| Teken de petitie om Exxon voor het gerecht te brengen, vanwege grootschalig bedrog, manipulatie en ander wangedrag met enorme schade voor natuur en milieu. |
It's Not Just What Exxon Did, It's What It's Doing: The Never-Ending Big Dig, Flooding the Earth With Fossil FuelsDoor Bill McKibben, TomDispatch, 18 februari 2016
[...] As a start, investigations by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School revealed in extraordinary detail that Exxon’s top officials had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. Even earlier, actually.
[...] Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed out in 1990, "potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs." Not only that but, "from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic," Exxon and its affiliates set about "raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines, and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic." In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable.
But in public? There, Exxon didn’t own up to any of this. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the 1990s, it started to put money and muscle into obscuring the science around climate change. It funded think tanks that spread climate denial and even recruited lobbying talent from the tobacco industry. It also followed the tobacco playbook when it came to the defense of cigarettes by highlighting "uncertainty" about the science of global warming. And it spent lavishly to back political candidates who were ready to downplay global warming.
[...] The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. [...] There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders, and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn about another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet.
[...] That's why it’s wildly irresponsible for a company to be leading the world in oil exploration when, as scientists have carefully explained, we already have access to four or five times as much carbon in the Earth as we can safely burn.
[...] What we need from Exxon is what they’ll never give: a pledge to keep most of their reserves underground, an end to new exploration, and a promise to stay away from the political system. Don’t hold your breath. [...] But if Exxon seems hopelessly set in its ways, revulsion is growing. The investigations by the New York and California attorneys general mean that the company will have to turn over lots of documents.
[...] As with the tobacco companies in the decades when they were covering up the dangers of cigarettes, there’s a good chance that the Big Energy companies were in this together through their trade associations and other front groups. In fact, just before Christmas, Inside Climate News published some revealing new documents about the role that Texaco, Shell, and other majors played in an American Petroleum Institute study of climate change back in the early 1980s. A trial would be a transformative event - a reckoning for the crime of the millennium.
[...] But while we’re waiting for the various investigations to play out, there’s lots of organizing going at the state and local level when it comes to Exxon, climate change, and fossil fuels -- everything from politely asking more states to join the legal process to politely shutting down gas stations for a few hours to pointing out to New York and California that they might not want to hold millions of dollars of stock in a company they’re investigating. It may even be starting to work.
Lees het hele artikel hier / full article here at TomDispatch.com.
Illustraties: Exxon-logo, bron Wikipedia;
Dirty Oil, documentaire over teerzandolie.
Zie ook:
Exxon's Oil Industry Peers Knew About Climate Dangers in the 1970s, Too
Door Neela Banerjee, Inside Climate News, 22 december 2015
Exxon Believed Deep Dive Into Climate Research Would Protect Its Business
Door Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song en David Hasemyer, Inside Climate News, 16 september 2015
How Exxon went from leader to skeptic on climate change research
Door Katie Jennings, Dino Grandoni en Susanne Rust, Los Angeles Times, 23 oktober 2015
Onderzoek naar wat ExxonMobil wist van klimaatverandering breidt zich uit
Door Krispijn Beek, Sargasso, 6 april 2016
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