deliberately ignored the implications of their own science and unabashedly worked to deceive the public."
Exactly right. But I am curious, just where did these visionary execs think they would be living? Here, on Earth? Or is this the reason behind a sudden rash of private space programs?
4
For anyone to spend so much money in a bid to convince a plurality of the public that 2+2 does not equal 4, is a blatant smoke and mirrors attempt to convince us to not believe our eyes, ears or brain. I'd feel sorry for Exxon for living affluent lives without a soul to aptly enjoy it, but their desperation to maintain the status quo, to heck with the planet, is something Trump would do. I cannot think of a more telling exemplar of an action taken to benefit an extreme few for the sake of the many.
6
Seems the adage ‘we have met the enemy and he is us’ applies. Consumers demand energy to live. For many decades there were few if any other sources to replace oil. So don’t blame Big Oil for meeting your demand. You asked for it.
9
@preston
You miss the point entirely.
What’s there to gain in admonishing a company for past misdeeds? We could bankrupt them and what would that achieve?
The future needs to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and that’ll require everyone committing to switching power plants, transportation and consumables.
There will remain a need for fossil fuels as some things just require hydrocarbons. But most everything else can switch to renewables or just cutting back on excess.
3
I think you are missing the point. To begin with, the case constitutes an example that may convince other companies that are currently financing climate change denial propaganda campaigns to stop, secondly, it should be possible to obtain a judicial order for a substantial financial penalty that could be used to help deal with the consequences of Exon’s misdeeds. The current administration seems to be a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry so anything that can counter its denialist propaganda is also desirable.
8
They are probably still funding organizations that deny the climate is changing because of our pollution. It's in their interest to do so. Maybe a trillion dollar fine will get their attention. If not, make it two trillion. The money could be used to subsidize wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy, plus energy conservation and improved energy efficiency.
13
The suits do not charge Exxon with damages to the environment, or even deliberately misleading the general public by promoting climate denial.
Rather, it is being held liable for deceiving its own investors about the implications of climate change for its business model and future profitability.
A rather different cup of tea. It's like only charging the tobacco companies with stock fraud, not harming smokers.
12
@gs
I'm a long term investor in XOM, I've not been deceived at all. I'm very satisfied with share performance long term and the current dividend. How can my voice be heard?
2
@Evitzee Your voice has been heard by Trump. He has made the destruction of climate the only coherent policy in his playbook. For the sake of your profits, the Trumpocalypse will destroy the ecosystem services that our children and grandchildren rely on.
It is time for other voices to be heard. Those who would protect climate. Listen to the youth and diversify your 401K.
16
@Evitzee
Sell your shares.
It's immoral to hold them.
And tell XOM why you're selling them.
Timely information. For background see "Blowout" the just released work by Rachel Maddow.
4
How do these people sleep at night? How do they look at their grandkids and know that they are choosing money over their future?
I simply cannot cannot fathom. I don't get it.
13
@Kelly Enormous wealth has a sedative effect.
Exxon. The big tobacco companies. Dupont (PFOA pollution in West Virginia). PSE&G (hexavalent chromium). The list goes on of corporations who care only about the bottom line, not about the people or the environment which they are harming. I wonder a) how those executives sleep at night and what they plan to tell God when they die, and b) how people can continue to own/buy stocks in those companies.
9
the US government alone spends two billion dollars a year, and has been for three decades now, which amounts to a grand total of about 60 billion dollars, to confuse us about the climate, never mind the science.
2
$30 million? That's peanuts compared to the profit they make. It's peanuts compared to what an oil company CEO can make in just a few years.
8
Of course Exxon lied.
This line of attack is a diversion, because it lets all the politicians Exxon bribed and the timid scientists and regulators who knew what was going on all off the hook.
Ditto for the legislative and regulatory institutions that let this happen.
8
The prediction and fear 25 years ago was that the earth would warm multiple degrees over the next 20 years and that the ice caps would melt causing major flooding in coastal cities. The problem is that none of this has happened and there really hasn't been any global warming. 8/10ths of a degree of warming since 1880 just isn't that big a deal. Of course the left is not letting a crisis that they invented but that hasn't happened go to waste. The solution is always more government control and higher taxes.
3
@Tom
The graph linked to below the last 400,000 years of global temperature, CO2 and sea level derived from ice cores doesn’t look like it was created randomly, but rather by a clock mechanism.
Fifty years before we knew how to create such a graph the work of a scientist named Milankovitch indicated that when we got our act together we would see Earth’s orbital cycles, which operate on time scales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years, in the record.
But what Milankovitch didn’t expect (1) is that when there was more sunlight at high Northern latitudes, processes like ice melt caused oceans to warm and release CO2 which made even the Southern hemisphere warm, although it was getting less sunlight.
The only way to explain this is with C02, so a story that didn’t start out to be about CO2 became one.
CO2, methane, and ice sheets were feedbacks that amplified global temperature change causing these ancient climate oscillations to be huge, even though the climate change was initiated by a very weak forcing.
The physics doesn’t change now that we are rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2, in fact ice is melting all over the planet and methane is beginning to escape the permafrost.
http://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/images/impacts/slr-co2-temp-400000yrs.jpg
18
@Erik Frederiksen
From Wikipedia.....In contrast to the melting of the Arctic sea ice, sea ice around Antarctica has been expanding as of 2013.[4] Satellite measurements by NASA indicate a still increasing sheet thickness above the continent, outweighing the losses at the edge.[5] The reasons for this are not fully understood, but suggestions include the climatic effects on ocean and atmospheric circulation of the ozone hole,[4] and/or cooler ocean surface temperatures as the warming deep waters melt the ice shelves.[6]
Just because you write something - it doesn't make it true.
2
@Tom
That's from a single study, which contradicts other studies. Here is some more recent data:
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/
And the wikipedia article you referred to ends with
"A group of scientists with the University of California updated previous results ranging from 1979 to 2017, which improved time series for more accurate results. Their article, published January 2019, covered four decades of information in Antarctica, revealing the total mass loss which increased gradually per decade."
And two subsequent paragraphs with more details.
Not one of the better articles on Wikipedia. I found it confusing.
And there's more to climate change than just Antarctica:
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
4
Exxon couldn’t sell that oil and gas if there weren’t a market for it.
Of those markets the one that has seen the greatest change is the vehicle market where low gas mileage SUVs and pickups which now make up the majority of vehicle sales in this country.
As to why they now sell mostly SUVs And pickups the reasons are twofold, the population is getting older, consequently less physically able to get into smaller cars, and 40% of Americans are obese, which leads the world.
And so we now need trucks to take most of us around that use much more gas than the sedans of yore.
11
@GerardM the world runs on oil....fact. and it will for the forseeable future....
Oof. The block quote from Judge Smith's decision omitted the citations. That is, Smith was paraphrasing the complaint's allegations. He had to accept the truth of those allegations at that stage of the proceedings. The decision in no way suggested the allegations are true. It is quite a disservice--and is just misleading-- to suggest otherwise as this author did.
7
@James
I am not a lawyer but in a bit of personal legal experience, a judge making a statement like the one highlighted in this article was done not as a formal state of findings in the case but, as stated here, a repeating of a Plaintif's accusation. Can someone with professional legal experience confirm "James'" comment? I believe it is correct but a 2nd legal perspective could help. If true, using this quotation in this article would in fact be quite misleading. Trust me, I am no fan of Exxon Mobil and their role in climate change but the public needs to see facts and data to be able to make its decisions.
It would be unwise to base climate policies on such roulette wheel lawsuits.
That said, this piece is right on in concluding that "when it comes to the moral repugnancy of the company’s climate deception, the verdict is in."
Let the chips fall where they may, let the trickle of lawsuits become a torrent if that is their trajectory, finally pass long overdue carbon taxation, and implement a green new deal without continuing unconscionable delay.
And rise up to rid the land and globe of today's monumentally disgraceful misleadership which totally prevents any part of such a sane response to the climate challenge.
12
Oil company are valued based on their reserves, so sure they want to pretend this all going to be pumped out of the ground to generate sales for as long as possible.
I don't think that any executive in those company truly had the power to make a 360 turn without being fired the next day by angry share holders.
This being said, it is sad that in 30 years they did not do a slow turn and redirect their investments towards renewable or turning carbon into some else than fuel contributing to global warming. Easy short term money winning again !
Some of those company are trying to rebrand themselves as chemical companies as they see fuel consumption dropping in the future. I guess we could use more plastic if it did not end up in the water and as micro plastic into our food supply.
Carbon capture is not such a bad idea, there is saline storage available, but it would be ironic to pay those guys to sequester carbon they got into the air into the first place. The scale needed is also mind boggling at 6+ Giga ton per year.
At $50 per tonnes (metric) that 300 Billion $ per year ! [with current technology not a viable price point ever].
