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Investigation Finds Exxon Ignored Its Own Early Climate Change Warnings
New submitter jrmcferren writes: PBS Reports the Exxon ignored their own internal climate change warnings. Newly discovered documents show that the corporation's own research scientists warned top executives that atmospheric CO2 was increasing and that the burning of fossil fuels was to blame as early as 1977. The report goes on to say: "In 1978, the Exxon researchers warned that a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius and would have a major impact on the company’s core business. 'Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical,' one scientist wrote in an internal document."
cold hard cash
Why should it be surprising that a vested interest ignored the evidence at the time, when we see the same denial today when faced with overwhelming evidence?
Another similarity; both oil and tobacco industry have huge PR and lobby efforts to continue misleading and confuse the topic and as much as possible avoid that anything is done about it.
As Tom Toro put it...
"Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
So it looks like scientists have been wrong about their global warming predictions going on four decades.
Except that their criteria for a 2-3 C increase hasn't passed yet. The IPCC apparently thinks the "first doubling of atmospheric CO2" will happen by about 2050. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies thinks that global temps. have so far risen by 0.8 C since 1880. This means that the Exxon researcher's warning that "a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius" could still come to pass. Several of the projections in the IPCC's figures suggest a 2C rise by ~2050 is possible, so they could still be proven right.
OTOH, they certainly were not going to back down and hand things over to nuclear. Their propaganda machine was already in full gear, and these finding would undermine their efforts;
Nuclear power’s main energy competitor is of course Big Oil, which had no problem with nuclear weapons, but was not happy to lose its grip on the world’s major source of energy. Nuclear energy was not under their control, requiring by definition major government involvement and regulation of the industry. Its widespread use would leave Big Oil with falling profits, and would mean the end of Big Oil’s economic hegemony.
This led to a bizarre situation where oil companies both founded and funded ecology-related organisations, including the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, Sierra Club and others to protest the peaceful use of nuclear power. These groups have all received backing from the oil industry, notably Atlantic Richfield Oil and BP
http://www.globalresearch.ca/b...
Of course, many still choose to believe and support big oil's agenda to the day.
What were they supposed to do to not be accused of "ignoring" warnings? Can you describe the decision-making process you wish they'd followed?
It's the same for the rest of us as it is for Exxon -- just less existential. We've been "warned". Yet we go on with our lives. The warnings get louder and more shrill and catastrophic and angry. And we still go on with our lives. Eventually this should stop being a big surprise.
Yes. You know like the farmers that did not do crop rotation and depleted the soil nutrients such that they couldn't grow crops anymore. Moron.
they have a vested interest in ignoring it
that's what you need *regulations* for
you know, evil, evil job destroying regulations. because a guy having a job on an oil field is more important than his grandkid able to grow food crops
what's that? companies write their own regulations through congresscritters?
yes, that's called *regulatory capture*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
in which case you clean up your government, remove the corruption. which is unfortunately legal in the usa. so you vote for the guys who are actually going to do something about that rather than the professional prostitutes who talk about tax cuts for "job creators" (aka, their rich friends who park their money in an offshore banking accounts, rather than a tax cut for the middle class and poor, who immediately spend their cash, actually growing the economy)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Except it wasn't. Nice troll.
Please read the actual words written. It helps. Just assuming that you are not here to start fires.
The key word for a start is "might" as in "might become critical".
There are at least two levels of indirection and conditional/probability in that statement. Failing to read them is failing to understand the meaning entirely.
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
To be fair, there was great uncertainty about those findings at the time. We have struggled to build good models to the day.
Their research into where to drill for oil also had great uncertainty, but that didn't stop them.
The fact that one guy at one company
BULLSHIT
A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). The large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2. Rather than 1970s scientists predicting cooling, the opposite is the case.
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
It's silly to be fanatical when there are no viable solutions. Even the most extreme proposals to cut CO2 would have an impact of around 1/10th of a degree temperature reduction. It's laughable. The second someone comes up with an effective, viable solution to drop 2 degrees, I'm on board.
