As runaway climate change continues to wreak havoc on the planet, it's getting harder and harder to disagree with the idea that we're in the middle of a potentially massive extinction event. It's also getting harder and harder to ignore the potentially criminal liability of at least some fossil fuel companies for causing this mess.
The evidence against them just keeps mounting up.
According to
a new story in The Guardian, executives from Exxon Mobil contacted the communications director of a popular congressional lecture series in early 2001 and, for all intents and purposes, asked him turn it into an outlet for fossil fuel industry propaganda.
That lecture series was set up by the US Global Change Research Program or USGCRP, and it was doing great work explaining the dangers of runaway global warming.
But Exxon couldn't let that happen, so it demanded that the lectures be "less agenda-driven" and more "balanced," which, just in case you don't know corporate double-speak, means less honest about the threat of global warming and more in line with Big Oil talking points.
Nichy Sundt, the USGCRP communications person who received the call from Exxon, says he never personally heard from the company again, but the whole incident still struck a chord.
As he
told the Guardian, "I thought it was very... inappropriate, for a fossil fuel lobbyist to be calling me directly, days after the administration was sworn in, only directly to instruct me on how we would be communicating to the Congress on climate change. This is ExxonMobil reaching into the federal government science apparatus and seeking to influence the communication of science."
In the grand scheme of the fossil fuel industry and its influence over the government, this incident with the congressional lecture series isn't all that significant.
It's just one of many examples of how Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Gas, try to write the rules regarding climate change.
But in the context of Exxon itself and the question of whether or not it is criminally liable for climate change, this story of a 15-year-old telephone call between a corporate executive and a government official is a really big deal.
Thanks to
some great reporting from the Guardian and Inside Climate News, we now know that Exxon knew about climate change as far back as 1977, eleven years before James Hansen gave his famous speech to Congress warning us about global warming.
We also now know that Exxon first took this knowledge as a sign that it needed to change its business model, but the company then changed its mind and tried to sow confusion and doubt about the science around climate change.
This mostly involved funding climate denial groups, but it also involved lobbying the government to tow the Exxon line on global warming, as today's report from the Guardian shows.
The big picture narrative here is stunning.
