“In the 1980s Exxon was the biggest, richest company in the world. Its product was carbon. And it had good scientists — great scientists — on the payroll. So the scientists set to work trying to understand this problem, and in 1983 they told the executives how much the earth was going to warm and how fast. Being rational, business-minded people, the executives believed them. Exxon, for example, began building all its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level that it knew was coming.
Meanwhile Jim Hansen worked for NASA from an office in New York City, at 112th and Broadway on the Upper West Side. Hansen had built the world’s most powerful model of the climate, and he had the best data coming in from around the globe. He reached the same conclusion that the Exxon scientists had reached, and he told Congress in June of 1988 that the “greenhouse effect,” as we called it then, was here, that the planet was indeed warming, and that it was going to be a very serious crisis.
Exxon could have said the next day, “Our scientists can confirm what Mr. Hansen is telling you.” Had that happened, it would have been a turning point in history. No one would have said, “Oh, Exxon executives are just a bunch of alarmists. Pay them no attention.” We could have begun to take relatively modest steps that would have put us on a different trajectory. By this point we could be on the way to solving climate change.
Instead Exxon, and the fossil-fuel industry as a whole, took the opposite course. It began spending lots of money to build an architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that for the next thirty years kept us locked in a pointless debate about whether global warming was real — a question that, remember, both sides knew the answer to from the get-go. It’s just that one of them was willing to lie. That turned out to be the most consequential lie in human history. It has cost us three crucial decades.
It’s a tragic story of an opportunity lost to corporate greed, and also to a kind of ideological conviction that ran strong, and still runs strong in those circles: that markets can do no wrong and all problems will be solved by laissez-faire capitalism. This has clearly turned out not to be true. Now half the summer sea ice in the Arctic has melted, and the oceans are 30 percent more acidic than they were before. We’ve run market capitalism through a test, and it has failed.”
-Tipping Point, Bill McKibben On A Planet In Peril
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