In the mid 70's the big scare was climate cooling, not climate warming.
If you wanted to believe some fringers, and some pop culture magazines that loved the frightening headlines.
All based on a couple years of whacky weather. Which many (most?) scientists said was partially based on destabilization, based on - you got it - Global warming.
One does not look outside the window, see it is hot or cold that day, and determine that AGW is either real or fake.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So then the article is effectively meaningless. It's about as damning of Exxon as if some scientist for them had predicted within 5 or 10 years pigs might sprout wings and fly to adapt to increases in atmospheric CO2.
Yeah, bad Exxon and others (like Union Carbide, because of Bhopal) have caused so many problems that one wonders how such things didn't get a more adequate treatment by society.
In these, and in other cases (like BP's oil spill), we are forced to the conclusion that we are not able to implement proper controls on any organization activity.
There's nothing wrong with the political system, be it capitalism or anything else. The problem is akin to accident prevention: we know it's important to have safety inspections to prevent the loss of a few lives, but we fail to have businesses cooperate in adequate disaster prevention -- which too often means loss of many lives.
And yet, even after those catastrophes, schemes are prepared for cleansing of the aftermath, like:
- hiring trolls to discredit everyone trying to call for a saner view on facts;
- ideological contamination, either calling people names ("capitalists" or "socialists", used as derogatory qualifiers);
- suggesting doubt on issues that are quite obvious, creating a feeling on people that we are weak of mind and fate was inevitable;
- procrastinating until a favorable setting allows the culprits to "lose" their case without really being punished;
- or manipulating punishments in ways to render them ineffective or even change them into new business opportunities.
So, it's not really just Exxon, or Union Carbide (now Dow's) or BP.
it's us, humans. We allow that.
We allow that when we have a nuclear reactor explode because it's old, when we choose dangerous technologies like nuclear reactors in a place subject to earthquakes and tsunamis, when we accept innovations that involve a certain risk of deaths (as if progress makes these acceptable).
It's great that we have Liberty; but as everything in this life, that, too, must be used with responsibility to help mankind -- not to harm some of us so that others gain advantages.
I wonder why those who still claim global warming is not our responsibility, that we cannot do anything, that throw mud on respectable scientists (not to mention other even more heinous methods) do not gain the same treatment as all other trolls (e.g. here).
Even now as I write these words, other humans are writing about how it's always the same (citing other examples) and we cannot do anything about it; or that companies do that because the general public wants the products at any cost etc. etc.
The way things go, we going to rationalize that deaths are unavoidable and protection equipment actually hurts profits, so we'd better just have a percentage die.
I think we fail -- even at being human.
Their research into where to drill for oil also had great uncertainty, but that didn't stop them.
Lots of companies did research in their own fields to support their industry, so I am not sure of your point? Drilling uncertainty had a known cost/risk associated, they price that into their product.
^^^ This. Back then, conventional wisdom was that the earth was cooling and potentially headed for another ice age.
That's odd - I was working with scientists back in the day, and they thought no such thing. They thought that the couple years of off weather - which was what triggered the pop culture global cooling thought by fringers - was just a temporary anomaly. Which it turned out to be.
Otherwise, they thought that the greenhouse effect did exist.
Newsweek is not a peer reviewed science journal,
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Life is not binary.
The bods in white coats said: burning oil (etc) may be bad news and furthermore it may be bad if you don't change your business strategy in the light of that soon.
It seems evident that the first part was true.
It is clear also that Exxon also chose not to alter its business model but instead to try to spread FUD.
The second is poor long-term business and poor ethics, and may well bite us all in the rear.
So as it happens the bods in white coats were right then and the trust of the summary is right now.
You seem to be trying to skip the caveats in the statement and ignore tha Exxon clearly failed to change direction when given the (basically correct) warning.
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Aaah - now I get it. You are scientifically illiterate, hence your confusion.
