Exxon covered-up climate change: email reveals

She also questioned Exxon’s claim that climate science was uncertain in the ’80s, pointing to reports issued in the 1970s from the White House and the National Academy of Sciences that described a consensus on climate change. “Other companies, such as Mobil, only became aware of the issue in 1988, when it first became a political issue”, Bernstein wrote.

In the 1980s, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna and other potential projects.

The memo, seen by Mobile and an industry group called the Global Climate Coalition, went on to say that climate change could cause an “array of climate changes” including rainfall patterns, storm frequency and intensity, as well as severe economic and environmental impacts, the report said.

In the email, the employee explains that, “Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia”.

Scientists knew by the 1950s that climate change could be a risk for humanity, but it wasn’t until 1988 that it became public knowledge, after NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress that scientific data had confirmed human’s role in climate change, the report said.

As early as 1977, the report’s authors note, “representatives of fossil fuel companies including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Shell attended dozens of congressional hearings in which the contribution of carbon emissions to the greenhouse effect and other aspects of climate science were discussed”. “There was nobody you could have gone to in 1981 or 1984 who would have said whether it was real or not”. As indicated by a lawsuit filed in 2009, internal documents indicated that the GCC recognized the reality of human-induced climate change in 1995 – yet still, their backers relied on them to continue to fight against any legislation that would hamper natural resource companies.

Prof. Naomi Oreskes, a climate change expert from Harvard University, said it was unsurprising that Exxon would have factored climate change in its plans as early as 1980s but she disputed the suggestion that other companies weren’t aware of the potential danger. “Nobody could provide a definitive answer”, Exxon spokesman Richard Keil told the Guardian.

Bernstein responded by email to an inquiry on business ethics from The Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics at Ohio University, offering insight into ExxonMobil’s practices, as reported by The Guardian.

Exxon ended up passing on Natuna, and despite its alleged awareness about how Carbon dioxide emissions can affect the atmosphere, it spent an estimated $30 million over the next 27 years sowing doubt about scientific support for such a connection. For instance, freedom of information requests from Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center yielded documents earlier this year that showed how API, ExxonMobil and Southern Company, a utility, continued to fund at least one contrarian researcher – aerospace engineer Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon – for more than a decade through grants to the Smithsonian Institution. “Whatever their public stance, internally they make very careful assessments of the potential for regulation, including the scientific basis for those regulations”, Bernstein wrote in the email. Over the years, Exxon has spent much time denying the evidence of climate change and that the oil company might have something to do with it.

The Natuna gas field, a few 700 miles north of Jakarta in the South China Sea, is the biggest in south-east Asia, holding about 46tn cubic ft of recoverable reserves. He was also very clear on what Exxon is doing now about this situation, “We have been factoring the likelihood of some kind of carbon tax into our business planning since 2007”.

Given the scale of their crime, UCS says the “time is ripe to hold these companies accountable for their actions and responsible for the harm they have caused”.