Global Warming From Scientific Warning to Corporate Casualty
Transcriber: Minh-Hung Nguyen
Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
Chances are you’ve heard
of climate change,
that it’s bad,
that it’s urgent,
and that it’s caused
primarily by fossil fuels.
What you might not know
is just how long scientists
and even the fossil fuel industry
have understood the
fundamentals of the problem.
In other words,
how much time has been wasted?
Now, the purpose of this talk
isn’t to depress you.
It’s to empower you.
Because the better we understand
what hasn’t worked,
the better we can develop
solutions that do.
I’m an historian of climate science,
and one of the fascinating
things about history
is looking at the forks in the road
and asking,
Do the world have to turn out this way?
How could things have been different?
And how could we make things
different now?
Today, these questions
are more important than ever,
as the climate changes
beyond anything humans have ever seen
before our very eyes.
And my hope is to convince you
that things did not
have to turn out this way,
that our present
is the result of intentional choices
made over decades past,
and that if we understand what’s happened,
we can take a different path today
and the world can have a better future.
Four years ago, I visited Delaware,
where the famous Du Pont family lived.
Back in 1802,
they built a gunpowder factory there
and made a fortune.
Today, it’s a museum
and a research archive.
And I was there to search
for documents that might reveal
what the oil industry knew
about climate change and when.
On my last day,
I pulled a book off the shelf.
It was a transcript of a conference
held by the American Petroleum Institute
in 1959.
Now, the American Petroleum Institute
is the main organization
for the oil and gas industry
in the United States.
But 1959 seemed way too early
for anything about climate change,
I thought.
But I opened the book anyway,
thinking, I might as well.
When I turn the pages, I was shocked.
I saw a speech
by the famous physicist Edward Teller,
the one who helped develop
the hydrogen bomb.
And in that speech,
he warned the oil industry
about global warming,
predicting that if fossil fuels
continued to be used,
all the coastal cities
would be covered by rising oceans.
He even calculated
how much carbon dioxide
we’d have in the air by the year 2000,
and he was almost exactly right.
His bottom line message:
Fossil fuels would have to be replaced.
So before 1960,
before the moon landing,
before the Beatles’ first single
was ever released,
before the first
aluminum can was ever used,
Big Oil was directly warned
about global warming
and was told that safe energy sources
would need to be developed
to replace fossil fuels.
Now, 1960 might sound
like a long time ago,
and in many ways. it is.
But here’s the catch.
In the world of energy,
when a refinery or a pipeline
or a power plant is built,
it often remains in operation for decades,
even 50 years or more.
So that means decisions made in 1960
can still affect us today.
Now, what did the oil industry do
with this information?
In 1968, the American Petroleum Institute
hired scientists to look
at the problem privately,
and they confirmed the warning -
that business as usual
would lead to climate change
by the year 2000,
and the damage to our environment,
they warned, could be severe.
Despite this awareness,
companies like Exxon, Chevron and Shell
continue to expand
their fossil fuel production.
Perhaps that’s understandable;
These are oil companies, after all.
But that’s not all they did.
The American Petroleum Institute
lobbied Congress not to fund
the electric car development,
saying falsely
that the pollution from gas cars
would be solved.
The industry also sent
educational materials to school kids
about petroleum and the environment,
which were used in 80 percent
of American schools
by the 1960s,
but which were silent
about global warming.
And by the end of the 1970s,
both Exxon and the American
Petroleum Institute
had created secret research programs
to study climate science
and monitor what others were doing.
The documents that describe these programs
were discovered only recently.
And what they contain might surprise you.
One set of papers describes a meeting
held by the American Petroleum Institute
in 1980.
Personnel from Exxon
and the companies that later became
Chevron and BP were there.
And they invited a researcher
from Stanford University
to brief them about the state
of climate science.
At the end of the presentation,
one of the researchers’ slides said,
“One degree rise,
2005,
barely noticeable;
two and a half degree rise,
2038,
major economic consequences,
strong regional dependence;
five degree rise,
2067,
globally catastrophic effects.”