In 2008, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a review of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979. They found seven papers that pointed to global cooling and forty-four that indicated global warming.
You'll find a quick, 7-min summary in this video by Peter Hadfield (aka: Potholer54):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU_AtHkB4Ms&index=3
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Where in the article did it state anything about the timeframe of the "major impact on core business?"
It doesnt. It states a timeframe for making decisions that will prevent the major impact without needing "hard decisions."
Where did you go wrong? I would guess it was in elementary school, but who knows....
That's odd - I was working with scientists back in the day, and they thought exactly that thing. They also were 100% certain the "population bomb" would see us in a post apocalyptic, cannibalistic society living a roving mad max style existence. The problem with claiming nobody I know believed it is that you didn't know anybody. It's called the the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy.
they price that into their product.
just think how much more sales they would have today if they had heeded their own research and put some profits into solar panels. The long term outlook for solar panels is better than the long term outlook for oil. Don't believe me? Ask the saudis, with all the oil in the world they are still investing heavily in solar. Watch the world bypass the USA as it adapts solar and leaves us in the dust.
Inside the article are links to the scans of the actual reports done by Exxon.
* 1977 report, from James Black: http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
* 1982 report from M. B. Glaser: http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
They did state that there is no unambiguous evidence yet (as of 1982), but the 1982 report said: "If the earth is on a warming trend, we're not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5 needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Nuclear powerâ(TM)s main energy competitor is of course Big Oil
It's not. Almost no one burns oil for electricity. Similarly, no one has a fission engine on their car. Similarly, there is no overlap in the other uses of oil such as chemical feedstock or asphalt road systems.
Coal is the fossil fuel competing head to head with nuclear.
Similarly, no one has a fission engine on their car.
people are using energy from nuclear fission to power their cars, whether or not the reactor is attached to the car is irrelevant.
Repeatedly, the anti-global warming nuts try to trot out that 'most people' were worrying about global cooling. When the actual reality was one guy who got one article placed in a prominent magazine. One time.
Well, unless you're in congress. And want to base public policy on a snowball outside. Then you actually do look out the window to determine if AGW is fake.
You're insane and incomprehensibly wrong, but that's what you do.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Exxon didn't "Ignore Its Own Early Climate Change Warnings". It, knowing that AGW was real, defunded the research that proved it and paid professional science deniers to spread FUD claiming that AGW didn't exist.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
In the 1970s, the majority of published climate papers forecast warming, not cooling. There were famous articles from Newsweek and Times Magazine that forecast cooling but that's not the same as the science.
See http://www.skepticalscience.co...
So it looks like scientists have been wrong about their global warming predictions going on four decades. Or did I miss the great, impactful Exxon global warming crash of 1988?
I'm not sure what prediction you're saying is wrong. The Exxon 1982 report) being discussed said:
"If the earth is on a warming trend, we're not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5 needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations."
Since they said the signal doesn't exceed the noise until 1995, they didn't even make a prediction for 1988.
The report did have a statement that the greenhouse effect would produce 1C warming "above present levels" by "the second to third quarter of the next century" (page 2 of the pdf.)
Here's the graph of actual measured data:
data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A.gif
Fitting a line through that data starting with "present levels" of 1980, I see a rise of about 0.8 between 1980 and 2014. So looks like their prediction was very close to the data.
If anytjhing, their prediction was slightly low, but since in the same report they list an uncertainty of over 50% on model predictions, their prediction matches the measured data to well within their quoted error bars.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In the end, I have faith in the species to adapt or to invent technologies that actually will be helpful.
The "species will adapt" by going extinct, mother nature will shrug and life will go on without humans
It's silly to be fanatical when there are no viable solutions.
yeah, it's better to lie back and allow death to take over instead of trying to fight back
So you're seriously going with "some scientist in 1978 warned Exxon that sometime in the upcoming CENTURY there will be an increase in CO2 that'll have a major impact on core business"? OK then...
