Thirty five years ago, on this day, August 3, 1988, an Exxon PR flak is drafting bullshit about “THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT”, draft written by Joseph M. Carlson, an Exxon Public Affairs Managers.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3024180/1998-Exxon-Memo-on-the-Greenhouse-Effect.pdf
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 350ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was everyone had started to bang on about climate change. And so Exxon needed to go public. But going public and saying, “yeah, we’ve known about this for 10 years and we decided a while back that we were going to be obstructive” would not be particularly helpful. So instead, they tried to baffle people with bullshit and passive language and all the rest of it.
What I think we can learn from this
What we learn is that this is just how corporates behave unless forced to do otherwise.
What happened next
Exxon funded loads of denialist groups, to the extent that the UK Royal Society asked them to knock it off. With limited effect.
#ExxonKnew
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.