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U.S. fossil fuel companies have known about global warming since at least the 1960s.[152] In 1966, a coal industry research organization, Bituminous Coal Research Inc., published its finding that if then prevailing trends of coal consumption continued, "the temperature of the earth's atmosphere will increase" and "vast changes in the climates of the earth will result. [...] Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London."[153] In a discussion following this paper in the same publication, a combustion engineer for Peabody Coal, now Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal supplier, added that the coal industry was merely "buying time" before additional government air pollution regulations would be promulgated to clean the air. Nevertheless, the coal industry publicly advocated for decades thereafter the position that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial for the planet.[153]
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Part One: Denial
Chapter i. A Proud History
EDWARD GARVEY, Engineer, Exxon Research & Engineering, 1978-83:
In 1978, my wife and I was just engaged six months prior. So we were going to get married a year after I graduated from college. I was kind of awkward, a little bit reserved. I was definitely a nerd. I mean, I grew up in a blue-collar area in Queens.
EDWARD GARVEY:
I went to Cooper Union, and Cooper Union was very well known. Not to toot my own horn, but you had to be pretty good to get in. So we were a draw for Exxon.
EDWARD GARVEY:
Exxon had a recruiting program. They would go to colleges all around the country, and every year they would take the best graduates from my school. And so when Exxon offered me a position in their research division, and doing environmental monitoring, for me it was a really good fit.
The salary I got offered was about $18,600, which in those days was a lot of money for somebody fresh out of school.
RICHARD WERTHAMER, Manager, Exxon Research & Engineering, 1979-82:
Exxon was not just the largest oil and gas company in existence, it was the largest company, period, in existence. It did business all over the world. It was enormous. And the resources were gigantic. And it had a very good reputation.
At the time I joined it, they had a company making word processors, fax machines. There was a new division of the company, Exxon Nuclear. And they had Exxon Solar.
EDWARD GARVEY:
Exxon wanted to become an energy company. They were flush with funds—the oil business was doing really well in the '70s, and so they wanted to move into other fields related to energy.
The energy projects that they were doing were very well funded. Each one of them would have teams of five to 10 scientists, and then technicians supporting them.
So the project that I ultimately ended up working for them on was really blue sky. They weren't going to make any money on it, it was just research for the sake of doing research. For somebody who was 22 or 23 years old, I was like, wow, am I really happy here. This is a really great place to be working. I was really happy working for Exxon.
MARTIN HOFFERT, Professor Emeritus, NYU:
Back in the mid-'70s, I was working for NASA. It was a very exciting time because NASA was sending probes all over the solar system. And the information that was coming back was very interesting, things that we never knew. For example, we found out that Venus was very hot—it’s at least 700 degrees there—and the most plausible explanation, it came from the composition of Venus’ atmosphere: Venus is almost 100% carbon dioxide.
It was a kind of unified idea in the terrestrial planets of our solar system that greenhouse gas warming was caused by high concentrations of carbon dioxide. At the same time, some research scientists were making observations of carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere. And we have seen this curve of increasing carbon dioxide—it's become a classic icon of the carbon dioxide problem—where CO2 keeps going up and up a few parts per million every year. And we can attribute that to greenhouse gases, primarily fossil fuel burning.
It was a small group, maybe 20 or 30, who were developing models independently and checking each other. All of the models showed that the average temperature of the Earth was going to warm. The things that we didn't know were details. We didn’t know exactly where that was going to happen and how it was going to happen.
The question came up, "What are we going to do?" Over 85% of our energy was generated by fossil fuels. And about that time is when I had the opportunity to work as a consultant with the biggest company in the world at the time, Exxon.
NARRATOR:
Today, the evidence of climate change is everywhere. FRONTLINE has been investigating the role of the fossil fuel industry and one of its biggest players, Exxon, in delaying and preventing action on climate change over the past four decades.
This film is based on over 100 interviews and thousands of documents, many of them newly uncovered.
It’s a story that begins with a small team of scientists inside Exxon.
EDWARD GARVEY:
This is a presentation entitled, “The Proposed Exxon Research Program to Help Assess the Greenhouse Effect.” It’s presented by Edward A. Garvey, myself, Henry Shaw, Wally Broecker and Taro Takahashi at Columbia University.
Exxon wanted to do research related to climate change. But they wanted it to be recognized as something that Exxon could contribute that was unlikely anybody else could do. And the role of the ocean in the global balance of carbon dioxide was not well understood. And so Exxon saw an opportunity, using an oil tanker, to involve itself in that line of research and make a really significant contribution to the understanding of the global cycle of carbon dioxide.
[Reading] “Program Goal: Use Exxon expertise and facilities to help determine the likelihood of a global greenhouse effect. March 26, 1979.”
I wasn't dying to go to sea. I was a city kid, I wasn’t a sailor. But I think I understood from the very beginning that the oil tanker was going to be my baby, so to speak. I was going make it work.
[Reading] “Rationale for Exxon Involvement: Develop expertise to assess the possible impact of the greenhouse effect on Exxon business. Form responsible team that can credibly carry bad news, if any, to the corporation.”
The work that we were doing the company was interested in at the highest levels. They wanted the knowledge.
MARTIN HOFFERT:
We wrote computer programs. We plotted graphs. We analyzed the results. We compared it with data, with what nature was doing. And we would compare our results with others’ results. We would see if there's a consensus. Those papers would then get presented at meetings with the government, people from industry, people from university. And there would sort of be this sort of brick-by-brick advance in our understanding of how the system worked.
Everything that we studied was basically consistent with the finding that the Earth was going to warm significantly. And we just were trying to say how it would warm.
I can only speak about the research group in Exxon Research & Engineering. Everybody there accepted it. Roger Cohen completely accepted it.
Roger Cohen, who was the manager of the group that I was consulting for, passed a lot of our results on to higher levels of management. Because that’s what this is—he’s writing to his boss about what the guys working for him are doing.
[Reading] “There's unanimous agreement in the scientific community that temperature increase at this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the Earth's climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere; that our results are in accord with those of most researchers in the field and are subject to the same uncertainties.”
EDWARD GARVEY:
There was no separation between Exxon's understanding and that of academia. None. Yeah, there were uncertainties. But the uncertainty was, "When?" "How fast?"
That’s what we were looking at. If we didn't reduce fossil fuel consumption in a significant fashion, we were going to be facing significant climate change in the future.
MARTIN HOFFERT:
And here he's saying that we should keep doing the research because it can inform our decisions.
[Reading] “Our ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research in the scientific literature; indeed, to do otherwise would be a breach of Exxon's public position and ethical credo on honesty and integrity.”
EDWARD GARVEY:
Within the Exxon Research & Engineering Company, at least, we knew that changes were going to be necessary. But I think Exxon was afraid we would change too fast. You just can't shut off the fossil fuels, because all of society depends on it.
I was convinced that Exxon was doing this research to understand it, to get a place at the table, to be part of the solution, not so that we can deny the problem.
California, 2018
Austin, Texas
Exxon Mobil Historical Archives
KERT DAVIES, Director, Climate Investigations Center:
Sometime in the 2000s Exxon give their archives to the library at the University of Texas. Many truckloads of documents. Perhaps it was a PR effort to show that this company has a proud history, and it's all transparent; it's all in the library. And so it was a revelation when journalists uncovered documents showing how deep the conversation was about climate change within Exxon....