When your model for fighting back is Sisyphus... yup!
You see a pattern mostly because you have been pressing your fingers in your eyes so hard you're just seeing stars.
No warming in 18 years? Try pulling your fingers out of your eyes and see actual data.
http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-...
And it's gotten hotter since that data was put there. But I'm sure you'll ignore that too.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
What Im going with is that the previous commenter was not able to correctly parse the words in the article.
Apparently you have the same inability to read the written word.
Where exactly in my post did I say anything for or against global warming?
However, your inability to understand what people say makes it really hard to take you or your arguments seriously.
Instead of the biased article, read what the report actually concludes:
http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
The report also points out that temperature increases would not be uniform, with strong increase at the polar caps and little increase near the equator.
The interesting thing is that little has changed about these conclusions in the last 30 years; science has produced a lot of new data, but the conclusions have changed little.
That's odd - I was working with scientists back in the day, and they thought exactly that thing. They also were 100% certain the "population bomb" would see us in a post apocalyptic, cannibalistic society living a roving mad max style existence. The problem with claiming nobody I know believed it is that you didn't know anybody. It's called the the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy.
So you were working with scientists who were 100 percent sure of anything?
Ummm, no. if they were 100 percent sure of anything - they weren't scientists. Your handy little apocryphal story is seriously doubtful in its veracity.
Because if you ask a scientist about a population "bomb" as you put it, you'll get a dissertation first about Malthus, and how and why her was wrong, eg that Malthus did not factor in human ingenuity, and things like the green revolution - which was quite mature during the 1970's. Malthus suffered from the idea that food production would be stabilized at a point that was contemporary. And that proved to be his undoing.
And no actual scientist would ever make the mistake of thinking that we will not have any more advancements in food and health technology that will allow us to double or triple our present population. I've already outlines a plan for nuclear powered underground algae food production facilities that would allow us to circumvent the problem of humans and food production needing to occupy the same space. There is also to possibility of genetically modifying humans to be much smaller, thus requiring less resources.
But I would never assume 100 percent that it would work. I am certain I wouldn't want to live that way.
The closest thing a scientist would come to 100 percent certainty about in this regard is that it is not possible to have infinite numbers of humans on the earth.
And next time try to start out with a premise that isn't completely wrong and shows your complete misunderstanding of scientists and science. You have to start with there is no 100 percent certainty of anything. What you were arguing is called the absoluteum bullshitum fallacy.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Big oil" also pumps out gas, which IS often used for electricity, much like oil. Nuclear energy is quite literally the only credible threat to the bottom line of oil companies. Even if they went nuke, their profits would dry up very very quickly as reactors tend to need far less fuel than their fossil fuel equivalents.
Two things to note. First, natural gas has been for decades used as peaking load. That means it is complementary to nuclear power to the degree that a higher use of nuclear power, which is a very inflexible power source, results in higher demand for natural gas to cover the variability that nuclear power can't cover.
Second, it doesn't even make sense to compare nuclear to fossil fuel by amount of fuel. Nuclear fuel rods are considerably more expensive, and upkeep and liability for nuclear plants is considerable.
Most people aren't doing that and are burning oil products instead. I'd look at the propaganda around electric cars instead. That's the actual crucial segment for Big Oil to attack. And there just isn't a lot of propaganda out there (say the occasional story about the pollution from the battery packs or how the vehicle does in an accident, maybe).
I think a much better explanation for Big Oil funding of environmental organizations is protection money.
Here is a link to the political cartoon parent is quoting.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
No, that's not what they said (even if the article leads you to believe otherwise). Read the actual report that the article is based on. What the scientists actually said was that action on climate change was "premature" because of the "large scientific uncertainties" and the "severe impact of climate change policies on the world's economies".
http://insideclimatenews.org/s...
So, Exxon followed the advice of its scientists.
(In addition, little has changed in the intervening 30 years, so the conclusions are arguably still valid.)
