The climate crisis is a crime story

                                   The climate crisis is a crime story 

The big fossil fuel companies openly lied for decades about climate change, and now all of humanity is paying the price. Shouldn't such lies be at the center of the climate change debate? 

 By MARK HERTSGAARD The inhabitants of Earth live at the scene of a crime

 This crime has been going on for decades. We see its effects in the terrible heat and wildfires that unfold this summer in the western United States; in the mega-storms that were so numerous in 2020 that scientists ran out of names for them; in global projections that sea level will rise by at least 6 meters. Our only hope is to slow down this inexorable ascent so that our children will find some way to cope.

 This crime has displaced or killed untold numbers of people around the world, caused untold economic damage worth billions of dollars, and devastated vital ecosystems and wildlife. 

 It has disproportionately affected already marginalized communities around the world, from farmers on the coast of Bangladesh, where rapidly rising seas salt the soil and drastically reduce rice production, to low-income residents of Houston, Chicago and others. cities, whose neighborhoods suffer higher temperatures. than the prosperous areas of the city. 

 This crime especially threatens the youth of today and calls into question the very survival of civilization. And yet the criminals responsible for this devastation remain at large. In fact, they continue to perpetrate their crime and even earn money from it, not least because their crime remains unknown to most of the public. 

 It's enough to make your blood boil, especially if you're a parent. My daughter just turned 16 and I have been thinking about the safest place where she can spend her adult life since she was a baby and I started writing about adapting to climate change. The orange skies covering her hometown of San Francisco after last summer's record wildfires were a heartbreaking and infuriating sign that California will not be that safe haven.

 The crime in question is the fossil fuel industry's 40-year lie about climate change. Possibly the most important corporate hoax in history, the industry's lies have had the effect of dulling public consciousness and government action against what scientists say is now a full-blown climate emergency. 

                           Capitalism against the planet

 As a 2020 candidate, Joe Biden said he would support efforts to prosecute the oil giants for his lies. It remains to be seen if he will keep that promise. Journalists have spent years documenting crime scene evidence. Then, in 2015, the Los Angeles Times, Inside Climate News, and the Columbia School of Journalism opened the case by tracing the crime's link to ExxonMobil, then the world's largest oil company. 

Internal records showed that in the late 1970s, Exxon scientists themselves were informing their top executives that man-made global warming was real, potentially catastrophic, and caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. Climate activists took advantage of the revelations and launched the hashtag #ExxonKnew. 

Subsequent investigations found that Chevron, Shell, BP, and other oil giants also knew that their products threatened to make the earth's climate uninhabitable. In short, it wasn't just that Exxon knew about it. They all knew it. And they all chose to lie about it.

 Beginning in the 1990s, oil companies spent millions and millions of dollars on public relations campaigns to confuse the press, the public, and legislators about the dangers posed by burning fossil fuels. His target was those lies to an unsuspecting audience.

 Humanity ultimately wasted precious decades arguing over whether global warming was real rather than defusing the threat. Instead of initiating a transition to renewable energy, it increased the consumption of fossil fuels. More than half of the total greenhouse gases that now overheat the planet were emitted after 1990, after Exxon and other fossil fuel giants privately learned what havoc they were wreaking.

 Exxon "could have ended the so-called climate change debate as early as the 1980s," author and activist Bill McKibben later wrote. “When scientists like Jim Hansen of NASA first raised public awareness about climate change [in 1988], think about what would have happened if the CEO of Exxon had also gone to Congress and said that his internal science efforts they showed [ed] precisely the same thing. 

" While some pockets of the American public may already know about the crime of Big Oil, the vast majority of its victims are almost certainly not. How could this happen? Big Oil's track record of lying never became part of the public narrative on climate change, largely because most mainstream media did not incorporate it into their ongoing coverage of climate change. 

Exxon Knew's initial disclosures in 2015 received relatively little follow-up coverage beyond the outlets that published them. Television, which even in the Internet age is still the main source of news for most people, ignored the revelations entirely. There were some stories in the business press and in the independent media, especially years later when New York State and other local governments began suing oil companies for damages. But the media as a whole seems to have forgotten that Big Oil's climate lies ever happened.

 It is time to correct these errors. To date, the oil companies, the executives in charge of them, the propagandists they have employed, and the politicians they have financed have largely escaped blame, let alone have had to pay, either through financial penalties. or prison sentences, for the immense damage. The media also owes the public an apology for mishandling this story, along with a commitment to do much sharper coverage in the future.

 Humanity cannot recover the 40 years lost to the climate lies of the big oil companies. It is now more than urgent for rich and poor countries to abandon fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy and other climate-smart practices. Equally crucial, we must strengthen our communities against dire climate shocks that, due to our decades of delay, can no longer be avoided. 

All of this will cost money, a lot. The world's governments will henceforth argue during the decisive UN climate summit in November over who pays how much. Restoring Big Oil's lies to their rightful place in the heart of climate history would offer an answer to that conundrum, one on which Joe Biden should be pressed: Big Oil knew, shouldn't Big Oil pay? 

Mark Hertsgaard is the author of books including HOT and Earth Odyssey and is the co-founder and CEO of Covering Climate Now, a global media collaboration that strengthens coverage of climate history.