Exxon researched climate science. Understood it. And misled the public.

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New research shows the company gamed the public for years with things its own climate scientists knew were false.

The world’s largest oil company has been under some scrutiny lately. Back in 2015, Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times published a pair of matching exposes on Exxon, using internal documents to show that the company was well aware of the threat of climate change as far back as the 1970s, but consistently misled the public and investors about it.

Now ExxonMobil is under siege from even more directions. Seventeen state attorneys general have said they will begin cooperating on investigations into whether Exxon broke racketeering, consumer protection, or investor protection laws in its climate communications. New York AG Eric Schneiderman, Massachusetts AG Maura Healey, and US Virgin Islands AG Claude Walker are all leading separate investigations. And in 2016, the US Securities and Exchange Commission launched its own federal investigation. All these investigations have inspired class-action lawsuits.

Exxon, not surprisingly, has denied all charges. It claims that it has been open and honest about climate change and that journalists are using “deliberately cherry-picked statements” to build their case.

In response to the 2015 articles, the company issued a challenge: “Read all of these documents and make up your own mind.”

Here’s a good lesson for #brands everywhere: Don’t issue reading-based challenges to a community full of nerds.

A couple of researchers at Harvard decided to take them up on it. They gathered every document, read them, did a thorough content analysis, and have just published the results in a peer-reviewed academic journal, Environmental Research Letters.

Spoiler: Yes, Exxon misled the public.

Exxon’s climate communications show internal honesty, outward-facing doubt

Geoffrey Supran, a post-doctoral fellow in Harvard’s History of Science program, and Naomi Oreskes, his post-doc adviser (and of course a noted science historian and author, most famously of Merchants of Doubt), did the yeoman’s work of wading through all the Exxon documents.

They found 187 overall, a mix of “peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and paid, editorial-style advertisements (‘advertorials’) in The New York Times.” (Exxon bought an advertorial in the Times every Thursday between 1972 and 2001 — one quarter of all the advertorials on the op-ed page.)

They did content analysis (a common social science method) of the documents, scoring various attributes, such as whether the document treated climate change as a) real and human caused, b} serious, and c) solvable.

The primary takeaway is this: In its public-facing advertorials, Exxon stressed doubt; in its internal documents and peer-reviewed research, it did not.

Specifically, 83 percent of its peer-reviewed papers and 80 percent of its internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, while only 12 percent of advertorials do. Some 81 percent of the relevant advertorials express doubt.

“We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science—by way of its scientists’ academic publications—but promoted doubt about it in advertorials,” Supran and Oreskes write. “Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.”

Exxon’s history with gaming the public

The internal documents uncovered by journalists show that “by the early 1980s, ExxonMobil scientists and managers were sufficiently informed about climate science and its prevailing uncertainties to identify [anthropogenic global warming] as a potential threat to its business interests.” In response, the company set up two initiatives, one focused on science, the other on public relations.

Read the full article at: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/23/16188422/exxon-climate-change

 

Science will prevail even when the politics fail.  

Unfortunately, it will likely be too late to have much effect.  Undoubtedly, after the deniers finally pull the wool from their eyes, they will blame scienctists for not being more persuasive.