Despite publicly acknowledging the harmful effects of burning fossil fuel and its contribution to climate change in 2006, behind closed doors ExxonMobil was engaged in attempts to diminish public concerns and even obfuscate scientific findings that might negatively impact the oil and gas industry and the company’s bottom line.
This is according to an article published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) – Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change – which pointed to internal documents that show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Rex Tillerson – former ExxonMobil President-turned US Secretary of State – era.
The WSJ claims will be of interest to regulators and civil society in Guyana as they seek to ensure that ExxonMobil complies with the terms of its various agreements and its outlook as it relates to climate change.
“ExxonMobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action. Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents review-ed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives,” the WSJ reported.
“Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson, an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus. The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decade’s long tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial,” it adds.
While Tillerson declined to comment through a representative and Exxon didn’t address detailed questions sent by the Journal, the company’s current President Darren Woods said that the information looks bad when taken out of context.
“I know how this information looks—when taken out of context, it seems bad,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in response to the Journal’s inquiry about the documents. “But having worked with some of these colleagues earlier in my career, I have the benefit of knowing they are people of good intent. None of these old emails and notes matter though. All that does is that we’re building an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions – both our own and others – and spending billions of dollars on solutions that have a real, sustainable impact,” he was quoted as saying.
Noted was ExxonMobil’s current commitments to reducing emissions where the company has pledged to spend $17 billion over five years on emissions-reducing technologies.
Details on the stance of the executives are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company, announced in 2015.
The documents add to others that have revealed a decades-long misinformation campaign, dating back to the late 1970s, waged by the company, and the seeming duplicity of its policy, which many defendants in cases have pointed to.
The WSJ pointed out that Exxon turned millions of pages of documents over to the New York attorney general during that office’s years-long investigation, announced in 2015, into whether the company misled investors about the impact of climate regulation on its business. WSJ reviewed summaries of the documents that Exxon’s lawyers had determined were the most significant. After the attorney general narrowed the focus of the case, the documents weren’t made public.
The documents summarise emails between top executives, board meetings and Tillerson’s edits of speeches, among other things.
Earlier this year, the New York Times had reported that for over 30 years, scientists at ExxonMobil had accurately projected the warming effects of fossil fuels on the planet, even as the company downplayed climate science while cautioning against any drastic move away from hydrocarbon usage.
Supertankers
The Times pointed out that in the late 1970s, scientists at Exxon fitted one of the company’s supertankers with state-of-the-art equipment to measure carbon dioxide in the ocean and in the air, an early example of the substantial research the oil giant conducted into the science of climate change. Global warming projections made or recorded by ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2003 closely tracked observed temperature increases.
Results from their studies, the Times noted, showed that the scientists’ projections “were as accurate, and sometimes even more so, as those of independent academic and government models.”
It noted that at a 1999 annual company meeting, ExxonMobil’s former Chief Executive Officer Lee Raymond had said that global warming projections “are based on completely unproven climate models, or, more often, on sheer speculation,”
“We do not now have a sufficient scientific understanding of climate change to make reasonable predictions and/or justify drastic measures,” according to a company brochure the following year, the NYT pointed out.
The publication noted said that Exxon did not address the new study directly but said “those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” referring to a slogan by environmental activists who have accused the company of misleading the public about climate science.
Mirroring the statements in the NYT article, the WSJ said that Exxon scientists had supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company had said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial.
According to the WSJ, prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents it had reviewed.
One of the lawsuits, they point out, is from Hawaii’s Maui County, where wildfires killed more than 100 people in August. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleged that the island faced increased climate-related risks, including more dangerous wildfires, caused by fossil-fuel companies. Some of the lawsuits may go to trial as soon as next year.