If anyone is then he/she may has been either ignorant, sleeping under a rock or simply wasn't paying attention to what fossil fuels do to climate in a short amount of time.
I, again, could be called a demon, as I studied geodesy, climate technologies and environmental change. I can tell now that we are already over the precipice. I call it the "Delaying phase", other scientist may call it differently but basically it describes the effect of nature compensating head by having chemical and physical reactions equalizing cold and warm to an equilibrium which will stay stable for one or two centuries. That's we are in now, cold water and ice compensate most of the warmth produced by this planet due to CO2 intake in atmosphere. The problem comes after, once water reaches a certain temperature and ice is melted and gone, the surface will be bare. After that, well I could write a scientific paper about it but its not getting published nor being read by the right persons thus I ll skip it (giving my regards to all who did already). Hell there is also the issue with the magnetic field but how Mark Watney says: " One problem at a time. "
What the scientists actually said was that action on climate change was "premature" because of the "large scientific uncertainties" and the "severe impact of climate change policies on the world's economies".
They DID "take action" on climate change, they hired a PR firm to lie for them.
Their scientists also told them that drilling for oil is uncertain and fraught with risks, but that didn't stop them from "taking action".
At the time, oil was used much more in electrical generation. Also, oil had a big stake in coal. They worked hand in hand.
How many times will they make articles about this as if it was something new?
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
I know we are leading up to COP 21 in Paris and they feel there is a need to spread the propaganda thick, but this is getting ridiculous.
Contrary to what the media is spreading, Exxon and other oil companies have been funding both sides fro decades.
i.e. http://news.stanford.edu/news/...
Rockefeller has been behind this push and drive on climate alarmism from the get go. Funding research and organisations like 350.org.
Those that believe the fallacy that big oil is all alone and behind only the "denier war machine" are keeping their heads in the sand.
Besides, the governements of the west outspend the supposed denial money by 10 to 1.
I'm a great fan of back-of-the-envelope calculations... but these aren't calculations; they are merely assertions. And worse, not merely assertions, but assertions that seem to be based on random pseudo-facts not really understood.
Europe has the longest history of solar panel installation, and has good data for energy payback time. Energy payback time for silicon panels is between 0.5 and 1.4 years. Depending on location, it can be as high as 3 years in northern Europe.
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...
plus the whole poisoning China thing with harvesting rare earths
Do you even know what rare earth elements are? Almost all solar panels manufactured today are crystalline silicon. Silicon isn't a rare earth element.
In the end, I have faith in the species to adapt or to invent technologies that actually will be helpful. We're not there yet. Band-aid solutions in the short term are meaningless..
I agree with you there. I'm a technological optimist; if we can identify problems, we can solve them. However, ignoring and belittling the existence of problems isn't going to help, and dismissing possible solutions with slogans and sound-bites is counterproductive.
So are gotcha-type articles about Exxon.
The point of this article was that Exxon was a major funder of the campaigns to discredit the science of global warming in the '90s and early 2000s, even though a decade earlier their own scientists were telling them that this was significant. They spent about $30 million dollars funding climate denial.
On the other hand, they did stop most of their funding to the climate-change deniers in 2007, so it does seem to me to be mostly an article about a company that isn't really the problem any more.
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/17...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Exxon's PR said exactly what the report says: there are big scientific uncertainties and it's too early to take action.
Correct. But their scientists also told them that the expected benefits outweigh the risks, so they took a chance with their own money and invested in drilling.
The problem with climate change action is that the expected benefit is likely no larger than doing nothing even according to the IPCC; furthermore, the people making a profit on climate change action are not the people paying the costs.
Go look it up.
OK.
http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-...
http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Let's say that coffee and tea cause global warming (climate change). In other words, let's make the "evil" bit more personal. Are you ready to give up coffee and tea?
Sometimes we have a better understanding of things when we make it a bit more personal...
Now... do you need coffee and tea more than you need electricity? more than you need manufactured goods? If you believe the answer to be "no", then this just became even more personal.
