The 1970s: a critical decade
One company intimately involved with the emerging science of climate change was Exxon (now ExxonMobil). Scientists working for this oil and gas giant were modelling Earth’s climate in the 1970s to understand how the increasing carbon content of the atmosphere would affect temperatures – and Exxon’s future as a business.
According to a study published in 2017 that involved scouring the company’s internal documents, Exxon scientists acknowledged back then that climate change was real and overwhelmingly caused by burning the same fossil fuels Exxon sold.
“Yet over 80% of Exxon’s editorial-style paid advertisements over the same period specifically focused on uncertainty and doubt, the study found.”
Exxon knew better – a lot better. An investigation published last year showed that forecasts of the future climate made by Exxon scientists in the 1970s were remarkably accurate. The company knew where the world was headed by continuing to burn coal, oil and gas and instead endeavoured to cover it up.
How differently history might have unfolded if the fossil fuel industry hadn’t obscured what was happening to the climate for several decades. John Grant, a sustainability expert at Sheffield Hallam University, argues that the crisis could have been solved by now – and the enormous potential of renewable energy realised much sooner.
Instead, a selection of companies, chiefly concerned with maximising profit, were allowed to decide the fate of all Earth’s inhabitants. Perverse as that may seem, our economic system enables this by leaving the means of producing the things people need (like energy) in private hands.
Amitav Ghosh, an author of 20 historical fiction and non-fiction books on colonialism and other topics, locates in this story the seeds of the climate crisis . “Colonialism, genocide and structures of organised violence were the foundations on which industrial modernity was built,” he writes. By making such destruction economically rational, capitalism encouraged activities that gradually degraded Earth’s living systems.