Around the same time,
Exxon’s researchers found
that 80 percent of fossil fuels
needed to be left in the ground
and renewable energy needed
to start replacing fossil fuels soon,
or climate change
would have serious consequences.
If this were allowed to happen,
one Exxon scientist wrote,
the results would be catastrophic,
at least for a substantial fraction
of the world’s population.
An internal report at Exxon
warned of rising seas, coastal flooding,
and mass migration and displacement
around the globe.
That report also predicted precisely
how quickly carbon dioxide would build up
and how much global warming would occur
throughout our century
if the industry didn’t change course.
Today, we know the industry
did not change course,
and the predictions in that report
have become strikingly accurate.
By 1980, Big Oil had been on notice
about global warming
for at least 20 years,
and it understood
that the time for action had arrived.
So, too, did an increasing
number of scientists.
In history, it was a fork in the road
and one with centuries long consequences.
Did the industry raise the alarm?
Did they develop plans
to replace fossil fuels?
Did they move towards renewables?
We might at first laugh
at the idea of oil companies
taking the lead to protect the world
from global warming.
But these were all options.
The industry knew that its own products
were causing the problem
and that the fate of the world
hung in the balance.
Around the same time,
oil companies were warned
that climate change could have
globally catastrophic effects.
They began speaking in public
about the issue.
But instead of raising the alarm,
Big Oil hit snooze,
enacting a campaign
of distraction and delay.
In 1980,
the American Petroleum Institute
published a book
called Two Energy Futures,
which pushed for a huge expansion
of fossil fuel production
across the nation
for decades to come.
To reassure the public
about global warming,
the industry said scientists
were split on the issue,
which was false,
and it pointed to a study from MIT
that claimed worldwide coal use
could be tripled
without harming human health
or the environment.
The catch?
The fossil fuel industry had funded
and even carried out
much of that project itself,
something the American Petroleum Institute
didn’t tell the public.
In essence, Big Oil told the public
the opposite of what it knew to be true.
And the fossil fuel expansion
that it called for
was adopted by the United States
and other governments around the world.
That became our history,
and now, our present.
But that episode was only a warm up
for what was to come.
In 1989,
the fossil fuel industry created a group
called the Global Climate Coalition.
But it wasn’t an environmental
organization like it might sound.
Instead, the group cast doubt
about climate change,
helping to create
large-scale climate denial
as we know it today.
And it also fought laws and treaties
that would have helped
to prevent global warming.
The Global Climate Coalition
operated until about 2002.
After that,
oil companies often avoided
denying climate change outright,
but they continue to lobby
against fossil fuel controls
and to expand their own
fossil fuel production.
Today, many oil and gas companies
advertise themselves
as environmentally friendly
and showcase the research
they fund at universities,
even though over the last decade,
oil majors have spent
only a few percent of their investments
in renewable energy,
and the rest, the vast majority,
tens of billions of dollars per year,
in more fossil fuels,
which the companies plan to sell to us
over the coming decades.
So where does this leave us?
This is the story of how we got here.
What we do now, of course, is up to us.
I said at the beginning
that I want this message to empower you -
empower you with the knowledge
of how we ended up where we are.
In this history, the biggest idea
that jumps out at me is this:
We didn’t have to take this path.
The solution to global warming
has been clear for longer
than many of us have been alive.
Replace fossil fuels
with clean sources of energy.
Oil and gas companies and their allies
delayed that solution
by failing to warn the public
and by, instead, spreading
disinformation and doubt,
by expanding their own
fossil fuel production,
and by blocking laws
that would have helped
prevent global warming.
Our past and our present situation
were not predestined,
and neither is our future.
The choices that led to decades of delay
and now to a climate crisis
were often made without our knowledge.
Now we know what’s happened,
and we can change course.
The original Greek word for crisis
does not mean disaster.
It means decision.
A crisis is a moment
when a pivotal decision must be made.
Today, we’re at a moment in history
that will be remembered,
a deciding point
that will change the world
for centuries to come.
How we act is, of course,
up to each of us,
and there’s no single correct answer.
But perhaps the correct question is this:
In this turning point in history,
one that won’t come again,
what would you do?