Sure, we could force all countries to have military rule and force all fossil and nuclear fuels to "end" business and switch to very very expensive alternatives. We could do that I suppose. But I think it would have to be done by force. The general populace won't give up tea and coffee easily.
With that said, a lot of these "evil" companies hedge their bets and spend a lot of money researching alternative sources just in case they are forced to change.
Now... the pain of switching, if done over a very long period of time... it's quite possible we would be ok with regards to our personal lifestyles (indeed, not talking about readers here, but the truth is, there has been some change already, just maybe not enough at a fast enough pace). However, since the "evil" potential is still out there, then the truly evil (not the current oil, gas, coal and nuclear companies) could exploit those technologies and possibly cause problems.... just saying...
With that said, if we can turn an alternative into a viable cheap and reliable solution that is economically better than oil, gas, coal and nuclear, then those big companies will change very very quickly. No sense being stuck in the past doing something more expensive.
Best solution happens at the consumer/people level. If "we" stop using "evil" energy. If "we" stop using the "evil". If we stop drinking coffee and tea... they (the evil companies) are forced to change. Are you ready? Currently the answer is a very clear "no".
Stuff to ponder...
Mid east countries are also investing in nuclear, also leaving us in the dust. They became too dependent on burning oil, so that have some catching up to do first in that regard.
So the 'scientists' that say they are 100% sure climate change is mostly caused by humans aren't scientists? Good to know.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's not. Almost no one burns oil for electricity. >
To add to my other reply, going back to the days when this propoganda was full force, oil was used heavily for home heating, for trains and ships, for heat in process plants, and as I said for electrical generation where oil generators were used the world over, particularly where coal supply was limited. That combined energy market was absolutely huge.
So yes, nuclear was seen as a big threat to big oil.
people are using energy from nuclear fission to power their cars, whether or not the reactor is attached to the car is irrelevant.
It's pretty damn relevant to the guy driving around with the nuclear reactor in his car.
"Off topic? Really?"
"Investigation Finds Exxon Ignored Its Own Early Climate Change Warnings"
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
So it looks like scientists have been wrong about their global warming predictions going on four decades.
Except that their criteria for a 2-3 C increase hasn't passed yet. The IPCC apparently thinks the "first doubling of atmospheric CO2" will happen by about 2050. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies thinks that global temps. have so far risen by 0.8 C since 1880. This means that the Exxon researcher's warning that "a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius" could still come to pass. Several of the projections in the IPCC's figures suggest a 2C rise by ~2050 is possible, so they could still be proven right.
"Still might come to pass" in 2050 is far different than "5 to 10 years" from 1978. But keep moving the goal posts and you may eventually figure out a way to prove them right.
I can't find that purported prediction for "5 to 10 years" in either of the reports referenced. To the contrary, the reports very explicitly made no predictions for 5-10 years; it said that in that time period it would not be possible to distinguish the global warming signal from the statistical fluctuations. The only explicit numerical prediction in the 1978 Exxon report is on page 34 (the very last page, labeled "summary"). This stated "Doubling CO_2 could increase average global temperature by 1C to 3C by 2050 A.D. (10C predicted at poles)."
So I don't know what you mean about "moving the goalposts" on predictions. The goalpost in the 1978 prediction was "by 2050". This has not changed. The prediction in 1978 (based on the 1977 presentation) overlaps the IPCC's current prediction of 2C by 2050-- neither the prediction nor the "goalposts" have changed.
(The 1982 Exxon report had a slightly different timespan for doubling, stating that "We estimate doubling could occur around the year 2090 based upon fossil fuel requirements projected in Exxon's long range energy outlook". This report, however, is by a different author and dated 3 years later, so it's not unexpected that it would have a slightly different fossil fuel use model.)
The only reference to "five to ten years" in 1978 report is the statement on page 2 "Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical".
