What #BigOil knew about #ClimateChange, in its own words

by Benjamin Franta, October 28, 2021

"Back in 1979, #Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding #GlobalWarming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from #FossilFuels and instead focused on #renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major #ClimateCrisis could be avoided.

"But the industry didn't pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute #ClimateScience, block fossil fuel controls and keep their products flowing.

"We know about it through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now beginning to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called the Global Climate Coalition—but it wasn't an environmental group like the name suggests; instead, it worked to sow doubt about climate change and lobbied lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s.

"For example, in 1997, the Global Climate Coalition's chairman, William O'Keefe, who was also an executive vice president for the American Petroleum Institute, wrote in the Washington Post that 'Climate scientists don't say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth,' contradicting what the industry had known for decades. The fossil fuel industry also funded think tanks and biased studies that helped slow progress to a crawl."

Read more:
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-big-oil-knew-climate-words.html

#ExxonKnew #BigOilKnew #BigOilAndGas #Climate #ClimateEmergency

Across the globe - north and south, ocean and land - climate change is super-sizing our heatwaves and heat extremes. While this puts us all at risk, some are much more vulnerable than others. Here's why.

First, people living in cities experience up to 4C (7F) hotter temperatures than surrounding rural areas due to the urban heat island effect. The strength of the heat island effect increases with the size of the city, driven by differences in evapotranspiration and convection efficiency between urban versus rural areas. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1512-9

Even within the same city, though, low-income neighbourhoods can be up to 8C or 15F hotter than high income neighbourhoods in the same city during a heatwave. This means poorer and non-white people are at much greater risk from heat-related stress, illness, and even death. Once again, climate change is a threat multiplier, exacerbating the risks the most vulnerable and marginalized already face today. Source: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021EF002016

This disparity is primarily due to a lack of green spaces and tree cover, exacerbated by the fact that poorer areas are often next to sources of heat like industrial areas -> which are in turn due to racist redlining practices stretching back to the 30s. Read: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-redlining-made-city-neighborhoods-hotter-180975754/

If you live in the U.S., find your city here: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/03/754044732/as-rising-heat-bakes-u-s-cities-the-poor-often-feel-it-most

Probably the most underestimated danger of climate change — over the immediate short term — is the way it destabilizes democratic nations. Here’s how:

https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-climate-change-accelerates-the-ff3

You are here.

(March 2023 update)

Still can’t get over the fact that an editor of the Financial Times said that we need to do away with #capitalism in order to deal with the #climate. If that’s not a sign of mainstream economics/finance finally waking up to the reality of the situation we’re in, I don’t now what is.

edit to add link (thanks Boud): https://archive.ph/2023.06.29-113742/https://www.ft.com/content/86d71297-3f34-48f3-8f3f-28b7e8be03c6

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