Exxon made ‘breathtakingly’ accurate climate predictions in 1970s and 80s

We, as a society, chose not to do either of those things. We made that decision during a time when it might have made a huge difference to our lives today. This decision was largely influenced by the actions of US non-state-owned oil companies, who were instrumental in preventing such policy decisions via lobbying, withholding evidence, and deliberate strategies to muddy the debate by funding climate denial PR. I’m sure the state-owned oil companies of Venezuela and the USSR/Russia deserve some blame as well for pumping and selling the oil (mostly to the West where our economies burned it), but I think pinning the blame right here in the US is pretty accurate.

PS This is the second or third company in this thread that tries to blame the deeply unethical actions of these oil companies on “foreign state-owned oil companies” and it’s such a specific and bizarre defense that I tend to wonder if some Exxon-funded PR office has been pushing that line.

You should be less certain about this: proposals going back decades had this working as a rebate mechanism — take the total collected, divide it by the number of citizens, and send them a check. The idea is that if you hit people with the cost up front they'll be incentivized to use less because they see the true cost of their decisions up front and if you use less energy you'll be getting free money from the people who use more.

It's also important to remember that in almost every country energy usage scales with income so this is less regressive than it might seem — poor people aren't commuting to work in Escalades or heating their 4,000 square foot houses to 75℉. See point number five here:

https://climate.mit.edu/posts/five-myths-about-carbon-pricin...

> And there has never been a scientific consensus.

There has been a consensus among qualified scientists since roughly 1980, and the predictions climate scientists were making that decade have held up quite well. For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which were accurate:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...

Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s. Here's what the National Academy of Sciences had to say in 1979:

> We believe, therefore, that the equilibrium surface global warming due to doubled CO2 will be in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C, with the most probable value near 3°C.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...

(Note that in both of the previous two cases there's a confound because some conservation efforts and especially the Montreal Protocol were effective enough to shift us to the lower end of those ranges. We do have the power to stop this.)

> Freeman Dyson, for example, which died in 2021, was the last remaining physicist from developing QED, a physicist I respect much more than the pop science scientists, thought the climate change religion is misguided and even called them religion.

Freeman Dyson was smart but he had no training or expertise in climate science — he even admitted that his position was largely emotional. Given that the people he was attacking made testable predictions which turned out to be correct, it's a regrettable tarnish on his legacy that he embarrassed himself acting unscientifically but it's hardly uncommon for famous elder scientists to start commenting well outside their area of expertise and expecting normal scientific standards not to apply to them.

> My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090608114821/http://www.e360.y...

The knowledge of CO2 (and water vapor) acting as an insulating blanket and having a warming effect on the planet was known years before the very first oil well was drilled and over a dozen years before Standard Oil (which eventually became Exxon and later ExxonMobil) was even founded.

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/#:~:text=Eunice%20Foote

It was also well known before Standard Oil's founding that oil is a hydrocarbon and that the complete combustion of hydrocarbons emits primarily CO2 and H2O.

Portraying Exxon of 100 years later as being the sole possessors of secret knowledge of the existence of atmospheric warming is grossly inaccurate IMO.

You're telling me people in power in 1923 knew that human oil consumption was causing climate change that would be detrimental to human life? If you asked Congress today many wouldn't agree with you, and I'm sure some of them sincerely believe there's no problem. Do you think voters knew back then? If this was common knowledge, why did Exxon have to suppress anything?

From the OP:

> Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating from at least the 1970s, with other oil industry bodies knowing of the risk even earlier, from around the 1950s. They forcefully and successfully mobilized against the science to stymie any action to reduce fossil fuel use.

My original argument was that this is evil and every individual in charge of suppressing this information and continuing to advocate for fossil fuel use deserves punishment. Do you agree? Because throughout this conversation what I've understood from your comments is that you think they did nothing wrong because people consume oil.

And I refer you to my first sentence in my reply.

> How does boot polish taste?

I see, this is how I can tell you are not asking in good faith. Goodbye, new account made just 13 days ago.