On this day, May 30, 1990, Australian band “Midnight Oil” held an impromptu concert in New York, outside Exxon’s HQ. You can see the footage here
Exxon were villain du jour because of a certain carelessness the previous spring in Alaska.
We didn’t know then, but Exxon already had a solid ten years of climate knowledge under its belt – they knew that their product would wreck the planet, but why, erm, rock the boat?
You might also like this song, by “Max Q”
Why this matters.
Culturally, we can resist. Economically, persistently, strategically? Not so easy.
What happened next?
Midnight Oil kept burning. They stopped while Peter Garrett, lead singer tried to change the system from within. Have since resumed.
Exxon? Oh, Exxon kept up their boundless love and generosity for future generations by, you know, funding denialist outfits, getting IPCC chairs sacked – the usual.
On this day in 1979, a few weeks after the end of the First World Climate Conference, Wally Broecker, the oceanographer met with Exxon scientists who were studying climate change and fossil fuels.
Broecker, to his apparent dismay, had coined the had been the first to use the term global warming in an academic context. (According to Alice Bell’s book “Our Biggest Experiment”, he offered 200 bucks to anyone who could find an earlier example so he wouldn’t be lumbered with the unwanted title.
What’s Exxon in all this? Well, “Exxon knew”. Exxon was doing its own studies of the climate problem, the carbon dioxide problem in the late 70s, early 80s. And this involved talking to scientists who knew what they were talking about. And Broecker most certainly was one of the scientists who really knew what he was talking about
You can read more about this at the truly excellent “Inside Climate News”
We need to remember that Exxon knew, and that scientists, quite rightly will talk to different constituencies they are paid out of taxpayer funding, and they should talk to not just the grassroots groups, but the biggies. And we need to know that in 1979, there were people seriously worried about climate. And these weren’t just hippies living in communes. This was the elite and it would be another 9 or 10 years before the issue would successfully break through and the co2 concentration had gone up and more kit had been built, and more norms around production and consumption had been established. And yes, yes, the population had gone up too; we have two problems. The one that we in the West really need to do something about is overconsumption, exploitation, imperialism, hyper-extractivism, murder, you name it. And once we’ve done all of that, and paid reparations, then we can start to lecture other people about having too many babies.
On this day, in 2001, the oil company Exxon was throwing its weight around trying to get specific scientists pushed off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In a memo to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol denounces esteemed climate scientist Robert Watson, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as someone “handpicked by Al Gore” who is using the media to get “coverage for his views.
He asks “Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the US?” In addition to Watson, Randol names other climate experts who he wants “removed from their positions of influence.”
And they succeeded. Bob Watson only served one term where the normal expectation was two. And this is because he was too independently minded and wasn’t going to waffle about technology saving us.
This is not a new story. Historically scientists have come under ferocious attack, not just for their climate work, but also ozone hole, asbestos, you name it. There’s a lovely example in An Enemy of the People, the play by Henrik Ibsen, which by the way, inspired the movie, Jaws… but I digress.
Why this matters
We need to remember that a lot of what we see and hear and take as accepted fact, is actually constructed for us actively or passively, and that critical voices have been removed. For the benefit of continued capital accumulation. This is Gramsci in action, people. This is how hegemony is constructed and maintained.
What happened next
The IPCC kept producing reports and is producing another one. Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide accumulates thanks to the actions and inactions of people like you and me who have failed to build the kinds of movements that could have made a difference despite having freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of information. It might be a good idea for us to look ourselves in the mirror.
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.
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.