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Not to argue with the sentiment of that brilliant quote, but just saying that the planet will be fine and recover almost instantly, the shareholders who got that blissful value out of those shares, and their kids and grandkids, will be extinct.
Apes don't see far ahead into the future...
So the 'scientists' that say they are 100% sure climate change is mostly caused by humans aren't scientists? Good to know.
You have their names? they need to lose their scientific chops, because noting in the universe is 100 percent certain. Ever.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Still might come to pass" in 2050 is far different than "5 to 10 years" from 1978. But keep moving the goal posts and you may eventually figure out a way to prove them right.
Lets not use ad hominem, lets instruct the troll:
5-10 years in 1970 was for a time to start making hard decisions, from a report with limited data by experts in 1978
2050 is current estimate of OMG this is now a juggernaut we cant stop and everyone is in deep shit (except coastal areas, they are washed clean by the waters.
They are different milestones in a progression. Cherry picking and saying someone is moving the goalposts is ignorant at best or willfully negligent at worst.
If the worst does come to pass, it should be people like you who are strung up right after the boards of companies who willfully chose to do nothing.
Silence is a state of mime.
plus the whole poisoning China thing with harvesting rare earths
Do you even know what rare earth elements are? Almost all solar panels manufactured today are crystalline silicon. Silicon isn't a rare earth element.
He was likely referring to what's needed by the wind generators.
Perhaps that is what he might have been referring to, if he knew what he was talking about, but it is not what he did say. Or he might have seen a blog post about indium or gallium, which aren't a rare-earth elements and aren't used in silicon panels, but are often brought up in the same discussions in which people talk about rare earths.
Either way, though, I'd advise not paying much attention to anything he posts until you have verified it against a reputable source.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Big Oil, which had no problem with nuclear weapons
I've heard that Big Ag has no problem with radial tires; I wonder if that's true...
Nice source you got there.
Brilliant insight into your conspiracy theory.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
just think how much more sales they would have today if they had heeded their own research and put some profits into solar panels.
You mean like BP who started the solar business in the 80s and closed it in 2011?
Or like Royal Dutch Shell who started in 2002 and got out of it only about 6 years later?
Yes but where did it get them? Those poor deluded people at at Exxon only made more profit than the world's top 20 solar providers combined. They really made the wrong choice didn't they? /sarcasm
they price that into their product.
just think how much more sales they would have today if they had heeded their own research and put some profits into solar panels. The long term outlook for solar panels is better than the long term outlook for oil. Don't believe me? Ask the saudis, with all the oil in the world they are still investing heavily in solar. Watch the world bypass the USA as it adapts solar and leaves us in the dust.
Why should we buy heavily into solar now? By continuing to pump oil even though the price is very low, the Saudi's are once again giving us a period of very cheap oil. Every few years they do this to slap the competition around. In addition to attempting to make US and Canadian high-cost competition go out of business, they are also slapping down the competition from renewables. The economics for an electric car don't look so great at current car and fuel prices.
They are investing in renewables because they have big piles of money and would prefer to export oil rather than burn it in their inefficient oil-powered power plants. Nobody else in the world burns so much oil for electricity. Oil is an expensive way to make electricity and it is better to sell the oil and make electricity some other way.
If and when solar takes over, it will be cheaper than it is now. That's pretty much a given if you look at any graph of price over time. In addition, we will have the time value of money on our side if we wait to invest in Solar. Until the economics work out in solar's favor, waiting and "being left in the dust" is the smart play. It is exactly the same as buying a hard drive. Waiting as long as possible is the right move. The future buyer will be better off than a buyer today, in almost all cases.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Just as the "science" had predicted.
by big oil. You can't trust them they were oil company shills.
lose != loose
No one is being asked to give up electricity, and nobody cares if they're electricity comes from burning coal or unicorn farts. There all alternatives to burning fossil fuels, and we should be pursuing them. No one has to "give up" anything....except maybe some profits for oil companies. Boo-hoo.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Lets just start by booting everybody from the University of East Anglia.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well, things have changed. My point is that it didn't used to be that way.
