Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer report that during a meeting in Exxon Corporation headquarters, Houston, a senior company scientist, James F. Black, addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message - carbon dioxide from the world use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.
Exxon believed deep dive into climate research would protect its business. By outfitting its biggest supertanker, Exxon could measure the ocean absorption of carbon dioxide during the Exxon research program.
Exxon confirmed global warming consensus in 1982 with in-house climate models but the company chairman would years later mock climate models as unreliable while he campaigned to stop global action to reduce fossil-fuel emissions.
Exxon business ambition collided with climate change under a distant sea and throughout the 1980s, the company struggled to solve the carbon problem of one of the biggest gas fields in the world out of concern for climate impacts. But highlighting the allure of synfuels, Exxon played down the climate risks. In the 1980s, Exxon lobbied to replace scarce oil with synthetic fossil fuels, but it glossed over the high-carbon footprint associated with synfuels.
Exxon sowed doubt about climate science for decades by stressing uncertainty by collaborating with the Bush-Cheney White House, Exxon turned ordinary scientific uncertainties into weapons of mass confusion.
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