On this day 20 years ago. Lee Raymond, then boss of Exxon met for an hour (or 35 minutes – accounts vary) with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Now, of course, prime ministers do and have to meet with big business all the time. But maybe we should know what is discussed, what is agreed. And when people like Blair, talk about climate change, but then pal around with Exxon. Well, I refer you to yesterday’s blog post.
What happened next
Exxon continued to be a big funder, a funder of fossil fuel denial. Exxon, we should remember, had known about the problem of climate change since the late 70s- see Inside Climate News and Exxon Knew.
And fossil fuel usage is continuing to soar. Let’s have a look at a graph of fossil fuel usage since the 1750s.
Annual CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels, by world region (ourworldindata.org)
Can you spot the downturn after we were warned in 1988 to change our ways? Yeah, me neither..
“We” pursued precisely the opposite strategy. That little first person plural pronoun is of course, a mystification. “We” might all be responsible, but we are by no means equally responsible. There is always power politics at play, often behind closed doors as they were on the 22nd of January 2000.
Exxon buying up Biogas