May be bankers could stop lending those guys money for exploration and extraction. They are all highly leveraged capital intensive operations [that's probably why they did not pivot in the first place], that would cripple them. Remember BP golf coast disaster, what happen to their stock was eye opening about their balance sheet.
5
A successful lawsuit “would force Exxon Mobil, which took in some $290 billion in revenue last year, to account for the true costs of its nature-crushing fossil fuel business, making it less competitive with wind, solar and other renewable energy sources.”
That really is the crux of the issue. Any company that pollutes makes a far greater profit if it does not have to pay for cleanup. And why should WE, the taxpayers, pay the bill to clean this up instead of Exxon?
A friend of mine said every company in America would poison every man woman and child in the country if they could make a profit doing it. Well, maybe not any company but Exxon certainly would - and has.
Personally, I hope they lose so badly that they are forced out of business. Then we could all breathe easier in more ways than one.
20
This is comparable to the VW emissions scam and should be similarly prosecuted.
8
No violation of law, climate deception is in the mind of some lawyers who understand nothing of the debates of science. The article fails to represent the actual science at the time. Models in the 1980's were useless as predictive of anything. They failed consistently for the next 30 years. Climate models for CO2 inputs are still not predictive. So sue just because todays science which still fails to predict ...? Cause it was not and still is not a provable fact in the law that a individual company did not like a fraction of the science that still is not provably correct in a court of LAW
4
@joe : Hardly useless; it predicted that the atmosphere and oceans would warm, and by enough to affect the climate - and ANY change, negatively affects somebody.
Even a change that was later seen to be a net benefit to the globe - suppose one that devastated American farming but was good for much of Asia - would cause harm, and therefore civil tort, no "violation of the law" needed to be actionable.
Exxon promoted doubt about things that were not in doubt even then: that it would cause detectable changes, at all, due to their product.
You're getting into weeds that are not necessary for this case; the very clear facts are sufficient.
8
@joe
Did you actually read this article? Exxon's own research predicted the consequences, and they took these predictions seriously enough to, at the same time, plan changes in their own operations to compensate for effects such as sea level rise, and bankroll a campaign to sow doubt by the public in the science. That seems like fraud to me.
23
So how can I/we put proper science back into the discourse, and best help at an individual level?
The small group of solar, EV, vegetarians amongst us feel good, but the real change has to be much broader and focused.
What specific actions can individuals take outside of the mega lawsuits ? We cheer the lawsuits but patronize the fossil auto industry, perhaps because it inconveniences our all too comfy lifestyles, and by golly, as hard-working Americans, we’ve earned those lifestyles!
I fear we are waiting for the lawsuits to save us rather than real action.
5
@Dale We need extreme, virtually universal global policy measures for a chance at retaining organized human life.
So vote, demonstrate, anything to effect systemic change.
NASA's former lead climate scientist James Hansen has been arrested several times protesting government inaction on climate change.
A few years ago he said all Americans should be knocking on the White House door.
Problem now is there's no one there worth talking to . . .
26
In college, we had a guest lecturer from Exxon Mobile talk about how much the company cared about the future of the planet by describing about how much money the industry spent on 'research,' implying it was research on clean energy--until one of the students in attendance pointed out that the number he was citing was actually research on new drilling sites.
41
The big meat companies are investing in meat substitutes because they don’t want to lose control of a market. The big oli companies know a lot about building in oceans. Generation of electricity from wave action seems a natural, but that’s too creative.
6
Imagine if Scientist had 30 million to better educate us about climate change. It is sad money controls everything in America. Luckily more and more Americans are growing aware of the destructive effect of money in American politics.
10
At the hart of climate change is a huge American problem made worse by the GOP and the "Stable Genius." When corporations become the driving force in public policy decisions, like confronting climate change, the public and country almost always suffers. To put it another way: "What's good for corporate profits is almost always bad for the public at large." For the MAGA folks, the mathematics and science behind this are part of the liberal conspiracy. So they appear to have missed this.
16
Anyone who watched the baseball playoffs knows that the deceit continues. ExxonMobil's "carbon capture" TV ads are pure fantasy, implying that we can somehow remedy the effects of burning fossil fuels by constructing huge carbon capture plants -- thereby allowing EM to continue selling petroleum. How much money is EM actually spending on carbon capture? It's anyone's guess...
17
@ADKMan
I'll agree that capturing and purifying CO2 to transport and stuff underground probably won't work. There are credible schemes to capture plant emissions to covert into carbonate rock that can be used as aggregate for concrete. That's a huge market on gigaton scale.
Given the new coal builds worldwide, there might not be another viable choice.
3
Crude oil prices have dropped dramatically (more than 50%) in the past decade, yet XOM has continued to be profitable and pay out solid dividends to its shareholders. Yet according to this writer the company has misled investors?
4
@DLS It's the NY attorney general's office that makes that argument, not the journalist writing the article. That's literally the first sentence of the article.
Also, your numbers are wrong - oil was at less than $80 a decade ago and is well above $50 today.
What's the conflict between the assertion that investors were misled (about the future value of reserves) and corporate profitability? That actually supports the assertion.
6
Unfortunately, the best realistic case is that these companies will pay a fine and then go about their business. The only thing that can change their behavior is jail time. Real jail time. Five years. Ten years. In a maximum security prison, where they will be in fear of their lives or worse every day. Then we'd see these companies find religion. And only then.
10
@Larry
That's Soviet and current Chinese mentality, Larry. Sorry, I don't want to be jailing people whose businesses have lifted billions people out of abject poverty. Let's keep it in perspective.
Climate science is not new.
1895, Arrhenius presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”
1950s US military learns enough about CO2 to make heat-seeking missiles
1968 John Mercer warns the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) may be a problem for sea level rise within 50 years
1988 James Hansen testifies to Congress that global warming has arrived
1998 Michael Mann publishes a graph later called a hockey stick
2014 Two independent teams of scientists report the WAIS is likely retreating irreversibly (and marine sectors of Greenland are likely doing the same)
And on and on and on.
18
@Erik Frederiksen
OK. What has not yet been developed is a way to redo the global economy without pushing it back in to the Stone Age. Don't say "renewables" because they aren't ready for prime time. Even in Oakland, the sun doesn't shine at night. Google the California Independent System Operator website (caiso.com) and see where this state gets its power. Even with all the renewable investment, that supplies a lot of the state's power during the middle of the day, we still get about 40% of our electricity from nat gas. And gasoline fuels our cars. Where do we get our oil? Largest source is Saudi Arabia.
5
This morning, 250 million internal combustion engines roared to life to transport the occupants to places unknown. Who’s zoomin’ who?
I don't believe there is any accounting standard that calls for expensing something that (a) can't be quantified, (b) may not occur in any particular time period, and (c) has numerous other causes. In a 10-k, companies disclose "risk factors" to describe what might happen and what its significance might be.
NY has a long and glorious history of shameless grandstanding AG's. The tradition continues.
9
Last summer just a 2 hour drive from me the Camp Fire incinerated the town of Paradise, California.
That could be my town’s fate anytime, even tomorrow as I live in the same foothills of the Sierras.
If you are a rancher who has lost their cattle to drought, or a homeowner who has lost their home to wildfire or flood, or an island nation going under the waves then dangerous climate change has already arrived.
It's been nearly 30 years since the first report by the IPCC. Nearly 30 years during which we could not plead ignorance yet global emissions have increased 60 percent since then.
It's no wonder that young people, who will live to see a vastly changed planet, are impatient.
35
Exxon spending $30 million is like me buying a candy bar. Obviously it was a half-hearted misinformation campaign.
7
Perhaps. But your candy bar is for one. Thirty million buys lots of candy bars, thus a far reaching audience.
3
30 million was all that was needed.
That's because they were funding fake science, cheaper to make up false and misleading stories than actually research facts. Perhaps.
This is textbook unfettered capitalism - how we expect powerful monopolies to act - and they do. It is also ironic that one relic of Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire is criticizing anther. But just big tobacco raged for decades, sending millions of people to their early graves, so too has big oil helped wreck our environment, big pharma pushed opioids, and big finance unleashed a deep worldwide recession. All powerful industries must be tamed by government oversight. But what to do when it is your govt (or the head of it) is corrupt? Now who do we call? A Congress? It is also divided. We are indeed at an inflection point, not only for American democracy, but earth's habilitability -- for us!
18
@PT Rockefeller infamously said,
“I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers."
Even more compelling are the words of Frederick T Gates, business advisor to Rockefeller:
“We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians….”
All Americans have been indoctrinated and brainwashed to believe that 'might is right'
How's that working for us, now?
The United States government needs to buy all the U.S. oil companies and run them properly.
4
@Keith Dow
Actually, a better solution would be to force fossil fuel corporations to invest in clean technology, and make every single American a shareholder.
That way, the corporation will be beholden to the general public.
Hey, a man can dream, can't he?
10
@Keith Dow well, you would have electricity available to you maybe two times a day if that was the case.
2
@Keith Dow
You mean like Venezuela's and Mexico's and Nigeria's? Show me a well run national oil company.
1
Go GET them. Don't stop. Because they sure never stopped lying to us while paying lobbyists and therefore politicians to do them favors, though. Decades ago, their own research proved much of our climate change was due to worldwide influence by the fossil fuel industry. Fines aren't enough - they should get prison for life, and for the future lives they've destroyed on our planet. GET them, don't stop.
14
I guess we will always have this sort of corruption of public debate. But why is it so cheap?
$290 billion in revenue, eh? How much did they get in government subsidies?
8
Thanks for putting all of these facts out there! I've been reading the book "The Blowout" and am stupefied by the downright evil decisions of Big Oil in the world. Yes, the use of oil has enabled us to have better fertilizers, amazingly helpful items from oil-derived plastics to say nothing of heating and transport, but at the expense of the health of our very planet ? ! ? And the companies knew about the dangers! This is sickening.
6
We should wait till the 10 ft(predicted) wall of water comes upon NYC. As it is, according to NOAA, seas are rising at the same 3mm/yr as in the times of Abe Lincoln, before the big emissions.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8518750
But for now, all fossil fuel to the state of New York, for heating, transportation and electricity generation, should be stopped ASAP by all companies before the winter.
This will solve many things. Landlords will no longer need to come from Florida and repair bad boilers in NYC, since there will be no fuel anyway.
People who scaled Mt.Everest and have the equipment at hand will survive.
2
Come on! You mean Exxon isn't that batch of good guys their ads have been telling us about? I mean, do we really expect such smart industry good guys to understand the complicity of their product in the destruction of the world as we know it?
But, if you're gonna sue 'em, I recommend doing so quickly. At the rate things are going, their stock ain't gonna be worth a plug nickel in a few years. And, when it gets to that point, I suspect a lot of 'em are going to be in jail after having spent their millions on their defense, whatever it might be.
2
"The burden of these [climate-warming related] costs will fall squarely on all of us who pay taxes unless the responsible climate polluters are required to pay their fair share."
Sounds a lot like the 2008 Wall Street banks bailout. Why is it the taxpayers need to pay????
You build on the ocean's edge, you take on a risk. Pay for it if the bet you made does not pay off.
If you can get payback from ExxonMobil, go for it.
Otherwise, I am tired of paying for corporate malfeasense and other person's bad decisions.
5
Exxon misleading the public.
Trump and his Administration also thrives on misleading the public. Yet there is no mention here of Rex Tillerson, the one-time CEO of Exxon-Mobil, who probably cultivated that deception approach at Exxon before Trump picked him for his 1st Secretary of State. One can see why both thought Tillerson would be a perfect fit in a Trump White House.
1
Where is Rex Tillerson now? On a serious note the oil companies, Koch Brothers included deceived the public for the sake of profits. Tobacco made a similar blunder. The cure to get ahead of the problem, share what you know, seek cures with all stakeholders and victims on board.
Lawsuits blunt instruments compared to policies designed to avoid cudgels in favor of sound public responsibility.
1
New York, the leading state legal geniuses in our Union. Thank you.
They went out and found the marketing guys who had retired after they helped the tobacco companies muddy the water on cancer and cigs.
2
It's incredible to think that, in their greed, they may have actually already killed us all.
Imagine if, from the early 1980s, climate change had been acknowledged, researched, and prepared for...what a different world we would live in now. And continue to have the hope of living in far into the future.
6
@Dr J : Yes. Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof as an example to the nation. Reagan had them removed.
7
This excellent article is the first hopeful development regarding climate control I've seen. Now, if more politicians would find support from the oil and gas industry morally repugnant, we would have a better chance of coming to grips with this problem.
1
I'm really glad to see this published in the NYT. I think a lot of those Gen. X and younger think that we are the first to realize that climate change is a serious issue. Many people don't know that scientists have been warning about this for over 50 years. The point is that the science was ignored.
Science gave Western Civilization every great invention of the modern era. And yet, when science was telling 'the C-suite' something that they didn't want hear, it was conveniently ignored.
Now, we are staring into the AGW abyss.
We could have used fossil fuels intelligently for thousands of years, and slowly weened ourselves off it to develop clean technology. Instead, we burned 'the oil barrel' at both ends and we have a planetary scale manmade crisis on our hands.
This is what happens when you double down on greed, and willfully play dumb.
And, no they can't say 'nobody saw this coming.'
They burned up that excuse along with everything else.
Good job, Exxon!
6
As I remember the tobacco CEOs after getting caught lying to the feds got away scot-free, courtesy of the Clinton administration.
3
This is just an example of how skewed our justice system is to serve moneyed interests. The only people who are allowed to sue Exxon for contributing to disaster are its investors ? The only wrong-doing our court system recognizes is financial?
Of course this practically means that the only people who can afford to achieve financial justice are the people who have enough money to be considered to have "standing" as well as the resources to go to court about this.
We need to repeal "Citizens United" and we need to rethink corporate law and responsibility. This is ridiculous.
8
But, but what about the algae?
We're growing algae!
You've seen our ads, right? Biofuel man.
From algae.
We're saving the planet!
5
For your next needlework project, a sampler:
"God Bless Letitia James"
For the Exxon Board of Directors, a cruise to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where they will disembark without life vests.
For top-level Exxon management and public relations decision-makers, death by a firing squad composed of asthma sufferers.
What else could you do to punish traitors to the human race that would, um, encourage the others to recall their responsibility?
Steve Coll's excellent book Private Empire details Exxon's dissembling in depth. Thoroughly recommend the book.
2
A prescient comment from Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
2
Who was confused about climate change? The same people who believe FB disinformation, Fox News lies, conspiracy theories and all the other garbage thrown around and embraced by those with no critical thinking skills and lazy minds. By all means, go after Exxon and hold them accountable but really these people will get their lies elsewhere.
4
I haven't trusted, or bought gas from Exxon since their Valdez debacle in 1989.
4
@melaniem
And gas from another source is better? As if the other fossil fuel companies didn't have their own debacles. As if the oil market isn't global, such oil pulled out of the ground in in one location would never show up for end use elsewhere?
2
Does animal agriculture do the same?
2
It all started with John D Rockefeller’s Devine inspiration to use the waste from crude for internal combustion engine.
30 million only, shows how easily we can be deceived
2
Why the "?" in the headline? Seems the entire column is about how they indeed did deceive investors and everyone else. If NYT is worried about fundamental fairness, that went out the window in the 80s and 90s when we still had time to act but when XOM was gearing up for its 40-year war on the truth--and fairness.
3
Exxon is a criminal company and everybody working for them is complicit.
No more excuses.
2
Read Rachel Maddow's 'Blowout' for (far)more.
1
While the NY AG's lawsuit is progress, it's really sad that the mechanism for punishing these sociopathic corporations is solely through a capitalist lens of "misleading shareholders." In a sane world, these corporations and executives should be imprisoned for ecocide, destroying the planet and causing a sixth mass extinction. How ecocide continues to be legal is the epitome of deception - and media conglomerates like The NY Times continue to be part of the problem (Chevron, a sponsor of The NY Times' Daily podcast, is the 2nd largest greenhouse gas emitter). Shame.
4
Cognitive dissonance: I just read a lengthy article from the New York Post online that plausibly argues just the opposite of this New York Times op-ed. They both seem believable, in fact, persuasively so, at least to this layman.
I just want the truth. Now I don't know which position is correct; I know they both can't be, so I'll be particularly interested in this court case and its findings. I trust juries to objectively arrive at the truth. Till then, my mind is torn asunder.
@Jim Muncy
If it helps:
Consider that the Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News. Consider which side of the political spectrum both favor. Consider which side of the political spectrum favors Big Oil. Compute.
A low-level drug dealer would be sentenced to hard time. A person who murders for hire would get a lot more time, maybe even the death penalty. Why do people who would kill off the entire planet for profit get away with a small fine compared to the money they've made?
5
" I tell you this, no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn "
Jim Morrison, 1969
4
Knowing career engineers at Exxon personally they have told me that Exxon NEVER admits wrong doing and will bleed anyone dry financially by fighting in the courts until the other side gives up.
This sums up the integrity of Exxon and likely other oil giants whose greed and denial of their own findings for decades.
SHAME ON YOU
4
It’s somewhat comforting to know that many climate-change denying red states will be underwater soon.
2
I have a problem with headlines that feature questions such as this one. Why click when the answer is as obvious as "Is the Pope Catholic"?
1
I’m shocked, actually, that the comments thus far are so measured and dispassionate. If ever there was an occasion for strident, angry outrage, this is it. These men of the fossil fuel industry - these bare-faced, immoral, conscienceless liars - are criminals in every sense of the word - that is, if words have meaning. Their selfish actions have already caused untold suffering and death. They knowingly made calculated, criminal decisions in order to line their own pockets. They are mass murderers, just as surely as history’s most infamous monsters, though perhaps in a more genteel fashion. If there is justice, they should be imprisoned. At minimum, they should be shunned.
3
Thank god for New York and god protect us from the machinations of morally bankrupt companies
1
" I tell you this, no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn "
Jim Morrison, 1969
3
Is that even a question at this point?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
Scientific America article supports these conclusions
1
And over to Alaska too...
Only 30 million?
That's Chump Change, to Exxon.
They blow more than that, just on luxury junkets for politicians.
AMERICA.
We have the best politicians, that money can buy!
2
I guess that the directors and members of the boards of Exxon and other oil companies never learned the story of Midas, the king or emperor who got the ability of everything he touched turned to gold.
But they, at last, will experience that we are all in the same boat because it may be that Mr. Nathaniel Rich was/is right when he wrote this article: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?comments#permid=28190600".
And perhaps big little Greta Thunberg has been preaching in vain
Ha, hell is overbooked though apparently still taking reservations. How unconscionable the executives are, feeding at the trough of personal greed and power at the expense of everyone. In a country like the US that is self professing to be so Christian, where is Jesus in all of this? Where is love thy neighbor? I don't think it says trounce my neighbor, does it? How do those executives at Exxon Mobil sleep at night? (feel free to substitute Trump White House opioid executives, Juul, etc. etc.)
1
Well duh. This is news? Where have you been the last twenty years?
"The burden of these costs will fall squarely on all of us who pay taxes unless the responsible climate polluters are required to pay their fair share."
Fair share? What's a fair share payment for "geocide," i.e.,
destroying the world?
The true $cost of a gallon of gas has been estimated to be over $10. That true cost removes the $tax subsidies paid to Big Oil, includes the $cost of pollution, etc.
1
There is no way of knowing for sure where we would be if Exxon had been honest about what it knew about climate change decades ago. After all, this is global problem and making a transition away from fossil fuels is extremely difficult to say the least. But if Exxon had not spent tons of money to create doubt about the finding of climate science things certainly probably would have worked out differently. The climate change denying industry might never have developed and the Republican Party might not have championed the cause of climate denial. If money can be obtained from the fossil fuel industry because of their years of deception that would certainly help reduce emissions and adapt to the consequences of climate change. There is no way to go back in time undo the mistakes of the past but some sort of justice can be achieved as well as financial help.
1
In the 60s we reached peak oil. Something that took million of years to create is used in 300 years. Always thought technology would protect our future. Maybe with fusion which make energy and water like the sun
Oil has lots of uses rather than just burning it for fuel and heat.
Seems like oil companies what to sell us the last drop just before the sixth mass extinction, which is in process, kills us all. The Earth will just start over without humankind as we will be gone.
3
Unquestionably Exxon and big oil in general have known for years that their products were a major contributor to global warming.
But government understood the science and the consequences as well. Big oil's motivation was clear, money. But how can we explain the failure of the news media to draw more attention to this pending crisis? How can we explain how global warming was not treated as a critical issue in any of the past presidential elections despite the warnings of a vast majority of climate science experts? Politicians respond to the interests of the voters, and if the news media fails to accurately inform the electorate of the importance of an issue, that issue becomes unimportant to the voters. Big oil and the likes of the Koch brothers successively misled the public on the seriousness of the problem, but did the lack of a strong, and independent press allow them to get away with it?
4
@kevin cummins You said it -- money. There never was an independent press dedicated to telling the truth, but there was/is a need to communicate what is really happening.
So, If I understand this. Oil was produced to generate energy. That energy was used to produce economic prosperity, including printing the New York Times.
All users of the energy could have used other sources but chose to use oil. Unlike Tobacco, there was no chemical addiction.
However, because they met a legal and efficient need they should be sued for false actions?
Andrew Sterling.
1
I think the Supreme Court made it all very clear. Money=free speech, therefore whom ever has more money has more free speech. They decided this for our political process. Therefore, free speech surpasses one person one vote and those that have more money and free speech simply control the political process. The firing of our Ukrainian Ambassador demonstrates the process clearly. Campaign money funneled from an interested party makes it to one presidential pac and one congressional pac and buys direct attention from the POTUS to fire a perfectly law abiding, constitution serving career diplomat. Oil money has bought enough free speech to control politicians on both sides long enough to bring us to where we are now. In addition, they have also bought enough media to delay information about climate change. Many policies are not about what is better for “the people”, but for specific interest that benefit instead of “the people “.
2
The oil companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to confuse people about climate science, malign scientists and purchase the Republican organization to toe their line.
As a result we’ve slowed action on a process which will kill more people than all our wars and many other species.
Nationalize the oil companies and use their vast wealth to help us adapt to the dramatic changes coming due to the momentum in Earth’s energy system and climate.
4
What perplexes me, is that the employees of Exxon Mobil and their families, live on this same planet Earth. If Exxon Mobil pollutes the environment, they have to live with the dire consequences, too. It is not like the tobacco companies who can foist their product on others. But, if Exxon Mobil has to be sued to do the right thing, then that's what needs to be done.
10
@Constance Look at it this way. The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. Cashing in on oil over the environment is how the rich view grabbing the money while the getting is good. I look at it as attempted murder of me and my loved ones and treat it that they'll kill me if I don't start looking at killing them first.
Indeed: "We’re not in this mess because we heat our homes or drive our children to school, which is what the fossil fuel companies want us to think."
They have paid media outlets to keep mum on the fact that there are alternative ways to heat, move and power our economy. There would be clean energy options for EVERY one of today's needs, IF they can get implemented commercially.
I know, as someone who has covered renewable energy technologies and substitutes for fossil heat, propulsion, and manufacturing, that it is almost impossible to get this news covered for a general reader at a general site. Writers with expertize in renewables are only able to cover this news for industry or research organizations.
The result is the general reader is ignorant of the fact that we could ban fossil fuels and the alternatives would finally be on the the market, because investors would no longer see them as lacking a market while fossil options are there.
And with no alternatives on the market, now how easy it is for readers to be guilt tripped into siding with Exxon, etc, that gosh, I'm the one who is guilty. I DID drive my gas car to work, take the plane to grandma's at Thanksgiving, buy my electricity from my coal utility, I better shut up about the need to get off fossil fuels, it's just impossible.
10
This highlights the problem with institutionalized corporate culture subverting our societal conscious. Back in the 70s, even in the 60s, we all knew about the problems with fossil fuels: massive pollution choking us; supply problems and price hikes; being subservient to shady problematic governments who mistreated people and promoted war, who we were enriching and powerless to deter due to our need for oil; and global warming was well known and highly publicized back then when it was called the greenhouse effect. Clearly, there was a critical need to develop and transform to solar renewables. The big gas and energy companies should have led the charge, and everyone who worked for them should have insisted their employers make this investment because it was a necessity for our Nation and World. However, corporate blind greed suffocated moral righteousness. Employees of the energy companies did not object, instead of solar they became obsessed to drill more and more around the globe, wrecking oceans, Alaska, and pristine rain forests. Instead of doing what was right, it was worse than greed. They lied and spent our tax break windfall profits to subvert the truth, pervert their workers to be complicit, and might have destroyed our earth.
5
Climate change will be a losing battle for us as long as consumerism rules. This is not limited to direct consumption of fossil fuels, but over-consumption in general.
8
Yet another screaming argument for legislation to facilitate lawsuits that "pierce the corporate shield" and hold individual decision-makers and implementers within corporations personally liable for their actions.
Otherwise, planetary destruction - and the fines it ever-so-occasionally brings - is just another item on the ledger.
10
The court will hopefully impose enough fines and costs to force Exxon to turn over billions now and trillions later. Force them to double the pump price, so we all pay the true cost of gasoline use.
12
@k. kong Ideally make them pay to do some mitigation, like bury power lines across California, to slow the destruction of California towns to wider and wider wildfire regions every year.
Making us pay more for gasoline is not the way off fossil fuels. That makes the poor, poorer, while enabling the rich to keep using fossil fuels.
Better to ban it. Give them ten years to start making clean energy and sell safe energy instead.
2
@k. kong
It would help if the price of gas doubled. But it would have to be done without doubling the salaries for the Exxon CEOs!!
3
This is Economics 101?
Despite what Exxon and others hid or mis-represented, even though that is wrong, certain key facts remain when one steps back and looks at humans, energy, and history.
The fossil fuel industry was born in 1859, six years after the invention of the kerosene lamp. That one invention permanently altered the course of human history by extending the hours of light, enabling work and study and socialization in cultures around the world.
Previous to the discovery of oil in the U.S., 1859, whale oil was used for fuel for these lamps.
Nobody at that time could have foreseen the long-term consequences of that leap in energy production.
Now, here we stand, in almost universal condemnation of this industry, which is almost always treated and spoken of as an evil which has been brought upon humanity, when in fact, it has done more to feed, light , mobilize and generally enhance human existence than any other industry you can name. If not for the discovery of this, whales today would be unknown, as they would have been hunted to total extinction for their oil.
The 7.5 billion humans alive today could have NEVER attained those numbers without oil, the food we produce from energy resources, and this is something Greta and many others seem to overlook.
I am tired of the oil industry being characterized as something evil, when in fact it is responsible for nearly all that we have. We all share the blame for this problem as users and producers.
16
@joel strayer Of course you are right about the contributions of fossil fuel to life as we know it today. But the key point you are missing, or downplaying, is that the industry already understood in the 1970's that continued use of fossil fuels was ruinous to the planet, even to the point of estimating what the liability might be, and chose instead to invest in misinformation. This is exactly what the tobacco industry did with the health effects of smoking.
So yes, Exxon Mobil stockholders should be very worried about what this will mean to share prices, based on potential penalties based on the impacts that Exxon Mobil themselves estimated. And yes, living human beings should also be very worried about their future survival.
38
@joel strayer Your comments are generally true but miss the point--breaking our habitual addiction to fossil fuels, which is extremely difficult and which almost all qualified and competent scientists conclude will have catastrophic global consequences, is strongly impeded by the powerful f-f industry and its wealthy fellow travelers. The 64$ question, of course, is whether even semi right-minded folks have the intelligence and will power to undertake effective action to avoid disaster.
10
@joel strayer Please explain then why all of the industry’s lies, deception, smoke n’ mirrors, and related misfeasance about the effects of climate change that they contribute to. Legitimate capitalism should be able to handle the external costs of any necessary industry. Looks like the many million$ spent to deceive engenders a form of crony capitalism and shareholder deceit.
9
Carbon tax, and a public dividend. Incentive to reduce emissions for corporations and the public. We can't afford to burn it all. Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. This will avoid the pushback the carbon tax in France encountered. Cap and trade for power plants will also work, notice how well it reduced acid rain causing pollution from coal burning power plants after the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. That program is still working today (although Trump is trying to ruin it).
7
Oh please. Oil and gas are products that have produced enormous benefits in living standards, including yours. Turns out that there are impacts from using them, like virtually everything we consume. Big surprise. So, no mention of the consumer here?
It seems inconsistent to argue that companies seem to hold a monopoly on science for a lawsuit, yet at the same time promote Greta Thunberg's view of "listen to the scientists". She is right - science is based on peer-review and open questioning and isn't the exclusive province of a company or two. We have known about this for decades and have done nothing.
Articles like this distract from the hard choices that consumers and societies will need to make, and to understand the impacts of their consumption (and yes, significant GHG emissions are created when that Tesla is made). If demand drops there will be no supply. It's easy to point fingers and do nothing. We have met the enemy and he is us.
7
@Big Charlie
While some place blame on individual choices around energy the fact is that those choices are insufficient. What is needed are government policy measures.
Why? From the Nobel Laureate Yale economist William D. Nordhaus, the guy who first came up with the idea in the 70s of a 2 °C rise above preindustrial temperature to avoid.
"A target of 2½ °C is technically feasible but would require extreme virtually universal global policy measures."
Without those measures you can recycle all you like but we'll still take the climate beyond human experience and our adaptive capacity.
https://www.scribd.com/document/335688297/Nordhaus-climate-economics
9
Please read the entire article, specifically these two sentences:
“But rather than warn the public, Exxon spent over $30 million on climate-denying think tanks and researchers to confuse the public about climate science — a confusion that persists to this day — while doubling down on its destructive business model.”
So, yes, the public needs to take responsibility concerning its fossil fuel consumption, but oil companies, specifically Exxon, muddied they waters instead of leading the charge. If corporations are indeed people, then they need to be held accountable just as citizens should be.
49
@Wendy The GOP is to blame as well.
1st thing Regan did was take the solar panels paid for by American Taxpayers off of the white house.
Bush stole almost $1 billion dollars of science paid for by US Taxpayers when he lied about the science report after he pulled us out of the Kyoto protocol. US government scientist resigned in mass after he lied and "undid" years and years of scientific work.
These ex-presidents (and our current one) need to go to prison for lying to America and choosing greed and power over doing what was right.
3
How ironic that Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund wrote this op-ed. John D. Rockefeller raised his sons and future generations to be generous in supporting community causes. It makes me wonder how the founder of Standard Oil would respond to scientific proof of climate change and the role of fossil fuels.
I also wonder what role Rex Tillerson played in this grand deception.
6
Before we start suing Exxon for hundreds of billions or even trillions I think we need to start preparing for a carbon free future by:
> building safe new nuclear plants,
> creating far more extensive transit systems, throughout the country
> changing zoning laws to encourage people to live and work in the same areas
> bring back trans-Atlantic ship travel to eliminate jet travel
The list goes on and on.
5
@Billbo
No reason why holding Exxon responsibility for its lies and preparing for a carbon free future cannot be done simultaneously.
Obviously, a settle with Exxon could start to fund many of the options you list.
Its hard for the government to address the issue when Exxon has convinced much of the Republican base that the planet is not warming, and if it is, doing anything about it would ruin the economy (rather than just decreasing Exxon's bottom line).
2
This type of corporate deception will not stop unless and until corporate executives who authorized the lies are convicted of crimes and put in prison. Most investors don’t have a clue about the truth. But the executives on the inside do. Fines against the corporation only penalize innocent shareholders and employees. One or two convictions and significant jail terms, say ten years, would stop this deception forever. These executives are rational, self-interested actors. If they know there is even a small chance of being caught and going to jail for many years, they will make sure their companies tell the public the truth.
31
It is a shame and unfortunately it will contnue as long as legislation allows unfettered lobbying to the point that their CEOs, are elected to top government positions, regardless of which party is elected.
10
I realize that Republicans and Libertarians tend to be anti-regulation and believe that the free market will self-regulate. However, time and time again, greed has proven that belief false. And, ethics and morality aside, nothing is illegal unless laws exist making it illegal.
According to social science researcher Brene’ Brown, “It’s important to recommit to one thing that can help keep us sane: boundaries…. Setting boundaries may seem harsh, but doing so is necessary in maintaining a healthy relationship…. Nothing is sustainable without boundaries.”
Laws and regulations are boundaries.
18
@Mark Baer The US will be such a better place when we quit calling protections "regulations".
The only thing trump has done is to undo protections put in place to protect you and your family. But he calls them "regulations" as though he should be proud.
5
@OneForAll Nicely stated!
Is there not some irony here? The Rockefeller Family Foundation is suing Exxon Mobile? The money in the foundation comes from the Rockefeller family. The wealth of the Rockefeller family comes from the Standard Oil Trust that was broken up into 34 companies by a Supreme Court decision in 1911. Two of the largest of those companies were Standard Oil of New Jersey or Esso (S.O.), later Exxon, and Standard Oil Company of New York or Socony Mobile. This is the dog chasing it's tail. Who is holier than who in the suit?
2
@Condelucanor Well first of all, no, that is not what this article stated. Rhode Island and multiple cities including New York and Baltimore are suing Exxon Mobile, not the Rockefeller Family Foundation. And the whole point is that Exxon Mobile knowingly and deliberately mislead the public after their scientists found research 30-40 years ago pointing to climate change, many years after the breakup of Standard Oil and the creation of the Rockefeller Family Foundation. While we can get into talks of the dangers of monopolies like Standard Oil, here your comment only serves to distract from the focus of the article and muddy the waters.
3
$30 million on climate change-denying propaganda?
Is that all? I would suspect it is much, much more than that.
By any measure, a fantastic return on investment by Exxon.
Not so much for the rest of us.
25
@BJ Kapler Koch spent well over $100 million on these fake science groups too.
2
For-profit, publicly-owned corporations were legally designed to create a mechanism whereby profits were maximized and liabilities and responsibilities were minimized or eliminated.
We have seen this approach with many of the Bill of Rights. For example, the 2nd amendment is understood to be the right to bear arms without any discussion of responsibilities that these rights are based. Similarly, the right to free speech and free press has been abused by Faux "news" in general, and campaign ads specifically (such as those outright falsehoods noted by Warren in Facebook ads).
Good systems and good democracies require everyone's participation, in good faith, for them to work properly. Both are high vulnerable to bad actors. Our criminal justice system, for example, has lawyers trying to get away with as much as the judges allow to the detriment of justice in general and the public faith in justice specifically.
To fix these systems, the reverse needs to happen. If any member of a corporation breaks the law, the exec's are held criminally liable. Someone is killed using your gun and it can be shown that you didn't store it properly, you go to jail. And so on.
We need an about-face about how in the US, we conceptualize our Rights to better reflect the responsibilities upon which they necessarily rest.
4
Until 2007, computers were not adequate to include all the warming and forcing agents involved nor were they powerful enough to have a grid for solving the Navier-Stokes equations of a small enough scale to come up with solutions that were not open to question.
Sure warming "could" which implies a probability. What was the probability.
and if you can't name a cooling forcing agent, you have not right to an opinion.
Rebateable carbon tax in the US with credits for reducing emissions in China and India.
"[I]n internal memos dating back to the 1970s, Exxon predicted that the effects of fossil fuel emissions could “indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the world’s population)." -- I believe we see here -- belatedly -- one of the reasons that Vice President Dick Cheney's energy policy meetings were held in secret.
11
"What makes this especially mind-numbing is that Exxon knew for decades that its business was altering the climate but repeatedly deceived the public, just as the tobacco companies knew their cigarettes caused cancer but denied it."
Unfortunately, this is a very different situation from what the tobacco companies did. For all of the heartache and pain they caused, reducing and eliminating smoking will have beneficial effects for generations still to come. This is not the case for what the oil companies did. They knew that their product was literally despoiling the earth for future generations, but couldn't stop themselves because the profits were just too good.
11
Does anybody catch the irony of the largest descendant company from John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, Exxon Mobil, being the rightful object of an opinion piece written by the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund? Is this a taunting, absurdist too little, too late or a sign of hope?
Every day now reminds me of the hall of mirrors scene from the ending of Orson Welles' movie, "Lady from Shanghai." My vision is reeling. Does this nightmare come with a happy ending... or not?
Welles' discomfort sprang from the dashed hopes of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing World War. What are we facing?
4
IT'S ABOUT TIME That Exxon and other fossil fuel corporations start shouldering their share of the burden of the impact of climate change. Especially now that wind and solar energy are competitive with fossil fuel use. If you factor in the cost of the damage to the environment caused by fossil fuels, they actually cost far more than sustainable sources of energy. At one point, there was an announcement by google that they intended to construct an underwater cable offshore in the Atlantic so that wind farms could be set up all up and down the eastern seaboard. There is still a need to increase storage capacity for sustainable fuels. But when the sun does not shine, the sea is often more turbulent, which would turn the wind turbines faster, offsetting the decrease of energy on couldy days. Big tobacco has been by and large vanquished. Fossil fuels are orders of magnitude more dangerous than human use of tobacco. So the taming of petroleum producers should have a very salubrious effect on the sustainable energy industry, including an acceleration in the energy infrastructure with the construction of smart grids.
2
Same as it ever was. Corporations simply cannot be trusted.
5
To see their ads suggesting a concern for the environment in prominent media makes me ill. Let them give their workers a good severance package and then use the rest of their billions to pay for the transition to a green economy. Also strip every leader in the gas and oil industry of all political influence.
6
@Daisy and send Bush Jr and trump to prison for continuing this shame.
They've lied about billions of US Tax Payer dollars spent on climate science.
There are about 15 carbon pricing bills before Congress. Which one appeals to you?
I like the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. HR763 does it all, and won’t kill our economy.
We all need to let them hear us. Write, email, phone, your Congress members and Senators.
Please.
6
I remember an old slogan "We don't care, we don't have to. We're EXXON!
5
Odd that the media is wringing its hands over whether Facebook should block "fake news" while at the same time not applying the same standard to political advertising. In fact, the Supreme Court has rulings allowing outright deception in political advertising.
So, is it surprising that companies put out propaganda to promote their interests and do so without fear of consequence? Should we be surprised that when an entity's prime objective is profit maximizing that truthfulness will only come to the fore when it is beneficial to do so? Any surprise about the deception in the opioid crisis or the Sackler family?
Can there be any expectation that this sociopathic behavior will get anything more than, perhaps, a small fine that will translate to a single-digit percentage of revenue?
When there's no public shaming, consumer boycott, or jail sentence, the profit maximizing entity will take the 5% chance of being discovered that generates a 2% settlement simply as a potential "dishonesty tax" which is the cost of doing business.
12
@Cee contemporary journalists don't do research. They are in the business of generating rage because rage equals clicks and clicks equals money!. Well informed articles don't do much in the way of generating revenue.
1
From NASA's former lead climate scientist in a 2012 TED Talk
"Now the tragedy about climate change is that we can solve it with a simple, honest approach of a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and distributed 100 percent electronically every month to all legal residents on a per capita basis, with the government not keeping one dime.
Most people would get more in the monthly dividend than they'd pay in increased prices. This fee and dividend would stimulate the economy and innovations, creating millions of jobs. It is the principal requirement for moving us rapidly to a clean energy future.
But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society, our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by 400 to 500 billion dollars per year worldwide, thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel -- mountaintop removal, longwall mining, fracking, tar sands, tar shale, deep ocean Arctic drilling.
This path, if continued, guarantees that we will pass tipping points leading to ice sheet disintegration that will accelerate out of control of future generations. A large fraction of species will be committed to extinction. And increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world, causing massive famines and economic decline."
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_hansen_why_i_must_speak_out_about_climate_change/transcript?language=en
41
@Erik Frederiksen
Since then we’ve already crossed one big tipping point, the West Antarctic Sheet is irreversibly retreating.
Greenland’s ice sheet is in trouble as well because extreme melt years like 2012 and 2019 will become the norm.
7
@Erik Frederiksen this is true, and why we need to shift the focus away from prevention and towards mitigation. But, like everything else, we will most likely start mitigation efforts at the last second or before its too late.
3
@Erik Frederiksen Unfortunately it might not ever change in the USA. Just came out that we spend 10x the amount to subsidize fossil fuel companies than we do on education.
2
Exxon follows a familiar playbook: ensure that profits remain private (for shareholders) while making the risks public (taxpayers). For just the small investment of $30m, they have endangered our entire planet, including the children and grandchildren of Exxon executives who fostered this deception.
Let's hope the NY Attorney General can make the legalistic argument about defrauding investors. The scientific and moral argument is already settled.
56
"ExxonMobil likely gets as much as $1 billion" in fossil fuel subsidies from the US Government. - Jan 11, 2017 on Oil Change International
As noted by others, its reasonable to conclude that American taxpayers are underwriting ExxonMobil's efforts to deny fossil fuel's effects on climate. Sad.
24
Thank you for coverage on the fossil fuel industry's deception of the public on the impact of carbon emissions and climate change. Finally an article that confirms the work of Naomi Klein in "This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Environment."
15
The fossil fuel industry knowing lied for 30 plus years about the affect their products have on the climate in order to enhance their shareholder value.
The executives at Boeing knowingly rushed a product to market in order to meet Wall Street expectations and boost their stock price.
Big Pharma raises drug prices on existing drugs, in some cases hundreds of percent, in order to maintain their growth expectations, and creates an opioid crisis to boost their profits.
Banks and financial institutions created the situations that led to the 2009 financial melt down all in the quest to make more profits.
See a trend here? And in all these, the industries in question wanted reduced government oversight and regulation. It's not just those mentioned above, it's all of them. The way the game is set up, we're just marks to be exploited and the businesses have only one job: make more money no matter how.
We need to be protected from the corporations.
74
@JD Ripper: Good examples to illustrate what is a major problem preventing the US from steadily implementing necessary changes that would benefit all of us. I think capitalism has many strengths, but when not sensibly regulated, it is amoral.
4
@David
Capitalism works, but it has to be regulated to protect everyone, even corporations.
I agree, Corporations are, at best, amoral entities devoted to making money. However these same corporations are operated by layers of human beings who can be complicated, conflicted, fearful, and subject to group think. Go along to get along.
Left to themselves with no rules or oversight, corporations will scorch the earth in search of growth and financial gains
5
Thanks Exxon.
In 1968 John Mercer warned us that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) could be a problem for sea level rise within 50 years due to "industrial pollution of the atmosphere".
46 years later, in 2014 two independent teams of scientists reported that the WAIS had likely already begun an irreversible retreat.
Perhaps within a few decades it will collapse, dumping 3.3 meters of sea level rise equivalent of ice into the ocean in decadal time scales or less, according to the most respected glaciologist in the US, Richard Alley.
45
@Erik Frederiksen
In support of that post, Here is Alley, the glaciologist who the MIT atmospheric physicist Kerry Emanuel described as the world’s foremost expert on the relationship of ice and climate from 2016.
At Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica, “once you get off of the stabilizing sill, whenever that is in West Antarctica, the time scale of getting rid of the West Antarctic [3.3m GMSLR, 4m in the Northern Hemisphere], it’s not centuries, it’s multi-decadal. This is not maybe the best case, it’s not the worst case.”
At 31:40 in this recommended presentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7MNA44RMNA
And when might Thwaites get off its stabilizing sill?
"When I asked Richard Alley, almost certainly the most respected glaciologist in the United States, whether he would be surprised to see Thwaites collapse in his lifetime, he drew a breath.
Alley is 58. ‘‘Up until very recently, I would have said, ‘Yes, I’d be surprised,’ ’’ he told me. ‘‘Right now, I’m not sure. I’m still cautiously optimistic that in my life, Thwaites has got enough stability on the ridge where it now sits that I will die before it does. But I’m not confident about that for my kids. And if someday I have grandkids, I’m not at all confident for them.’’
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/magazine/the-secrets-in-greenlands-ice-sheets.html
1
Why is Exxon allowed to gaslight us all this way. I wonder if Exxon investors enjoy collecting their big dividend so much !
6
Follow the money...every time. Regulation, regulation, regulation.
15
Great suit. Remedies could make the remaining sole purpose of the company to clean up the damages.
21
I just finished Rachel Maddow’s book, Blowout. It should be read by anyone who believes our representatives in Congress are in any way on the side of the people. The oil and gas companies have contributed billions of dollars to politicians so they can avoid any oversight.
And the rundown on what happened in Oklahoma (900 earthquakes a year) where the governor, the legislature and even the university was virtually owned by oil and gas is staggering.
But Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State!
That is/was amazing.
94
More climate garbage. Fossil fuels have elevated global standards of living. They have been one of the great gifts. All the modern conveniences we enjoy are the result of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have driven almost all of our modern industries. Raise your hand if you want to go back to the horse and buggy days. And also, raise your hand, if you haven't greatly benefited from fossil fuels.
And Mr. Wasserman should be forthright and admit these were papers published by some scientists who worked at Exxon. It wasn't the official policy of Exxon to say, " to heck with climate change, full speed ahead."
And Mr. Wasserman misrepresents the state of climate change. The only reason we hear all of these horror stories on the news is because much of the MSM has been suckered into believing climate "science." We hear about hottest this and that, but we don't hear how mild a hurricane season we've had this year, or that the YTD avg warm temps for the contiguous US is just at the average for the last 125 years. Nor does he mention that the global temp data base used by climate scientists is basically composed of estimates and extrapolations that have then been adjusted. My My.
Also note that in the contiguous US temps declined from the 1930's to 90's. US has most accurate temp data by the way. And our data is basically cyclical.
2
@Ralphie Do you really think that moving on from fossil fuels to alternative sources of energy means going back to horse and buggy days? And the author did say that Exxon's scientists published the papers for review by Exxon's main decision makers. And obviously it did become the official policy of Exxon to say "to heck with climate change, full speed ahead," as they actively worked to increase extraction in the face of climate change reports their *own* scientists informed them about. With extremely accurate forecasts for 2019 ppm CO2 levels. That they made in 1982.
On August 8, NOAA published their findings that hurricane season this year is above average--just ask the Bahamas how their encounter with a Category 5 hurricane went. Climate change doesn't just mean the world is getting warmer, it means that weather systems are becoming more deadly to existing species. If you don't trust the MSM, do your own research using sources from peer-reviewed journals, or at least think critically about the situation.
Judging by your usage of double spaces after each sentence, looks like you used a typewriter a lot in the past. If that's in fact the case, you definitely benefited from fossil fuels without consideration for the future. My my.
16
@Ralphie We have come a long way from the horse and buggy and now we will look back on the combustible engine with the same analogy. It’s called progress. The high levels of C02 have been the common denominator of every mass extinction on this planet. The last great extinction in the Permian was due to vulcanism. Thousands of smallish volcanos especially in Siberia. We have unprecedented rising C02 again due to the “volcanos” we are driving.
8
A kid inherits a fortune. They spend like crazy—huge house, a dozen cars, staff of servants, $1000 bottles of wine. By the time they turn 40 they’re looking at bankruptcy.
That money bought tons of stuff. The kid’s whole lifestyle was funded by it. They totally benefited from spending that money.
So—should the kid keep spending like mad until the bank comes to take the house? Or should they maybe shift gears, live more sustainably, and try to avoid disaster?
7
Most everyone now including the fossil fuel industry admit that we have a problem. What we need now is the solution. Denial has reached the end of its run so now will have a settlement just like the tobacco industry and the narcotics industry has
But this one is too important to just take the money and pass it around with the usual amount of corruption. We need to take the money and use it to get rid of fossil fuels. That means we need to fund research. We need to get more wind and solar. Need to get the bureaucracy out of the way of installing wind and solar all over the United states. Right now, in some states it is difficult to cite solar panels because of local restrictions. There are many other restrictions put in place by local industries to impede the transition to renewable.
To implement all of this we need to get the money out of politics. If you can by a politician the fossil fuel industry and the utilities will continue to slow down the transition to renewables because “no one owns the sun.” It’s always cheaper to pollute and let someone else clean up and it is to do the job correctly.
Get involved in the fight. Get money out of politics. Join makeitfair.us. LOOK UP THE AMERICAN ANTICORRUPTION Act.
6
I am not a lawyer, but If I were representing Exxon, I would argue that people are well aware of the damage caused by climate change and future risks, have been aware of this for years and still mostly do next to nothing differently.
If the state wants to show that there is future risk to their investments that Exxon failed to warn investors about, it should probably have to show that reasonable people would have invested differently if the company have disseminated accurate information on climate risks. Since we now have an atmosphere of mostly transparent analysis of these risks from a variety of sources and oil companies are not seeing plunging demand or similar shocks, it is hard to see what damage was done by Exxon's misleading behavior even if it was a technical violation.
7
@Alan First, it is not a TECHNICAL violation for a public company to deliberately mislead (LIE) to investors. The Cigarette companies lost in court because the facts showed they knew cigarettes caused cancer and then LIED about it to investors. Its not a "technical" violation, its fraudulent, and its illegal.
SECOND, many people still believe in the propaganda the fossil fuel industry has bought and paid for since the 1970s. Many states, two Presidents (Carter and Obama) tried extensively to move the US off fossil fuels. They were stymied by political forces that were substantially financed by the fossil fuel and chemical production industries. Lets remember that the entire Koch brothers political network pushed the climate denial propaganda.
Finally, people would and will switch if the the full truth is put forth, the costs are brought to bear, and there are actual products they can switch too. Politics paid for by Oil & Gas & Chemical giants has prevented all of those things from happening. The pendulum is moving against fossil fuel just as it did against cigarettes. Hopefully this case will accelerate that movement.
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@Alan
You were right not to become a lawyer.
Reasonable people don't lie. Its just that simple.
Did Exxon Mobile lie about the known consequences from their product? Yes they did.
Hard to see what damage was done? Pretending isn't a legally sustainable argument.
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@Alan Blame the victim. Sounds good to me.
Regardless of the relatively paltry settlement Exxon is likely to agree to, we are now forever stranded in the "world of trouble" willfully created by Exxon et al.
If these oil and gas companies want to conduct new research into oil related technologies, or invest in new drilling sites, they should be forced to match, dollar for dollar, with good faith investments in clean/green energy.
No more lip service. No more "thoughts and prayers." They've literally broken the world, and no US court case is going to be able to fix the global suffering inflicted for shareholder profit.
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And one more cost: insurance. In addition to the hit we take in taxes for recovery programs such as FEMA, we also have to think about the enormous payouts that insurance companies (residential, commercial, agricultural) have to make in response to claims for hurricane, tornado, fire, drought, unusual snow, flooding, and mudslides that have increased. It's not going to get any cheaper.
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Companies should be forced to bear the cost of externalities such as pollution. BUT this is the proper role of government not the companies themselves. I fully support a carbon tax for this reason. To demand that a company impose costs on themselves is simply ludicrous. And unlike the asymmetry of information with the tobacco lawsuits (i.e. they had much more information on smoker health), literally everyone is free to study the environment. Companies cannot and do not control the information flow here. This is a political and frivolously lawsuit.
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@Jeff The fossil fuel industry has engaged in a coordinated effort for decades to undermine all the objective scientific research that proved climate change and its dangers. The average person is not a climatologist. The tobacco lawsuits are exactly the same thing. Exxon KNEW climate change was real and KNEW the damage it would cause. There is nothing political about the State taking legal action against a polluter. Lawsuits are the reason chemical companies can't dump toxic waste into our lakes and rivers anymore. Were the Love Canal lawsuits frivolous, were the pesticide lawsuits frivolous? Companies have always put poison into the environment to make $$$ and it only stops when legal action is taken against them.
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From the decision in last year's similar case in California:
“Reliable, affordable energy is not a public nuisance but a public necessity,” said R. Hewitt Pate, Chevron’s vice president and general counsel. “Tackling the difficult international policy issues of climate change requires honest and constructive discussion. Using lawsuits to vilify the men and women who provide the energy we all need is neither honest nor constructive.”
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@Crm
Since the oil companies have been poisoning honest and constructive discussion for decades, the issues concerning climate change remain unresolved. Honest discussion would begin with confessions by the oil companies of their disinformation campaigns and a repudiation of the results of these campaigns.
Reliable, affordable energy is both a public necessity and a public nuisance. The men and women who run the finances and public relations campaigns of fossil fuel companies deserve to be executed, just as the Sacklers do; vilification is letting them off much too easy.
They will argue that there is no specific law against knowingly endangering the future of most present and future human beings. But if the workings of our legal system make us need such a law, our legal system is broken.
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@Crm Yes, HONEST conversation would start with the Fossil Fuel industry honestly saying that they knew about Climate Change in the 1970s, lied about it, funded propaganda to fight against any policies that tried to address it, fought against public investment in renewable energy, fought against a carbon tax, etc., etc.
Its laughable to see such a quote from a fossil fuel executive who has made millions off polluting the atmosphere. Suing fossil fuel companies under established law that legally mandates they tell shareholders the truth is holding them accountable. Its the same old playbook polluting companies have been running since the dawn of the petro-chemical industries.
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@Crm
Neither is ignoring criminal behavior for convenience sake.
You righties love to talk criminal behavior when it is an illegal immigrant trying to feed their family.
But when a Corporation ignores all responsibilities to their workers, neighbors and Country, for profit...and a corrupt profit at that...you see nothing unusual.
Hypocrites. The party of Nixon, Gingrich, Cheney, Trump and Fascism. The Rationalize-a-con party.
Corrupt to the bones.
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Our family drives two electric cars, and is thus decoupled from reliance on gasoline. I do numerous public education events in my car club where we show the public the huge advantages and opportunities in driving electric.
That said, I'm always careful to point out that while EV's are the end of gasoline, they are not the end of oil, since there will continue to be a large demand for petrochemicals. Plastics, lubricants, medicines, agriculture and food consumption all depend on petrochemicals. Climate change isn't caused by oil consumption, it's caused by oil combustion. While I'm doing everything in my power to eliminate the later, I understand we will still have the former.
The oil industry will likely finish this century still intact, just far smaller and more consolidated. And those future stockholders will likely think it crazy that we used to just burn a large potion of every barrel we pumped out of the ground, rather than process it into more valuable products.
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@Leptoquark Exactly! Is just crazy to burn a limited resource! So many high value, long life, recyclable items are made from oil; burning it seems insane. Greedy, but insane.
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@Leptoquark
Where do you think the electricity to power your electric cars comes from? Most likely coal or nat-gas fired power plants.....
@Leptoquark
But petroplastics are causing their own pollution problems, like all evaporated sea salts now contain plastic.
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Thank you for this article! Both Exxon the company and the its leadership, past and current, need to be held accountable. Financially and legally, with fines and jail time.
And we all need to pitch in by reducing our footprints in every way we can. It adds up.
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We, the public, do not get any of the benefits of Exxon's billions in profits. However, we get the breath the polluted air, and drink the polluted water. We get the pollution because Exxon has paid off politicians. Our "one person, one vote" is a joke. Who can compete with Exxon in getting our representatives' attention?
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@ATronetti Exactly, it's greed that is at the center of this issue, like a lot of social issues these days. Greed is a very deadly sin, not just for the individual but the collective.
Science gave Western Civilization every great invention of the modern era. And yet, when science was telling 'the fossile fuel C-suite' something that they didn't want hear, it was conveniently ignored.
Now, we are staring into the AGW abyss.
We could have used fossil fuels intelligently for thousands of years, and slowly weened ourselves off it to develop clean technology. Instead, we burned the barrel at both ends and we have a planetary scale manmade crisis on our hands.
This is what happens when you double down on greed, and willfully plead ignorance.
Sorry, they can't say 'nobody saw this coming.'
They burned up that excuse along with all the oil.
Good job, fossil fuel industry!
The last thing we are going to let you do, is get away scot free. You're going down with the ship!
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@ATronetti You live in Pittsburgh - how do you heat your home? If you drive what fuel do you use? Try living your life without petrochemical products. The products you use every day are the benefits you get from Exxon and other energy companies making a profit. If these companies were not profitable you would not have energy to heat your home, fuel to drive your car, and the thousands of petrochemical products you need to support your lifestyle.
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@Andrew Perhaps if we subsidized alternative energies like we do fossil fuel, we would have better choices. Could he/she have solar, wind or thermal energies heating his/her house or running his/her car? Those companies are profitable because we have not adequately invested in alternative energies, like we have in fossil fuels. Level the playing field and get money out of politics and perhaps you will see those petrochemicals products be replaced. It also would be helpful if scientists were determining best uses of energy systems and not lobbyists.
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It's my fault. I've been buying fossil fuels my whole life. These companies are just intermediaries that supply me with my fix. It was legal for them to do so and lucrative, so I can't blame them too much. In fact in 1962 one of them boasted that they produced enough energy to directly melt 7 million tons of glacier every day.
I guess it would have been better if I had worked with my neighbors to work out a better plan that valued the environment, didn't sell the drilling rights for cheap, and let anyone dump exhaust into our common atmosphere for free.
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@John
Better late than never! Start now. Please.
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@John
Better late than never: start doing what you can NOW.
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If Climate Change is going to be addressed in any meaningful way, fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. We need to shut these companies down. Dir their deceit, they should have zero involvement in monetizing our next generation of clean energy and pushing their new lie touting their carbon capture nonsense which needs to be exposed as an expensive and wholly insufficient diversion. (Love the new propaganda campaign concerning turning industrial plants into carbon consuming “plants” — get it?). This must be accompanied by a just transition for those employed by these polluters.
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@Joe B. Think of the change in the power structure here and elsewhere. How much power would the Saudi Royal Family have if the world turned away from oil? How would Middle Eastern terrorists fund their violence? Phasing out oil, in favor of phasing in alternative energy, would impact only a small sector in Texas, while expanding construction of the infrastructure and administration to every area in the country. Democrats have seen the potential for years. These are good paying jobs that could replace coal, without the safety and pollution concerns. Shouldn't our nation invest in the industries of the future, and not try to salvage the dying industries of the past? Do we want to be the people saying to invest in candles, instead of hydroelectricity?
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In fact, ExxonMobil had well-placed scientists, such as Haroon Kheshgi who inserted themselves into the earliest and most foundational IPCC research and reporting, tainting whatever came afterwards with their climate change denial (and watering down of the alarming conclusions) from the late 1980's onward. To say that what ExxonMobil et al did was premeditated and strategic would be a huge understatement.
I've written about it extensively, including in this piece about Kheshgi: https://schatziesearthproject.com/2015/11/13/exxon-mobils-mad-science/
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"The industry is based on a deceit". Concise and accurate. When the full costs of an industry, a product, are not included when we calculate their true costs, the operation of that industry, the selling of that product, is a lie.
I urge all Times readers to consider watching Kate Raworth's Ted Talk on moving to an economy that thrives, not grows, one that accepts and is creative within the limitations of our planet.
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@Jeff S. Thank you for that recommendation to watch Kate Raworth's TED talk. I just did. And then I ordered her book. The planet and all its inhabitants have born the costs of Exxon's economic growth. It is time to send them the due bill.
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@Jeff S.
"This is Economics 101. It’s cheap to pollute if you don’t include the costs of the damage on your books. And for the world’s oil companies, those current and future damages are nearly incalculable..."
Yes, classical economists explained the problem of dumping costs, like pollution, on others so that those costs are not reflected in the price. This is a deliberate manipulation of the energy market called a Negative Externality, making the price of fossil fuels artificially cheap compared to other sources.
But, modern economists (at least the ones that are paid by global corporations and Republican think tanks) have decided that none of that matters.
Neo-Classical Economics has just decided that all of the details of economics are a waste of time, and that any government attempt to make markets fair, by trying to stop the dumping of costs on others (like when chemical plants cause deadly cancer spikes by dumping chemicals on their neighbors) are meaningless in the larger scheme of things and just slow the economy.
The opposite of free markets is not socialism. The opposite of unfettered free markets (where global corporations, like Exxon, run rampant is FAIR MARKETS, carefully regulated by government (our democratic Republic) to create a level playing field and stability.
Save markets and democracy from Capitalism.
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