The combined energy market was and is still huge. The energy market for oil power plants isn't and never was. It's a fallacy to attach a small market to a large one and then claim the former is large as well.
Further, the places that tend to use oil-generated power because oil is plentiful, also tend to have a notable lack of competition. A Middle East country like Saudi Arabia or Iran would usually have the same parties in control of all their power generation.
Personally, I think the article you originally cited makes the common error of assuming that oil is energy. It's not. Certain oil products, like gasoline and diesel drive the oil market, but they have the additional feature of being very energy dense, cheap, and convenient fuels, which batteries still aren't. Nuclear power never will replace those features.
citation needed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You are not viewing through the lens of yesteryear, and are minimizing just how big the market overlap was. I was never even remotely hinting oil would be completely displaced, or even mostly.
You are not viewing through the lens of yesteryear, and are minimizing just how big the market overlap was. I was never even remotely hinting oil would be completely displaced, or even mostly.
What is the point of making such an assertion? Find some evidence first.
We are in an interglacial period, It will not last forever, based on past cycles we are very, very lucky. The question isn't whether the glaciers will cover the majority of the earth's land but when and how quickly the ice will return. Beside in 1965, climatology was considered in the same league as tarot cards.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The point is that back when nuclear was still 'new', there was a lot of talk about all kinds of uses that could displace oil. There certainly was a reason for big oil to attack nuclear. It matters not how well founded their fears were. I didn't get any sense from your post that you understood that.
The point is that back when nuclear was still 'new', there was a lot of talk about all kinds of uses that could displace oil. There certainly was a reason for big oil to attack nuclear. It matters not how well founded their fears were. I didn't get any sense from your post that you understood that.
Big Oil is not the only special interest out there. There is a really obvious reason to fund environmental groups - protection both for regulation and public opinion. And there's a really obvious reason not to fund an assault on nuclear power - retribution from the big money behind nuclear power.
The acted on it. The report was hidden and the researchers were made to sign an NDA, killed, or relocated to Siberia.
Am I right?
If there was big money behind nuclear power they could afford to build new stuff instead of getting governments to put up the money.
Like it or not it is not commercially attractive. Small units may change that by making it less capital intensive, but for now the only movement is in China, India and Russia where "big money" has less of a say than "big government".
If there was big money behind nuclear power they could afford to build new stuff instead of getting governments to put up the money.
They could, but I highlighted the part of your post that explains why they frequently don't. And these plants require billions of dollars in capital investments. If that's not big money, then what is?
Further, what's the cost of funding some environmental astroturf to permanently protest a refinery? I bet it's on the order of a few hundred thousand a year including the lawsuits obstructing every capital improvement or other major change the refinery tries to make. And permanently hiring a PI to sniff out expensive, time consuming safety and environmental violations? A factor of ten less a year.
The sort of stuff that "Big Oil" is being accused of in this thread would generate a considerable amount of blowback. It's one thing to pick on small fry, it's another to pick on fellow bullies with international reach (like General Electric). The MAD principle is at work here.
It's obviously not them that have the money since they need governments to put it up, so where on earth are you going with what you've written above? It makes no sense as written.
The country took a determined turn to the right in the 1980s, with the Reagan Revolution and all. In addition, the attention of corporate leaders changed from long term issues to quarterly profits. Less well known is that the corporate leaders of Exxon-Mobil did as well. The team that supervised actual research into the effects of fossil fuel consumption (and was also investigating long term strategies for the company for after the oil biz was dead) was replaced by executives that doubled down on petroleum now, petroleum forever.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
1) Pollution is bad mmmkay, kids?
2) Burning fossil fuels creates pollution
3) Don't believe 1) & 2)? breathe deeply off the exhaust pipe of your car long term and see what happens to your health
4) Therefore burning fossil fuels is bad and we don't have to bring climate into the equation
5) Profit?!
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson