At 83, the visionary American physicist, Dr Martin Hoffert still zooms around in an ELF, a three-wheeled solar and pedal vehicle that is a striking hybrid between a bicycle and a car, produced in North Carolina by Organic Transit, which later went bankrupt. Capable of an incredible equivalent 1800 miles per gallon, it does not use gasoline.
A passionate advocate for the adoption of alternative energy sources, the burly, white-haired Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Chair of the Department of Applied Science at New York University, known as “Marty,” was among those who testified before the United States (US) House of Representatives, in October, 2019.
That historic hearing examining “the oil industry’s efforts to suppress the truth about climate change,” sets out decades of damning evidence confirming the oil giant Exxon, which merged with another powerful multinational into ExxonMobil, long knew about the negative effects of fossil fuels, but turned to a deliberate campaign of disinformation. Exxon and other oil companies did not participate in the hearing.
The Brooklyn-born Dr Hoffert was recruited as an Exxon Research and Engineering consultant by a colleague in 1981. He is “gratified that we did important work that is still cited today” and that “The quality of the scientific work done by our Exxon research group was high.” Among the first experts, or “group of geeks” to create a computer model accurately predicting the effects of man-driven climate change, he reported the alarming findings to his bosses at Exxon, which spent millions on pioneering research.
He informed the hearing, “our research was consistent with findings of the UN (United Nations) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on human impacts of fossil fuel burning,” and the increasingly “perceptible influence on Earth’s climate.”
Stressing that such impacts have become more pronounced, Dr Hoffert noted, “Scarcely a day goes by without news stories of major wildfires in the American West, riverine flooding unseen for hundreds of years, droughts, the disappearance of mountain glaciers, tundra melting, more intense hurricanes, melting sea ice in the Arctic and glacial calving in Antarctica, all of which are consistent with the uncertainty spread of IPCC model predictions.”
“If anything, adverse climate change from elevated CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) is proceeding faster than the average of prior IPCC model projections. I worked with Exxon researchers for several reasons. First, they were excellent scientists who made a positive contribution to the research. Second, I believed that having Exxon scientists on published papers acknowledging the reality of climate change could help reduce the polarization surrounding climate change science. Third, I hoped that the work could help persuade Exxon to invest in developing the energy solutions the world needed.”
While his experience with Exxon’s researchers was “positive,” Dr Hoffert revealed, “I was greatly distressed by the climate science denial campaign that Exxon’s front office launched around the time I stopped working as a consultant for Exxon (in 1987). The advertisements that Exxon ran in major newspapers raising doubts about climate change were contradicted by the scientific work we had done and continued to do. Exxon was publicly promoting views that its own scientists knew were wrong. This was immoral and has greatly set back efforts to address climate change.”
In a 1996 speech at the Economic Club of Detroit, Exxon’s Chief Executive Officer, Lee Raymond stated: “Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate.”
Dr Hoffert declared, “This is false. Exxon’s own scientists knew climate change was real and serious when he made this statement.” The next year, at the World Petroleum Forum, Mr Raymond followed up with a series of “bloopers” claiming “(O)nly four percent of the carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is due to human activities – 96 percent comes from nature,” and cutting “this tiny sliver of the greenhouse pie” would defy “common sense” and lack “foundation.”
Lamenting that Exxon repeatedly failed to capitalise on obvious business opportunities, Dr Hoffert highlighted the brilliant contributions of the British-American chemist. Michael Stanley Whittingham, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and is the “founding father” of rechargeable lithium batteries used in cellphones, laptops and electric cars. Mr Whittingham put in 16 years at Exxon Research and Engineering.
“Imagine that in some parallel universe Exxon’s management had connected the dots and put a major effort into developing electric cars powered by this technology, much as Elon Musk did starting from zero, decades later with Tesla Motors. After all, Exxon had an inside track and could see from our climate modelling work that sometime in the 21st century the world would have to transition away from fossil fuel,” Dr Hoffert argued.
“So why not develop a business plan twenty years earlier?” he asked in his testimony, saying that Exxon could have built a similar battery plant like Mr Musk has done to reduce electric transportation charges by employing economies of scale to drive down battery cost. “Exxon with its billions in quarterly profits could certainly have afforded it.”
“Instead, they fired this guy (Wittingham). They shut down all their energy work. And they started funding climate deniers,” he said in a separate interview with the Guardian newspaper.
Exxon advertisements tout that the company is working on carbon capture from smokestacks and carbon neutral fuels derived from algae. “Even if true in a public relations sense, this is going nowhere soon. Exxon has no market ready products after many years of inaction,” Dr Hoffert recognised in his presentation to the Committee.
In a 1998 ExxonMobil pamphlet, the oil and gas behemoth affirmed,“[F]or many years, we’ve carefully studied and worked to increase understanding of the issue of global climate change – often referred to as ‘global warming.’… This recent warming trend falls well within the range of natural changes in Earth’s temperature over the past 250,000 years.”
However the Exxon scientists knew this was untrue, given that the rate of temperature rise from fossil fuel burning is far higher than any in the past million years, Dr Hoffert said. A 2000 ExxonMobil advertorial called “Unsettled Science” publicly contradicted the ground-breaking work of Exxon’s staffers, in statements like “it is impossible for scientists to attribute the recent small surface temperature increase to human causes.”
As Dr Hoffert testified, “This is nonsense. The impact of humans on climate and environmental change today is so massive that earth scientists call the present era ‘The Anthropocene,’ meaning humans are the dominant factor. I cannot see into Exxon management’s heart. Whatever its intent—wilful ignorance, stymieing an effective response to preserve quarterly profits, or simply an incomprehensible refusal to incorporate their own world class researchers’ results into their business plans (demonstratively counterproductive long term)—what they did was immoral.”
He concluded, “They spread doubt about the dangers of climate change when its researchers were confirming how serious a threat it is. The effect of this disinformation was to delay action internally and externally. They deliberately created doubt… As a result, homes and livelihoods will likely be destroyed and lives lost. Major energy corporations like Exxon Mobil may face bankruptcy if the Paris Climate Accords succeed in phasing out fossil fuel energy to preserve the habitability of high tech civilization and Exxon remains competitively unprepared for a carbon emission free energy world.”
As the eminent scientist told the Guardian, “Very often people will ask me: ‘How much time do we have left before we can prevent this problem?’ We don’t have any time left. It’s already happening.”
ID fears what more is to come. Dr Hoffert’s model showed the Earth’s warming would introduce climatic changes unprecedented in human history. “That blew my mind” he warned in a BBC interview.
